The KOSPI has moved more than 3% on 53 days this year. The five years before it managed 20.

Between 2021 and 2025, the KOSPI moved more than 3% in a day twenty times. Twenty days out of 1,225 — four a year, spread across five years.

In the first 143 trading days of 2026 it has done it fifty-three times.

The regime, in one column

The average day in 2026 is three times the average day in 2023. This is not a market that fell; it is a market that changed how it moves.

July was the sharp end of it: 22 sessions, an average absolute move of 4.89%, and ten days above 5%. The worst was −10.84% on 28 July. The best was +17.91% on 31 July — the largest single-day gain anywhere in this six-and-a-half-year file.

The drawdown, and the number that complicates it

The index peaked at 9,114.55 on 22 June and closed at 6,257.45 on 3 August: down 31.3% in six weeks.

It is broad. Four indices built from different constituent lists tell the same story:

Listed market capitalisation on the KOSPI went from 7,450tn won to 5,165tn — 2,285tn won gone in six weeks.

And here is the number that stops the obvious headline. The KOSPI closed 2025 at 4,214.17. At 6,257.45 it is up 48.5% on the year.

Both things are true at once. An investor who bought in January is well ahead. An investor who bought in June is down a third. The index went up 116% from the end of 2024 to 22 June and then gave back a third of it, and the year-to-date figure — the one that appears in most summaries — hides the entire round trip.

What we are not saying

We do not know why. This feed carries closes, ranges, turnover and market capitalisation; it does not carry a reason, and we are not going to invent one from a price series. Anyone offering a confident explanation is working from something other than this data.

We also cannot tell you whether the index is cheap now. That needs earnings, which are not in this dataset.

What the data does support is narrower and, we think, more useful: the thing that changed in 2026 is not the level, it is the variance. A market whose average day is 3% prices risk differently from one whose average day is 0.8%. Hedging costs more. Stop-losses trigger. Position sizes that were prudent in 2023 are not prudent now, and that is true whether the index goes up from here or down.

One methodological note, because it nearly caught us

The exchange publishes 168 index series a day, and the name alone is not a unique key. “IT services” exists in both the KOSPI and KOSDAQ series — 1,159.33 and 607.25 respectively on 3 August, with 25 and 227 constituents. So do “construction”, “metals”, “finance” and “machinery”. Group by name and two different indices merge into one line, silently, with no error.

Seven of the 168 are calculated indices — the K-Sharpe series and similar — which report zero volume and zero market capitalisation by design. A zero there means “this is not a traded index”, not “nothing traded today”. Every figure above is keyed on series plus name, and calculated indices are excluded from turnover figures.