WhyItDropped

KOSPI · October 11, 2018

The day the trade war reached earnings

-4.44%

single-day change vs previous close

Part of a longer stretch

Eighteen months under the trade war

midway through · 2018-01-29 → 2019-08-07, -26.50% over the whole period

What happened that day?

  • The KOSPI fell 4.44% on the day, the largest single-day drop of the decline that ran from 2018
  • US ten-year yields had just risen to their highest in years. American shares fell hard first and Asia followed
  • The US-China trade war sat on top of that. Korea is structurally caught between the two, so orders fall even when tariffs do not target it
  • Memory prices were also starting to turn down. The boom of 2017 was ending
  • Two chipmakers carry enough weight in the KOSPI that their cycle moves the index itself
  • This decline ran on into August 2019

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.