South Korea's red-hot stock market is having a wild start to the weekNEWS | 09 June 2026South Korea's red-hot stock market index, the Kospi, is experiencing a volatile start to the week, dropping 8% on Monday, before gaining 8% on Tuesday.
The Kospi dropped sharply at Monday's open, losing around 700 points, or 8%, as investors took stock of a US market sell-off at the end of last week, which particularly affected tech stocks.
On Tuesday, it recovered all those losses, closing at 8,096 points, a gain of 8.2% on the day, and around 50 points above its Monday opening price.
"A day with a rise or fall of less than 5% in the Kospi has become rare — a sign of just how volatile this market has become," Ipek Ozkardeskaya, a senior analyst at Swissquote, wrote in a morning email.
South Korea's stock market is dominated by two tech giants — Samsung and SK Hynix — which have both passed market capitalizations of more than $1 trillion in recent weeks.
The two firms account for around half of the index's total market capitalization, meaning that when they see big share price movements, the Kospi is also likely to move sharply.
On Monday, SK Hynix lost more than 10% of its value, while Samsung dropped around 8%. On Tuesday, Hynix gained 15%, while Samsung rose 9%.
The fortunes of both companies are closely linked to US AI giants like Nvidia and Google, so when US tech stocks suffer, so too does the Korean market at large. As a chipmaker, SK Hynix is particularly vulnerable to US market moves.
On Friday, the tech-heavy Nasdaq index in the US plunged almost 5%, driven lower by profit-taking among investors in the semiconductor sector. As Korea's market was closed by the time the Nasdaq made its move on Friday, the impact of the US sell-off wasn't fully felt in Asia until Monday.
Long regarded as something of a backwater in the investment world, the South Korean stock market has shaken off that reputation in the past couple of years.
The Kospi has more than tripled since the start of 2025, driven not only by the global AI rally, but also by market reforms aimed at making the country a more attractive investment destination.Author: More Stories. Will Martin. Every Time. Look Out For An Alert In Your Inbox The Next Time. Source
