Kospi -0.53%, Kosdaq -1.33% — Foreign Selling Pinned the Market Down

Kospi slipped 0.53% and Kosdaq dropped 1.33% today — a quiet pullback across the board. On the Kospi side, foreigners dumped about 3.29 trillion won worth of stock and institutions piled on with another 121.4 billion in net selling, so honestly, foreign outflows are what dragged the index down. Kosdaq saw lighter foreign selling at 248.1 billion won and institutions actually bought a net 161.5 billion to cushion it, yet the index still fell harder — which tells me the real damage was happening name by name underneath the surface. Naver posting 520.3 billion won in Q2 operating profit while flagging that AI infrastructure spending is squeezing margins probably weighed on big tech sentiment broadly, but it's telling that cloud stocks rallied anyway — money is still chasing the AI theme, it's just the incumbents footing the bill whose profitability is getting stress-tested. Gold miners strong, utilities and energy weak — that combo reads like safe-haven appetite and a rotation away from cyclicals happening at the same time. Still, with exports and employment holding up and the currency and commodity backdrop staying friendly, today's dip feels less like a trend breaking and more like the market catching its breath while it digests a big earnings miss — so I sat this one out with nothing in the book.