Foreign investors offloaded Korean stocks and bonds in February in extended capital flight amid lingering concerns over the global economic slowdown, the financial watchdog said Thursday.

Offshore investors sold a net 194 billion won ($162 million) worth of Korean stocks last month, sharply narrowing down from the previous month's selloff of 3.07 trillion won. They dumped 4.23 trillion won worth of bonds, soaring from 487 billion won during the same period, the Financial Supervisory Service (FSS) said in a statement.


"The trend of capital outflows is slowing down this month. The foreign bond selloff last month was mainly due to full-scale portfolio reorganization by multinational funds from the United States, Luxembourg and Israel," an FSS official said.

In the January-February period, foreign net selling of local stocks and bonds snowballed to 7.98 trillion won, jumping from 2.99 trillion won reported for the whole of 2015, the statement said.

As of the end of February, the accumulated value of foreign shareholdings totaled 407.73 trillion won, accounting for 28.4 percent of the overall market capitalization. In contrast, their accumulated bond holdings were valued at 96.8 trillion won, or 6.2 percent, of the total, it said. (Yonhap)