WhyItDropped

KOSPI · November 6, 2023

The day short selling was banned outright

+5.66%

single-day change vs previous close

Part of a longer stretch

Eight months of promising to lift company value

early in it · 2023-10-31 → 2024-07-11, +26.93% over the whole period

What happened that day?

  • The KOSPI rose 5.66% on the day
  • Over the weekend regulators announced a blanket ban on short selling, effective from this session
  • Short selling means borrowing shares, selling them, and buying them back later if the price falls. It profits when prices go down
  • Banning it forces everyone who had sold borrowed shares to buy them back. That buying arrived at once and pushed prices up sharply
  • But a rise like this is not new demand — it is existing positions being closed. Such moves often do not last
  • Much of this day's gain was indeed given back within weeks

Sources

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.