검은 월요일의 경고장: AI 광풍이 쏘아 올린 변동성의 부메랑 > K-wave Trends

The trigger for this plunge was the sell-off of technology stocks on Wall Street in the United States. As the U.S. employment index released last week showed better results than market expectations, fears that the Federal Reserve System (Fed) would strengthen its hawkish stance took over the market. In particular, semiconductor-related stocks, which are the core of the AI ​​industry, recorded the steepest decline since March 2020, dragging down the Nasdaq, and this fear was reflected across the Pacific to the Korean market. Large domestic semiconductor stocks, led by Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, fell sharply as soon as the market opened, creating a domino effect that led to the decline of the entire index.

However, this incident should not be interpreted simply as an external shock. Recently, the domestic stock market has shown an extreme bias called 'semiconductor focus' and its fundamentals have been weakening. In fact, although the KOSPI index has shown an upward trend over the past few weeks, statistics prove that the number of stocks that actually fell was much higher than the stocks that rose. As Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix have become common underlying assets for financial products, the market is now trapped in an abnormal structure in which the index is determined by mechanical capital inflow rather than the fundamentals of individual companies.

In this process, the dominant analysis is that individual investors' ETF (Exchange Traded Fund) investments served as a catalyst to amplify volatility. While foreign investors continued to engage in large-scale net selling this year, individual money moves filled the void, and a significant portion of these funds went into domestic stock ETFs. When an individual purchases an ETF, a securities company must purchase the underlying assets to provide liquidity, but this process has resulted in mechanical buying being concentrated only on large stocks with the highest market capitalization. As a result, individual investment has become a self-defeating method that accelerates market concentration and dramatically increases volatility in the event of external shocks.

The market landscape has also been rapidly reorganized around the keyword AI. This year, Samsung Group affiliates showed remarkable progress at the top of the market capitalization thanks to a surge in demand for AI server components. On the other hand, stocks in the secondary battery, shipbuilding, and defense industries that led the market last year showed a contrast, falling out of the rankings and losing interest from investors. This phenomenon of funds being concentrated only in certain sectors hinders the healthy circulation of the market and exposes the vulnerability of the entire market to collapse helplessly when the sector in question falters.

In particular, the rapid increase in preference for leveraged and inverse ETFs among individual investors is a cause for concern. Since the launch of single-stock leveraged and inverse ETFs at the end of May, their speculative nature has become more intense, with related transactions accounting for more than half of the total. This shows that the market is dominated by the psychology of chasing short-term profits rather than long-term value investment. In the end, this incident proved that the index, which was built up relying on liquidity and derivatives without any improvement in fundamentals, is in such a precarious state that even a small external adverse event requires an extreme measure called a circuit breaker.