On July 20, South Korea’s benchmark composite stock index, KOSPI, staged a “Black Monday.” After opening down 2.6% in the morning, it kept sliding and finished down 4.5%, closing at 6,516 points. The cumulative drop for this month has already exceeded 20%, officially placing the market in a bear phase. At 10:22 Beijing time, the Korea Exchange activated the Sidecar mechanism, pausing KOSPI programmatic sell orders for 5 minutes. KOSDAQ was also “sidecarred” on the same day. This year, the Sidecar mechanism in the South Korean market has been triggered 38 times, underscoring just how violent the volatility has been.

Leading the declines are still the two semiconductor giants: Samsung Electronics (005930.KS) and SK Hynix (000660.KS) both fell more than 5% at the open and at one point broke below the 250,000/1.8 million won thresholds. Although losses were narrowed slightly by the close, the market weakness was already set. On the same day, Citigroup downgraded its rating for South Korean equities from “overweight” to “tactical neutral,” citing excessive risk exposure to the AI theme and extreme volatility in chip stocks.

The outside environment is also far from calm: an escalation in Middle East tensions dampened risk appetite. In the U.S., semiconductor stocks entered a technical bear market, and in South Korea, the scale of retail forced liquidations in leveraged ETFs has already exceeded 340 billion won, with passive sell pressure being layered on top of additional pressure. Meanwhile, the crypto side is facing parallel strain: BTC briefly broke below a key support level during the day, and the premium on Korean won stablecoins narrowed—meaning the script of “risk assets plunging in sync” is still unfolding. In the short term, it is the cloud-company earnings reports in the U.S. in late July that will be the real catalyst for semiconductors; before that, the KOSPI will most likely keep grinding for a bottom. #夏日创作营