South Korea ETF (EWY) Reaching New Lows

Dec 3, 2024

Although US equities are mostly flat today, South Korean equities have been much more eventful. News broke today that the country’s President Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law which was then contested by the National Assembly shortly thereafter. The catalyst for the declaration was claims to address what he described as communist/North Korean sympathetic parties conducting anti-state activities including budget disputes and impeachments.  While the event is still unfolding, in response to the political tensions, the MSCI South Korea ETF (EWY) is down 2.35% as of this writing. That makes for the fifth straight day of declines, resulting in the ETF trading at its lowest level in over a year.

In the table below, we show the 22 country ETFs tracked in our Global Macro Dashboard (which was most recently updated last week). As shown, South Korea (EWY) is by far the worst performer today and it is also now the only one trading at a 52-week low too.  In total, EWY is now down over 15% year to date with only Mexico (EWW) and Brazil (EWZ) falling more.  Of those, EWZ is also the only country ETF that is now more oversold than South Korea.  On the flip side, other Asian country ETFs like Japan (EWJ) and Singapore (EWS) have been moving higher into overbought territory.