Kospi Nears 6,900 as Goldman's Target and a Construction/Nuclear Spike Collide

Kospi's up 3.18% to 6,899.77, and with three hours left before the close, it's still stretching the gain further. Compared to my 10:40 brief, Kospi added another 0.20 points and Kosdaq 0.22, with foreign investors pouring in ₩479.6bn and institutions ₩1.6694tn on the Kospi side to push this along. Goldman Sachs holding its 12,000 Kospi target and flagging that Korea's memory-chip earnings cycle looks underrated gave sentiment a lift, and construction names like Daewoo E&C, DL E&C, GS E&C plus nuclear-power stocks spiked intraday to drag the index higher too. Given Wall Street closed soft on September 4th — S&P500 -0.38%, Nasdaq -0.29% — today's Kospi is going its own way, shrugging that lead off. My book shows Microsoft +26.4%, Nvidia +8.0%, Freeport-McMoRan +8.5% in the green while Duksan Neolux sits at -5.4%, and into the close I'm watching how the S&P500 futures — wobbling on strong US jobs data and Middle East tension — hand off the mood to the next session.