[Anchor]

The KOSPI, which saw its largest surge on record last Friday, plunged by over 5% today (the 3rd). Although trading in single-stock leverage products has visibly decreased, extreme volatility with no middle ground shows no signs of settling down.

Reporter Kim Hye-min has the story.

[Reporter]

Volatility in the KOSPI continued today.

Following the record-breaking surge last Friday, the index plummeted 5.7% to close at 6,257 today.

SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics, which had hit the daily upper limit, both dropped by more than 8%.

Trading value for the 16 single-stock leverage products plummeted to the 1.3 trillion won range—dropping to less than a tenth of its peak periods and falling short of even half compared to last Friday, when the minimum deposit requirement was raised to 30 million won.

While the volume of leverage products, pointed to as the cause of the recent sharp fluctuations, has decreased, the skewed market structure where just two semiconductor stocks heavily sway the entire index was reaffirmed.

[Interview / Kim Dae-jong / Professor of Business Administration, Sejong University: Micron Technology and other semiconductor companies in the United States account for only about 1 to 2 percent of the total U.S. market capitalization.]

As semiconductor stocks in New York's stock market took a breather over the weekend and the yen strengthened due to currency interventions by the U.S. and Japan, concerns over the unwinding of the yen carry trade—which could lead to investment funds pulling out of the U.S.—appear to have partially weighed on investor sentiment.

However, the prevailing view in the securities industry is that today's decline does not deviate much from profit-taking following last Friday's overheating.

[Interview / Kim Dong-won / Head of Research, KB Securities: We judge that a significant portion of credit trading volume was cleared as the KOSPI dropped 22% throughout July, leading to a downward trend in leverage trading volume as well. In particular, with the KOSPI P/E ratio approaching 5x, investment appeal has grown...]

Experts expect our stock market to establish a floor based on the earnings of AI-related companies such as AMD, Palantir, and SanDisk scheduled for release this week.

(Photo: Yonhap News)

Reported by Park Jin-ho | Video by Park Ji-in | Graphics by Lee Jong-jung