Kospi Clears 7,000 Again, Chips Doing the Heavy Lifting

Right now the Kospi sits at 7,007.72, up 1.65%, while the Kosdaq is at 836.27, up 1.11%. That's 0.22 points above where I last checked in on the Kospi and 0.25 points above on the Kosdaq — but the real change since then is in the foreign money flow. Foreign net selling widened by another 441.5 billion won on the Kospi and 51.8 billion won on the Kosdaq.

Overnight on Wall Street (Sep 21 close), the S&P 500 jumped 1.49% and the Nasdaq 2.26% on a chips-and-AI rally, and this morning Korea picked up right where that left off. Headlines came in fast about Samsung Electronics surging past 3% right at the open and dragging the Kospi up with it, while institutions poured in over 1.519 trillion won to keep the index propped up. The Kosdaq isn't riding the same wave though, with foreigners turning sellers there. The won also weakened to 1,384.86 per dollar, up 0.39%, moving in step with a firmer dollar index at 100.42.

With more than six hours left before the close, the thing to watch is whether this chip-led rally holds through the afternoon, and whether that growing foreign selling on the Kosdaq spreads further. On my own board, Microsoft's still up 26.9%, Nvidia up 6.6%, and Freeport-McMoRan up 7.6%, while Amazon's the lone red one at -9.7% — just watching to see if today's mood carries through.