Seoul halted program selling twice before lunch as the oil shock and a US tech rout reached Asia

Twice before lunch, Seoul stopped part of its own market. The Korea Exchange triggered a sell-side sidecar on KOSPI 200 futures at 11:23 a.m. local time on Friday, after the contract fell 5.04 percent to 1,070.80, a drop of 56.88 points from the previous close. Twenty-four minutes later the exchange did the same on the KOSDAQ, where the 150 futures had fallen 6.09 percent to 1,273.30. The figures were carried by the Korea JoongAng Daily.

A sidecar is not a halt of the whole market. Once triggered, it suspends program sell orders for five minutes, and it targets the automated, futures-linked trading that can deepen a fall. It is the narrower cousin of a circuit breaker, which stops everything. The exchange announces each one as it triggers, so the record is the market data itself rather than a separate filing.

Neither trigger was rare. Friday's KOSPI sidecar was the 21st of 2026 and the KOSDAQ sidecar the 11th, so a market that pauses itself more than two dozen times in seven months is the context that this single session sits inside. The curbs have become a routine feature of a year in which Korean equities have swung hard and often.

The push came from outside Korea. Brent crude has traded above $100 a barrel since Thursday, after attacks on shipping in the Red Sea, and the same session that moved oil also carried a heavy fall in US technology shares, led by Alphabet, into Asian trading on Friday. Seoul sits at the intersection of both, with large exporters exposed to the oil bill and chipmakers exposed to the read on artificial-intelligence spending that drove the New York selloff.