Korean stocks, today's flow at a glance

The starting point for the US market overnight was the October jobs report released that morning. Nonfarm payrolls rose by 165,000, far above a consensus of around 60,000, and the unemployment rate eased from 4.2% to 4.1% (CNBC). A sturdy labor market eased growth worries but read the other way on rates. With average hourly earnings up 3.1% from a year earlier, the odds of a December rate hike implied by the CME FedWatch tool climbed to 76.8%, and the US 10-year Treasury yield rose from 4.84% to 4.86%. Because better data brings a heavier rate burden with it, the technology shares that had plunged a day earlier got a reason to bounce and a headwind at the same time.

The indexes split. Money returned to technology, lifting the Nasdaq Composite 1.09% to a close of 24,579.42 and the S&P 500 0.31% to 7,376.86, while the Dow slipped 0.46% to 51,285.73. Set against the Nasdaq's 5.52% drop the previous day, the recovery was small. For the week, the S&P 500 fell 2.7%, its worst week since April 2025 (AP). In other words, one day of gains does not mean confidence in the AI trade has been restored after a week that shook it.

The lift came from chips, the group hit hardest the day before. NVIDIA (NVDA, AI accelerators) reversed its 9%-plus drop and pushed its 2026 return back into positive territory, and AMD (AMD, CPUs and GPUs), Intel (INTC, CPUs and foundry) and Broadcom (AVGO, networking and custom AI chips) rose with it. In memory, Sandisk (SNDK, NAND flash memory), Micron (MU, DRAM and HBM memory) and Western Digital (WDC, hard-drive storage) recovered part of their double-digit losses. In AI cloud, IREN (IREN, miner turned AI cloud) helped the bounce along by reporting quarterly revenue above expectations. The rebound faded through the session, though: CoreWeave (CRWV, neocloud) gave back nearly all of its gain, and Microchip Technology (MCHP, microcontrollers) slumped after quarterly guidance came in short. With bitcoin stuck below $76,000, crypto-linked names sat out the rebound (CoinDesk).

Korea's next session opens on Monday the 9th. Memory and chip-equipment names now have room for the overnight US rebound to take at least part of the sting out of the previous drop. The deeper decline in Korean shares has to be weighed alongside that, however. The KOSPI fell more than 8% early on the 6th, triggering a circuit breaker, and foreign investors sold a net of more than 3 trillion won on the main board, most of it concentrated in semiconductors (Newspim, Kiwoom Securities). Power infrastructure shares the same catalyst of data-center regulation worries, and since the overnight AI cloud rebound cooled during the session, that hope cannot be called firm. Rising odds of a December rate hike and a stronger dollar can also keep weighing on foreign flows.

What is confirmed is the October jobs data, the closing moves in the three main indexes, and the earnings reports from IonQ, Moderna, Airbnb and Cloudflare. Whether the overnight rebound marked a floor or amounts only to a technical bounce off the previous day's oversold condition is still at the stage of press and market interpretation.

Holding the 5,000 line on the index was the least bad part of the day; underneath it was worse. The KOSPI closed 6.02% lower at 5,059.69 and the KOSDAQ fell 5.03% to 644.27, with a circuit breaker and a sell-side sidecar both triggered within minutes of the open. Only 158 KOSPI names rose against 734 decliners, and the KOSDAQ showed 341 advancers against 1,350 decliners. Across both markets, 252-session highs shrank to three names while new lows swelled to 193.

What dragged the market down was not one industry but the whole AI infrastructure complex. Not a single one of the 43 semiconductor names finished higher, and power infrastructure, nuclear power and EV batteries followed with declines in the 7% range. The only industry to end positive was entertainment, where NHN surged on its own on expectations that US data center restrictions would benefit existing facilities and non-US operations (News1). Industry moves and individual names are laid out below under industry highlights.

Part of the money leaving stocks moved into bonds. The three-year Korean treasury yield fell 5.6 basis points to 3.613% and the ten-year fell 3.4 basis points to 3.853%, the lowest level of the past six months. The won eased 1.3 won to 1,342.0 per dollar, while gold and silver fell 1.34% and 1.64%, so metals slid along with everything else even within safe havens. As of November 4, investor deposits stood at 89.2273 trillion won, up 986.0 billion won, while credit financing balances fell 305.6 billion won to 28.6446 trillion won, a picture of investors paying down leverage and holding cash. KOSPI non-arbitrage program trading was a net sale of 1.6398 trillion won, bringing the five-session total to 6.0742 trillion won, and Korea's weight in the MSCI Emerging Markets index was 19.33% as of November 4, down 0.78 percentage points in a week.

The trigger was the US midterm elections. With Democrats taking both chambers, worries spread that AI data center construction would face tighter regulation, and that doubt broadened into investment that consumes large amounts of power and water, as reported by Wolyo Shinmun and the Korea Economic Daily. Intraday, the government suspended the collateral ratio requirement on margin loans for three months to curb forced liquidations first (Newsway). That shipbuilding, specifically the plate and equipment node, screened as the strongest industry on relative strength means less damaged rather than strong, and the only ETFs with positive daily returns were software-oriented ones such as UNICORN Generative AI Small-Cap Active, up 3.27%. Lead stock LX Semicon fell 4.58% to 22,900 won.

Separating the confirmed from the inferred: index moves and closing levels were verified at the same values across several closing reports, and industry and stock moves along with advance-decline counts are computed by this site. Why individual names moved as much as they did mostly rests on press explanations and is therefore inferred. Korea Investment Holdings' 17.34% drop was attributed to a third-quarter earnings shock and target price cuts (Moneystorm) and Kumho Petrochemical's 17.34% fall to a third-quarter earnings shock (Yonhap Infomax), while InBody, down 26.61%, appears to have given back the previous day's surge. The fund-flow figures and the MSCI weight are as of November 4, and on the currency our collected value is 1,342.0 won while closing reports describe the won weakening into the 1,350s intraday, so the reference times may differ.