The KOSDAQ has fallen sharply, dropping close to 15 percent in the past month alone according to Korea Exchange data, surrendering the 800 level for the first time in ten months. That's already a severe move on its own, and if the 9-week window you're describing captures an even longer stretch of this decline, a 31 percent cumulative drop is entirely plausible given how compressed the selling has been. The KOSPI, meanwhile, has gone through repeated circuit-breaker events, six separate activations this year by one count, including an 8 percent single-day plunge on July 7 that triggered a 20-minute trading halt, and another near-10 percent collapse in late June. Despite all this, KOSPI remains up somewhere between 72 and 90 percent year-to-date depending on the measurement window, which confirms your point that even a brutal multi-week correction hasn't come close to erasing the year's gains at the index level, even as KOSDAQ's smaller-cap, less chip-concentrated makeup has fared considerably worse.

The root cause across both indices traces back to the same two stocks. Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix now make up roughly half of KOSPI's total weight, up from about a quarter at the end of last year, a concentration level that means a sharp move in either name drags the whole index with it before the other roughly 900 listed companies get any say. The immediate trigger for the latest leg down was Samsung's own record second-quarter earnings report, an almost nineteen-fold profit jump that still wasn't enough to stop the stock falling as much as 9 to 10 percent the same day, because investors focused on revenue guidance and mounting doubt about whether AI infrastructure capital spending can keep justifying current valuations.
The leveraged ETF piece is real and confirmed too. South Korea launched its first single-stock leveraged and inverse ETFs tracking Samsung and SK Hynix back in April, and assets in these products reportedly grew from around $3 billion at launch to over $9 billion within months, with 92 percent of holders being retail investors. Regulators have flagged that on sharp down days, forced rebalancing from these products alone can account for anywhere from 10 to 60 percent of that day's trading volume in the underlying stocks, mechanically amplifying whatever move is already happening. Margin debt has also hit a record quarterly average around $23.5 billion, and the central bank has explicitly warned that a sharp correction could trigger a self-reinforcing spiral between margin calls and leveraged ETF rebalancing demands.
For anyone tracking Korean semiconductor exposure or broader AI infrastructure sentiment on Gate, the practical read is that this correction is functioning as a genuine stress test of how concentrated, leverage-heavy markets behave once sentiment turns, and the Finance Minister's pledge to monitor these leveraged products closely suggests regulators are increasingly worried the mechanism itself, not just underlying fundamentals, could turn a normal correction into something considerably more disorderly if the AI spending skepticism deepens further.
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