KOSPI · March 19, 2020
From trade war to COVID
-43.90%
peak-to-trough, the whole slide
524 trading days · 2018-01-29 → 2020-03-19
back to the old high on 2020-11-23
What happened that day?
- From the January 2018 peak to the March 2020 low the KOSPI fell 43.9% — 524 trading days
- A decline that runs over two years does not have one cause. Several hit in sequence
- First the US–China trade war. Korea sells components to China, which sells finished goods to the US, so when those two fight the middle gets hurt first
- In 2019 memory chip prices collapsed. Semiconductors are a large share of both exports and the index, so it landed hard
- The same year Japan tightened export procedures for chipmaking materials, adding supply worries
- Finally COVID arrived in 2020 and made the low. The bounce was steep — the old high was back on 23 November
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.