On July 13, iShares MSCI South Korea ETF fell 8.14% in pre-market trading, trading at approximately 169.01 USD/share, with turnover of $13.97 million. The sharp decline was triggered by the Korean KOSPI index breaching 7,000 points and activating circuit breakers twice during the session, hitting a new multi-week low.

On the earnings front, local brokerage KIS projected SK Hynix Q2 operating profit at approximately 60.4 trillion won, roughly 8% below the market consensus of 65 trillion won. The earnings miss sparked heavy selling, with SK Hynix plunging over 13% and Samsung Electronics falling more than 9% in Seoul trading. Meanwhile, Bank of Korea Governor Shin Hyun-song has explicitly signaled the need for a rate hike at the appropriate time, with markets widely expecting the July 16 monetary policy meeting to deliver the first rate increase since August 2021.

Adding to pressure, Korean regulators launched a full-scale review of single-stock leveraged ETFs, with the top-level F4 coordination mechanism now involved in formulating volatility-suppression measures, as leveraged product mechanics continue to amplify market swings.

The fund generally invests at least 80% of its assets in component securities of the MSCI Korea Index, a free float-adjusted market capitalization-weighted index designed to measure large- and mid-cap equity performance in Korea.

(The above content is based on publicly available market information, generated by a program or algorithm, and is intended solely as a stock movement alert. It does not constitute investment advice or a basis for trading decisions.)