Strota/ Newsroom/ Global Markets/ 2026-08-04

KOSPI tumbled 3.6%

Strota Newsroom · Global Markets · session of 2026-08-04 · market close

KOSPI closed at 6,358.95 on 2026-08-04, tumbled 3.6% on the session and is +50.9% year-to-date. Here is what the market data shows.

South Korea's KOSPI fell 6.49% on 4 August 2026, closing at 6,167.16. It was a heavy single-session decline by any standard, and it extended a slide that has been building for weeks rather than arriving out of nowhere.

The move left the index deep inside a wide trading range. The KOSPI is now 32.34% below its 52-week high of 9,114.55, yet still 97.03% above its 52-week low of 3,130.09 - the index has roughly doubled off that trough even after the recent damage. It closed below its 50-day moving average of 7,732.5, the rough gauge of the past two-and-a-half months of prices, but remained above its 200-day average of 5,747.31, the longer-run trend line. Over one week the index lost 8.71%, over one month 19.36%, and over three months 7.83%. Despite all of that, it was still up 46.34% for the year to date, which is the clearest measure of how far it had run before the pullback began.

Peer markets are not all quoted from the same session, because world exchanges close at different hours. Among those with the same 4 August as-of date, Japan's Nikkei fell 1.81% and Australia's ASX 200 rose 0.98%. The US indices last printed on 3 August, when the S&P 500 gained 1.48%, the Nasdaq 2.13% and the Dow 1.32%. European and other Asian markets in the list were last marked on 31 July: the FTSE 100 down 0.27%, the DAX up 0.07%, the CAC 40 up 0.28%, the Euro Stoxx 50 up 0.21%, the Hang Seng up 0.1%, Shanghai up 0.72%, the TAIEX up 7.98%, the Sensex up 0.21% and the Nifty 50 up 0.27%. On the dates available, the KOSPI's drop was far larger than anything its peers most recently recorded.

The news flow around the index has been about its volatility rather than any one event. A WSJ headline from three days ago reported that the KOSPI had logged a record daily gain, while CNBC described the market as swinging between meltdowns and a record rally. Bloomberg published a piece arguing the index has been more volatile than bitcoin, and The New York Times tied the swings to artificial-intelligence enthusiasm. More recently, Fortune reported that Korean retail investors were angry after the rout, and Business Insider framed the selloff as a cautionary tale. The Diplomat reported on the market's dependence on semiconductors.

None of these are confirmed causes of the session's fall, and the pack contains no data release or corporate announcement tied to the session. The data shows no single obvious catalyst: it shows a very large one-day decline, a month of losses, and an index that is still up sharply on the year.

The numbers

Around the world (same session)

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How this article was made: Strota assembled the market data above (the index's price history, same-session peer-market moves and public headlines) and an AI model wrote the narrative strictly from that evidence — it is not permitted to add outside facts or numbers. Every figure comes from the underlying market/public data.