KOSPI · May 15, 2026

The day it touched 8,000 and fell 6%

-6.12%

single-day change vs previous close

What happened that day?

The KOSPI fell 6.12% on the day — **the same session in which it cleared 8,000 for the first time**
It set a record of 8,046.78 in the morning, then turned and closed at 7,493.18
Foreign investors sold more than five trillion won that day, and institutions more than one trillion
The week's material was Samsung Electronics' union announcing a strike from 21 May covering some 45,000 workers in the semiconductor division — a production halt threatened at the height of AI capital spending
There is a structural reason the index moved that hard: **Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix together are more than two fifths of the KOSPI's market value.** When those two give way, the index goes with them
The macro backdrop did not help either. US producer prices for April were up sharply on the year, pushing rate-cut expectations further out
And the index had climbed a long way that year, so this was also a place where people were looking for a reason to take profits

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.