South Korea's benchmark KOSPI suffered a near-vertical drop on Tuesday, June 23, plunging 10% – its steepest fall since March and one of the five largest single-day declines in the index's history.
The slide was severe enough to trip a market-wide circuit breaker, freezing trading for 20 minutes.
For U.S. investors, the move showed up in the iShares MSCI South Korea ETF (NYSE:EWY), which fell 12.25% on Tuesday — a one-day drop the fund has registered only a handful of times in roughly 25 years.
By Wednesday morning, panic had flipped to relief: the index rebounded more than 2% at the open, led by a recovery in the very stocks that had dragged it down a day earlier.
Here's what drove the swing, and why it matters for the AI trade.
