KOSPI -9% Crash, For Those Afraid to Open Their Account

TL;DR

• As of Tuesday 1 PM when this was written, KOSPI plunged to around -9% intraday. This follows last Friday's -5.72% drop.
• The fear you feel is a normal response, and the worst decisions on crash days usually come from that fear.
• What is needed today is verification, not judgment. Below are things you can skip now and three checks to make after the close.

Feeling scared is normal

You are afraid to open your account, and when you do it feels worse. That is not abnormal. The human brain is wired to feel losses almost twice as strongly as gains. Behavioral economics calls this loss aversion, a survival instinct shaped over hundreds of thousands of years.

The problem is that this instinct works counterproductively in markets. You want to sell when fear is highest, and buy when excitement is highest. So on crash days, the first thing to protect is your judgment, not your account.

Start with the numbers

When you are scared, look at numbers, not feelings. KOSPI over the past four trading days is below.

A +4.40% Thursday and a -9% day in the same week mean the issue is unusually large amplitude, not just direction. In such periods, the chance of making a bad intraday judgment is much higher than usual. Remember, decisions made today can be unusually costly.

Things you do not need to do today

• Refresh your account constantly. Numbers will change every minute, and only your judgment will wear down.
• Make intraday decisions. Whether stop-loss or averaging down, if it was not part of your pre-set plan, there is no reason to decide intraday today.
• Search for the bottom. No one reliably predicts today's bottom. If someone does, that is luck.

Doing nothing is a perfectly valid choice. The market reopens tomorrow and next week.

Three checks after the close

After the market closes and you feel calmer, these three checks complete your work for the day.

1. Relative performance of your holdings, Check whether they fell less or more than the index. If the decline is similar to the index, it is a market problem, not a stock-specific one. You can review the market-close briefing in My Stock Radar.
2. Re-examine your reasons for holding, Ask yourself whether the reasons you held before the drop still stand. A detailed checklist is available in Crash-Day Playbook: 3 Don ts and 3 Checks.
3. Confirmed close and sector map, Tonight s daily briefing will show which sectors held up and which sank based on confirmed closes. The confirmed numbers, not intraday prints, become the reference for tomorrow.

Finally

If this is your first time in a day like today, it will feel long. Market history includes crash days, and today does not end the market. Protect your judgment and your routine before your account. We will recap with confirmed evening numbers.

This article is for informational purposes and not investment advice.