With 20 Minutes to the Close, KOSPI and KOSDAQ Both Lose Steam

Twenty minutes to the closing bell right now, KOSPI is sitting at 6,639.41, down 0.67%, while KOSDAQ has climbed to 814.06, up 0.90%. But stack that against my last check at 1:40pm and the story shifts: KOSPI's loss has actually deepened by 0.13 percentage points, while KOSDAQ's gain has shrunk by 0.35 points. Heading into the close, both markets are quietly running out of steam.

KOSPI's weight came from foreigners unloading roughly 3.3 trillion won and institutions piling on another 1.2 trillion won in net selling. It looks like today's KOSPI is carrying over last night's slide, where both the S&P 500 and Nasdaq closed lower, and with the won sliding back toward 1,344 per dollar, export-cost worries seem to have surfaced too — HD Hyundai Heavy Industries reportedly plunged as much as 5% intraday. KOSDAQ saw far smaller selling, about 92.3 billion won from foreigners and 23.8 billion from institutions, but its upward momentum has visibly cooled heading into the close all the same.

What I'm watching in these last 20 minutes is whether this cooldown holds through the bell, or whether things flip again at the last minute. In my own book, Microsoft sits at +27.9%, NVIDIA at -1.1%, Freeport-McMoRan at +3.4%, and Pungsan at +6.6% — unrealized marks I'm simply watching ride out into the close.