KOSPI Finds a Second Wind This Afternoon as Yen Moves Send the Won Tumbling

KOSPI is running through the back half of the session at 6,891.41, up 2.62%. That's actually 0.49 points wider than the 12:10 brief, so in my read the index found a second wind in the afternoon rather than fading. KOSDAQ sits at 825.87, up 0.45%, but that gain shrank by 0.27 points from before — it's just not catching the same lift KOSPI is.

The flows look odd on their face. Foreigners dumped over 2.6 trillion won worth of KOSPI stocks and the index still climbed, which tells me institutions absorbed it, buying a net 249.7 billion won. Some of that lift is carryover warmth from last night's US session, where the S&P 500 rose 1.14% and the Nasdaq 1.69%. On top of that, the Bank of Japan hiked its policy rate to 1.25%, a 31-year high, and word that carry-trade money is rotating out of yen into yuan and Swiss francs helped push the won-dollar rate up 0.96% to 1,376.60. Overnight in the US, cybersecurity names led while utilities and copper names lagged.

With about an hour fifty left until the close, I'm watching whether foreign selling keeps this pace and how long the spiking won-dollar rate can keep leaning on that US-market warmth. My own book is unchanged in mark-to-market terms — Microsoft +24.1%, Nvidia +0.3%, Freeport-McMoRan +3.3%, Amazon -14.1% — just a snapshot right now, not today's move.