Top 10 KOSPI Market Cap Stocks' Weight Declines from 46.6% to 42.3% Compared to Last Year

Declining Individual Investor Participation and Continued Foreign Net Selling
Weak Performance of Mega-Cap Stocks...Concerns Over Individual Investor Losses

[Image source=Yonhap News]

[Asia Economy Reporter Gong Byung-sun] The market capitalization (market cap) share of the top 10 KOSPI stocks has decreased compared to last year. This is interpreted as a result of the poor performance of large-cap stocks earlier this year.

According to the Korea Exchange on the 26th, as of the 24th, the market cap share of the top 10 KOSPI stocks excluding preferred shares was 42.33% of the total KOSPI market cap. This is a decrease of 4.3 percentage points from 46.63% last year.

Last year, amid the COVID-19 impact, the stock market plunged and then rebounded, during which individual investors mainly net bought large-cap stocks. As a result, the market cap share of the top 10 stocks in 2019 was only 40.52%, but it grew by 6.12% within a year. On January 11th, the market cap share of the top 10 stocks even increased to 48.29%, showing that the concentration on large-cap stocks continued until early this year.

However, as individual investor participation declined and foreigners continued net selling, large-cap stocks began to be sidelined. This year, foreigners net sold 25.7592 trillion KRW in the KOSPI. If the stock market ends the year as it is, it will mark the largest amount since 33.6 trillion KRW in 2008. Among the top 10 stocks with the highest foreign net selling are large-cap stocks such as Samsung Electronics (18.1 trillion KRW), Hyundai Motor (1.2 trillion KRW), Kakao (1.1 trillion KRW), and Kia (700 billion KRW).

In this situation, the performance of KOSPI large-cap stocks this year has been poor. The KOSPI large-cap index, composed of common stocks ranked 1st to 100th by market cap including large-cap stocks, rose 3.20%, while KOSPI small-cap stocks rose 15.18% and mid-cap stocks rose 11.73%.

Individual investors’ investment performance is also expected to be poor. Among the top 10 stocks by individual net buying this year are Samsung Electronics, Kakao, SK Hynix, Hyundai Motor, and Naver. The average net buying prices for these stocks by individuals are 80,900 KRW for Samsung Electronics, 137,500 KRW for Kakao, 120,000 KRW for SK Hynix, 234,000 KRW for Hyundai Motor, and 367,000 KRW for Naver. Except for SK Hynix and Naver, all are currently in the loss range.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.