Kospi's 8,000 rally proves short-lived as foreign investors expand profit-taking A trader works at a Hana Bank dealing room in Seoul as an electronic board shows the Kospi trading at 8,028.91 on Friday morning. (Yonhap) Seoul's benchmark Kospi quickly reversed course Friday after briefly crossing the historic 8,000 mark, falling below 7,600 as foreign investors deepened profit-taking in chip stocks.The Kospi was trading below 7,550 at around 2 p.m., down over 5 percent from the previous close. After opening lower at 7,951, the index quickly climbed past 8,000 for the first time in its history about 15 minutes into trading, rising as high as 8,046.78.The milestone came in a rush, with the Kospi taking just seven trading days to jump from 7,000 to 8,000.But the rally faded quickly. After hitting the intraday high, the index fell back below the 8,000 threshold around 9:40 a.m. and slipped as low as 7,520.At around 1:28 p.m., a sell-side sidecar triggered after Kospi 200 futures fell more than 5 percent, halting program sell orders for five minutes.Heavy foreign selling weighed on the index. Overseas investors sold a net 4.4 trillion won ($2.94 billion) on the Kospi by 2 p.m., adding to the roughly 27 trillion won they had offloaded over the previous seven sessions.Retail investors continued to buy, absorbing much of the foreign selling with net purchases of nearly 5 trillion won. Institutions swung between buying and selling in the morning before tilting toward sales in the afternoon, offloading a net 350 billion won by midday.Chip giants, which had powered the recent rally, led the losses. Samsung Electronics, the market's largest stock, was down about 5.4 percent at 280,000 won, while SK hynix lost around 3.6 percent to trade at 1,899,000 won per share.Most other heavyweights across sectors — including bio, energy and aerospace — also fell. Hyundai Motor was one of the few gainers among the market's top 10 stocks, climbing as much as 8 percent in the morning to 774,500 won and overtaking SK Square as the third-largest company by market capitalization.