★ Tokyo beat the bond selloff, but narrowly. Nikkei 65,647 (+0.97%), intraday high 66,249. The TOPIX slipped to about 4,084. A few chip stocks made the gain. ★ The truce extension is official. It is also only two months. Treasury Secretary Bessent: expiry moves from Nov 10 to Jan 10. Markets expected six months or…
KOSPI 7,080.92 (+0.90%), fourth straight gain — but it opened at 7,153.99 (+1.94%) and gave back 73 points. KOSDAQ 844.48 (+1.21%). ★ The checkpoint I called most important last night failed. Foreigners did not buy for a fourth day; they flipped to net selling of about 505 billion won. Facing a four-day gap and a…
The KOSPI opened +2.20% and closed +0.15%. Open 7,161.61, high 7,171.44, close 7,017.91 — 153.53 points given back from the high. The KOSDAQ actually fell, to 834.38 (−0.23%). ★ Yesterday's first checkpoint missed badly. I had asked whether SK Hynix would outperform Micron's +2.77%. SK Hynix fell 1.50% — a 4.27 percentage point gap. Last…
Oil has fallen for four straight sessions. WTI October $98.33 (−1.96%), Brent November $102.09 (−1.71%). Europe's STOXX 600 is +0.8% with tech up about 2%. ★ What is different from three sessions ago: the bond market came along. The US 10-year sits near 4.97%, below Friday's 5.01% close. Gold is −0.73%, and European energy is…
The Fed hiked and promised more. A unanimous 12–0 vote took the funds rate to 3.75–4.00%, the first hike since July 2023. Median dot for end-2026: 4.1%; for end-2027: also 4.1%. By the test we set on 9/16, that means one more hike. Stocks reversed within a day. After the Dow fell 1.2% on Fed…
The KOSPI rebounded after four straight down days, closing at 6,717.97 (+90.71, +1.37%). Domestic institutions bought 1.21 trillion won, concentrated in chips. Samsung Electronics closed at 253,500 won (+2.01%) and SK Hynix at 1,759,000 won (+4.08%). 🔴 Foreign investors sold for a sixth straight session, 1.68 trillion won. The won fell another 9.2 to 1,368.6/USD….
The US 10-year hit 5.04%, the highest since July 2007 [observed], clearing the October 2023 peak of roughly 5.02%. The 30-year is at 5.40% and the 2-year at 4.686%. The whole curve is shifting up more or less in parallel. Oil is doing the pushing. Brent $107.05 (+1.6%), WTI $102.9 (+1.5%). Per BMO Capital Markets,…
A call to slow AI development hit semiconductors. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published a roughly 3,800-word essay on Saturday 9/12 arguing that safety and oversight need time to catch up with capability gains. Sam Altman agreed that labs need to "pace the frontier"; Elon Musk agreed as well. In the same stretch, OpenAI pushed its…
US August CPI: headline +0.4% (in line), core +0.3% (above the +0.2% forecast). Year-on-year, headline 3.4% and core 2.4% both matched expectations. Gasoline jumped 3.9% in a month, accounting for more than a third of the headline increase. Yesterday's PPI showed cool core inflation; today's CPI showed hot core inflation. The two gauges split, which…
US August PPI — headline +0.4% (in line), core +0.2% (below the +0.3% forecast). Year-on-year: headline 5.4%, core 4.6–4.7%. More than three-quarters of the rise came from energy (+4.2%), and diesel jumped 24.1% in a single month. The source of the inflation is confirmed in the data: it is oil. Yet the 10-year yield pushed…