Kosdaq Marks All Time Low of 45.83 Points

Kosdaq Index dropped at the lowest level since it opened on July first 1996.

Korea Composite Stock Index (KCSI) dropped below of 620 point for last 11 months and recorded the lowest level of this year for consecutive two days.

On the 9th, KCSI closed at 619.94 points dropped by 14.90 points (2.35%). It was the first to drop below 610 levels since 21st of November of 2001 and dropped from the annual maximum by 317.67 points for last 6 months.

Kosdaq Index closed at 45.83 points dropped by 1.25 points (2.65%) and recorded the lowest level. It dropped from the annual maximum (94.30 points) by 48.47 points (51.4%) and broke the lowest level of 46.05% for 13 months since 17th of September of 2001.

In the morning, Dow and Johns Industrial Average increased by 1.06% and Nasdaq by 0.88%. In Korea market, foreigners were on net purchasing position with 80.6 billion won and was increasing tendency at the beginning. However, foreigners were on net selling position for KOSPI 200 Futures by 2,646 cases (105.2 billion won) and the price of Futures dropped to 77.40 by 2.55 points (3.19%). By the influence, 140.2 billion wan of speculative stocks were on selling (27.3 billion sold), so the value of major stocks influential on the index dropped vertically.

All items dropped, especially items concerned in domestic market such as retails & wholesales (5.64%0, insurance (4.87%), stocks (4.53%), food and beverage (4.08%) etc dropped sharply. Only 192 items increased and 582 items dropped.

At that day, Nikkei Index closed at 8,539.34 Yen by decreasing 169.56 Yen (1.95%), so 8.600 levels collapsed. It was the lowest level for last 19 years since June of 1983.

Chan-Sun Hong hcs@donga.com