Korean stocks fell 5.80% on Wednesday. A sell sidecar tripped six minutes after the open, foreign investors sold roughly ₩3.5 trillion (about US$2.5 billion), and the index closed at 6,471.17. Two days later, on Friday morning at eight o’clock, the Deputy Prime Minister sat down with the heads of the financial regulators and the central … Read more
MSCI’s August review takes effect on the August 31 close. Index money buys and sells that day whatever the price, and if you hold EWY it buys for you.
The KOSPI rose 11.49% last week but 88% of that came in three sessions, while the KOSDAQ built 84.5% of its gain on Monday alone. A US account holding EWY received +8.22%.
The KOSPI rose 11.49% this week and Korean regulators made no public comment on it. What they published instead was the next tranche of leverage rules.
iShares’ own holdings file says EWY’s top two stocks are 42.85 percent, not the 50 percent screeners show. One of those numbers cannot exist.
Weekly scoreboard for August 3–7, 2026. The KOSPI fell 5.10% to 6,258.77, a seventh straight weekly loss and the longest streak since December 2022.
On August 6 Korea’s deputy prime minister said the index was “stabilizing.” The KOSPI closed down 4.58% that day.
Korea stopped program trading 45 times in 2026 – 23 on the way down, 22 on the way up – against 26 in all of 2008. Nine of the 15 KOSPI circuit breakers ever recorded fired this year. A guide to Korea’s three-layer brake system: the sidecar, the circuit breaker, and the 30 percent daily price limit that has no US equivalent.
Korean retail investors have two names. Donghak ants buy Korean stocks; seohak ants buy American ones.
In the last week of July 2026 the KOSPI printed a −10.84% session and its largest one-day gain on record (+17.91%) inside five trading days — travelling 36.9 percentage points to finish down 1.42%. And the month headlines called the worst ever ranks third on month-end closes, behind October 1997 and October 2008.