KOSPI slid, KOSDAQ jumped — I still added Samsung Electronics

Today the KOSPI dropped 1.58% while the KOSDAQ jumped 3.22%, and the two markets couldn't have looked more different. On the KOSPI side, foreigners dumped over 2.8 trillion won and institutions sold more than 1.9 trillion on top of that, and since the selling was concentrated in heavyweight semiconductor names, the drop felt sharper than the headline number suggests. The KOSDAQ told a different story — foreign selling was modest, institutions actually bought, and cloud-related names rallied hard, which lines up neatly with the sector split I saw: semiconductors and utilities weak, cloud strong. Overnight on Wall Street, relief that the US called off its Iran strike plus a rebound in AI stocks sent US markets higher, but Korea didn't really catch that tailwind today — it got pinned down by its own selling pressure instead. Layered on top, the 2026 tax reform news about a new ISA making domestic-investment interest and dividends tax-free read less like today's headline and more like a signal for where money might flow next. With exports and employment still holding up and the currency/commodity backdrop staying favorable, I read the real economy as intact, so I treated today's drop as short-term positioning noise rather than a trend reversal — and on that read, I added Samsung Electronics.