KOSPI · March 13, 2020

The day the circuit breaker fired

-3.43%

single-day change vs previous close

Part of a longer stretch

A third gone in two months

near the end of it · 2020-01-22 → 2020-03-19, -35.71% over the whole period

What happened that day?

The KOSPI fell 3.43% on the day
As losses deepened during the session, trading was halted. It was the first time that mechanism had fired on the KOSPI since 2011
The same thing happened twice in the US that week. It was a week when world markets stopped together
A halt is not meant to reverse prices but to let everyone catch breath. In those few minutes orders clear and quotes come back
The problem in this period was that there were only sellers. It was a phase where not the price but the trade itself failed to form
The actual bottom came six sessions later, on 19 March

Sources

KOSPI

Every figure on this page is recomputed from the original daily closing prices and checked against them at build time. The account of what happened is written from the sources listed above.