Kospi Rips 2%+ Higher, Foreigners Doing the Heavy Lifting

Right now the Kospi is up 2.42% to 6,977.94 and it's been leaning hard into the rally all morning, while the Kosdaq is just tagging along with a mild 0.38% gain to 864.65. What's driving this surge is pure flow — foreigners poured over 3 trillion won of buying into the Kospi, and even with institutions selling more than 1 trillion won the other way, the index never flinched, so foreign buying power is clearly winning this tug-of-war. There's also a story out today about semiconductors tightening their grip on the economy, which lines up with the sense that the big chip names are carrying part of this move, and given that the last US session (close on 8/14) was a quiet, slightly-red affair for both the S&P and Nasdaq, today's Kospi isn't riding that wave so much as running straight against it. The won is barely budging around 1,416, so this doesn't look like an FX-driven pop, it's a flow-driven one, and I'm holding my Eaton, Vertex, ConocoPhillips and Schlumberger positions as-is while I watch whether this foreign buying keeps its legs into the close.