WhyItDropped

KOSPI · October 2, 2019

The day US factories printed their worst number in a decade

-1.95%

single-day change vs previous close

Part of a longer stretch

The five months before the pandemic

midway through · 2019-08-07 → 2020-01-22, +18.72% over the whole period

What happened that day?

  • The KOSPI fell 1.95% on the day
  • A US manufacturing gauge released the previous day had come in at its lowest since 2009, falling further below the line that separates growth from contraction
  • It was the first hard number showing that the US-China trade fight was no longer only about tariffs but was cutting into actual factory activity
  • Korea sat at the centre of that story: it sells the parts other countries assemble, so when the world's factories slow, its orders shrink first
  • Across this recovery stretch as a whole, though, hopes of a trade deal revived and the index climbed into January
  • That recovery was cut off in late January 2020 by news of an epidemic

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.