Asian stock markets closed their worst day in more than a year and a half on Friday, 6 November. The sell-off in artificial-intelligence shares, which the day before had knocked the Nasdaq down more than 5.5%, reached Asia with greater force than it had in the United States and forced two governments to intervene mid-session.
The MSCI Asia Pacific Index fell 3.8%. None of the region's major markets escaped, and the heaviest losses fell precisely on the three economies that make the chips of the AI cycle: South Korea, Japan and Taiwan.
Seoul: a circuit breaker and the loss of 5,000 points
The Kospi fell as much as 8.8% intraday, dropped below the 5,000-point mark and triggered a level 1 circuit breaker, which temporarily halts trading. After the pause it recovered part of the ground and closed at 5,059.69 points, down 324.11 points, or 6.02%.
The Kosdaq, the index of smaller companies, fell 5.03% to 644.27 points, and early in the session triggered a sell sidecar — a mechanism that briefly freezes programme sell orders. There, retail investors were net sellers of 110.4 billion won and foreign investors of 100 billion, while institutional investors bought a net 205.6 billion.
Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, the world's two largest memory manufacturers, each fell more than 5%.
Tokyo below 60,000
The Nikkei 225 lost 3,643.13 points, or 5.96%, closing at 57,434.77 — slipping below the 60,000-point mark, as Bloomberg recorded. It was the index's biggest one-day fall since April 2025.
The move was just as broad across the Japanese market: the Topix fell 5.90% to 3,707.99 points; the Nikkei semiconductor index lost 5.94% to 16,731.46; and the Tokyo exchange's growth segment, the TSE Growth Market 250, dropped 5.63%.
Taiwan enters a bear market
The Taiex fell 1,873.08 points, or 4.51%, closing at 39,701.64 — below 40,000 for the first time this week, down from 41,574.72 in the previous session. It was the fifth consecutive decline, from 2 to 6 November, and with it the Taiwanese index technically entered a bear market.
Mainland China and Hong Kong felt it less. The Shanghai Composite fell 1.10% to 3,649.18 points; the Shenzhen Component slid 2.57% to 11,175.78; the ChiNext lost 3.96%; and the Hang Seng gave up 1.27% to 24,481.86 points, a day after rising 3.67%.
Governments step in
South Korea temporarily waived the rule requiring brokerages to hold collateral of at least 140% of margin loans — a measure aimed squarely at slowing the forced unwinding of leveraged positions. In Taiwan, the financial regulator was expected to announce stabilisation measures. After reports of official support, regional shares pared part of their losses and Nasdaq 100 futures turned 0.8% higher.
The backdrop is the unwinding of the artificial-intelligence trade. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index was down almost 16% for the week, on course for its worst weekly performance since April 2025. On Thursday the Nasdaq entered correction territory and Nvidia lost more than 9%.
One detail sets this fall apart from the year's earlier ones: it did not come with a flight from risk assets in general. The yield on China's ten-year bond fell to a record intraday low, the dollar strengthened against every G10 currency and Brent crude rose 1.4% to $99.70 a barrel. In other words, the money left one specific theme — AI infrastructure — rather than the market.
With information from the South Korean portal NEWSTOP, the market wrap from FinancialJuice based on Bloomberg data, reporting by Bloomberg and Nikkei Asia, and the market round-up from 10 Things.
