Kospi tries to claw back as institutions hold the line, Kosdaq flips to flat

Right now Kospi sits at 6,999.84, down 0.73%, while Kosdaq is holding flat at 830.33. Compared to the briefing an hour ago, Kospi is up 0.33 points and Kosdaq up 0.67 points, so the afternoon has been a slow chip-away at the day's losses. Foreigners dumped ₩434.8bn worth of Kospi names, but institutions stepped in with ₩942.2bn in buying to cushion the fall, while Kosdaq flipped to net foreign buying of ₩264.6bn, dragging the index from red back to flat. The Bank of Korea's monetary policy report out this afternoon pointed to leveraged ETFs and margin-debt trading as amplifiers of the swings tied to the market's heavy semiconductor concentration — and oddly enough, that echoes overnight Wall Street, where the indices fell but copper and chips both held up (which, funny enough, is why my Poongsan position, sitting at +10.5% right now, caught my eye — though that's just where the number stands, nothing more). Into the close, the thing to watch is how far that copper-and-chip resilience keeps chipping away at Kospi's losses.