Korean brokers say Buy on four reports in five, and almost never say Sell
Across 6,372 broker reports in 2026 the market rated Buy on 79.7% and Sell on 0.06%. Of 13 houses that rated 200-plus reports, 10 issued no Sell at all. The Sell rate has sat near zero for over a decade.
AI-assisted, human-reviewed sourcing. Figures are pulled programmatically from the official sources listed at the end of this article and checked by an editor before publication.
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Korean brokerages rate the stocks they cover, and the rating is almost always the same one. Add up a year of reports and the Sell rating has effectively disappeared — not at one house, but across the market, and not recently, but for well over a decade.
Buy on four in five, Sell on almost none
Across 6,372 rated reports in 2026, the market ran Buy on 79.7% of them, Hold on 2.7%, and Sell on 0.06% — six-hundredths of one percent. The rest carried no clear rating. Hold, the polite way to avoid saying Sell, has thinned to almost nothing too.
House by house it barely moves. Of the 13 brokerages that rated at least 200 reports, 10 issued not a single Sell all year. The most Buy-heavy rated 92% of its reports Buy with no Sell at all. The handful of non-zero Sell rates in the table round to a fraction of one percent.
It did not fall — it was already gone
This is not a recent shift to explain. The market Sell rate has sat below 0.6% every year since 2014, and below 0.2% in most of them. Whatever a Sell rating once meant in Korean retail research, it left long ago and has not come back.
What this is, and what it is not
This measures the rating as filed — a fact about how brokerages grade what they cover. It is not a verdict on any house, not a claim that any stock should be bought or sold, and not investment advice. It also does not say whether the ratings were right: whether a house’s price targets actually came true is a separate question, and we measure it on its own — in the target-price accuracy panel. What this page says is narrower and structural: in Korean research, the rating is a Buy, or it is nothing, and it has been that way for a very long time.
Data & Verification Notes
- Data as of
- Sources
- SeoulMarkets broker-research archive — Daily archive of broker reports (house, date, rating), grouped Buy/Hold/Sell from the filed opinion
- Cross-checks
- In 2026 our archive holds 6,372 rated broker reports; grouped by opinion the market runs Buy 79.7%, Hold 2.7%, Sell 0.06% and other 17.5%
- Of 13 brokerages that filed at least 200 reports and rated the majority of them, 10 issued no Sell rating at all in the year; the most Buy-heavy rated 92% Buy with zero Sell
- The market Sell rate has stayed below 0.6% every year since 2014, and below 0.2% in most years — this is a standing shape, not a recent change
- Excluded figures
- Whether any rating was correct — whether targets came true is a separate dataset, our target-price accuracy panel
- Rating-free IR bulletins, which issue no Buy/Hold/Sell and are dropped rather than counted as zero-Sell
- Houses with fewer than 200 reports in the year, whose rating mix is too small to be stable
The full dataset behind these figures — every listed company, every row — is available to license. SeoulMarkets data for licence →
Not investment advice. SMarkets publishes data journalism for general information only. Nothing here is investment advice, a recommendation, or an offer to buy or sell any security — any investment you make is at your own risk and responsibility. Figures are derived from official public data sources and may be revised by the issuing agency. Verify independently before acting.
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