Half of August Sees Buy Sidecars... What's Driving the Kosdaq Surge?

[Anchor]

The Kosdaq, which had been suffering from a severe slump, is continuing a steep upward trend.

A buy sidecar was triggered on half of the trading days so far this month, and compared to its low point last month, it has surged by 35 percent. Reporter Min Gyeongho looks into the reasons behind this.

[Reporter]

Starting the day up 1 percent, the Kosdaq continued to expand its gains.

Even after a buy sidecar was triggered at around 9:50 AM, the upward trend continued, eventually closing up nearly 7 percent at 854.

A strong rebound is underway, with the index rising in 5 out of the 6 trading days this month, and buy sidecars being triggered on 3 of those days.

Compared to this year's lowest intraday point of 630 recorded on July 29, it has surged by about 35 percent in just 8 trading days.

Analysts suggest that a significant portion of investment funds flowed into the Kosdaq after daily trading value for single-stock leverage products plummeted by around 10 trillion won following Kospi single-stock leverage regulations on July 31.

In fact, Kosdaq trading value, which was in the 4 trillion won range just before the regulations, increased to the 7 trillion won range.

In particular, today (August 10), Alteogen, the top biotech company by market capitalization on the Kosdaq, soared by 14 percent, leading the index higher.

Investment rushed in after BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager, disclosed that it holds a 5 percent stake in Alteogen.

However, the prevailing interpretation is that this is less of a sign that the Kosdaq has entered a major bull market, and more of a reaction to how severely it had fallen previously.

Currently, the Kospi is about 33 percent lower than its peak recorded last June, while the Kosdaq has barely recovered to 70 percent of this year's peak even after this recent surge.

[Interview / Lee Jin-woo, Head of Research Center at Meritz Securities: Since the Kosdaq is full of high-risk, high-return stocks, it is necessary to compress investments into companies backed by fundamentals and earnings....]

The Kospi closed up 0.65 percent at 6,299 today.

Although the number of advancing stocks exceeded 75 percent of the total, semiconductor stocks struggled, with Samsung Electronics falling 0.43 percent and SK Hynix dropping 0.14 percent.

(Photo: Lee Moo-jin | Video Editing: Choi Hye-ran)
※ Please note: This article was translated by AI and may contain errors.