SeoulMarkets · funds

Korea’s fund shelf, dated

183,351 registered codes · 183,346 with a readable establishment date · 1970 to 2026

Korea’s fund registry does one thing very well: it dates things. Every registered code carries the day the fund behind it was established. Read that way — year by year, and by the registry’s own type field — the shelf has changed hands. Derivative funds were the most common new registration for 15 consecutive years, 2009 to 2023. Since 2024 the most common has been fund of funds.

These are codes, not funds, and not money. One fund is registered once per share class — ClassA, ClassC1, ClassC-P2e each hold their own code and their own establishment date. A registry also weighs a ₩1bn fund and a ₩1tn fund identically, so nothing here says where Korean savings sit.

Older years are counted through survivors only. Codes leave the register when funds close, so an early year shows what is left of it. Every decline below is therefore a floor, not the whole fall.

Three eras on one shelf

Years	Most common new code	Years running
2005–2008	Mixed-bond	4
2009–2023	Derivative	15
2024–2026	Fund of funds	3

The eras are not written in by hand — the page walks the years and starts a new row whenever the most common type changes. Runs shorter than two years are left out of this table and are visible in the full one below.

Every year, every type

Established	Derivative	Bond	Mixed-bond	Equity	Fund of funds	Mixed-equity	Other	All codes	Most common
2026 part year	74	258	253	324	742	44	85	1,780	Fund of funds 42%
2025	183	481	152	458	1,281	22	121	2,698	Fund of funds 47%
2024	238	418	229	384	893	18	132	2,312	Fund of funds 39%
2023	1,633	251	85	459	604	34	131	3,197	Derivative 51%
2022	1,674	261	90	327	744	40	149	3,285	Derivative 51%
2021	2,051	151	327	660	595	48	228	4,060	Derivative 51%
2020	3,343	294	206	739	894	46	468	5,990	Derivative 56%
2019	1,962	501	131	367	740	47	573	4,321	Derivative 45%
2018	2,392	777	234	862	942	164	352	5,723	Derivative 42%
2017	2,464	1,340	511	1,189	1,348	65	334	7,251	Derivative 34%
2016	2,504	1,135	729	866	776	110	171	6,291	Derivative 40%
2015	3,268	1,329	977	1,034	820	228	463	8,119	Derivative 40%
2014	3,730	1,732	841	1,238	716	294	422	8,973	Derivative 42%
2013	3,618	877	513	670	568	154	434	6,834	Derivative 53%
2012	3,130	753	380	614	343	237	240	5,697	Derivative 55%
2011	2,991	1,170	383	1,327	628	501	232	7,232	Derivative 41%
2010	2,961	1,519	525	1,215	254	513	238	7,225	Derivative 41%
2009	1,920	1,883	1,184	703	124	236	372	6,422	Derivative 30%
2008	2,577	2,441	3,869	864	159	268	467	10,645	Mixed-bond 36%
2007	2,589	2,522	5,561	1,615	391	308	583	13,569	Mixed-bond 41%
2006	1,835	2,409	4,376	471	207	215	431	9,944	Mixed-bond 44%
2005	1,554	1,816	1,897	438	80	259	323	6,367	Mixed-bond 30%

Types are the registry’s own field, uncounted and unreclassified. “Other” holds 8 smaller types. Years after 2025 are part years and are not compared like-for-like.

The largest cohort still on the register is from 1998

1998 accounts for 13,925 of the codes still registered — more than any later year. A spike that size in one year is the shape a data error makes, so it was checked before being printed: the codes spread across all twelve months rather than piling onto one date, and their composition dates them.

Read this the way the caveat above requires: it is what is left of 1998, not what 1998 produced. The year was larger than this.

How this was counted

Source — the Korean fund standard-code registry (KOFIA, via data.go.kr). 183,351 rows; 183,346 carry a readable eight-digit establishment date and 5 do not. Rows without one are left out and counted here rather than treated as zero.
Counting — one code, one row. Types come from the registry’s own field with no reclassification. Shares are that year’s count over that year’s total.
Not funds — recovering funds from codes would mean stripping share-class suffixes off names and guessing where the guess ends. We do not do it, so no fund count appears anywhere on this page.
Not asset managers — the standard code comes in at least four families (KR5…, K55…, KRM…, K5V…), and the four digits that identify a manager in one family do not in another. We hold no table turning those codes into names, so there is no manager-level count here. Stated as a gap rather than filled with a guess.
Not money, not returns — the registry names and dates funds. It does not say what they hold, what they charge, or how they did.

Questions

How many funds are registered in Korea?

The registry holds 183,351 standard codes, of which 183,346 carry a readable establishment date and 5 do not. These are codes, not funds: one fund is registered once per share class, so a fund sold in eight classes appears eight times.

What kind of fund does Korea register most?

Across the whole register, derivative codes are the largest group. Year by year the answer changes: Derivative funds were the most common new registration for 15 consecutive years, 2009 to 2023.

What is Korea registering now?

Fund of funds. That has been the most common new registration since 2024, at 42% of codes established in 2026.

When were most of Korea’s registered funds set up?

1998 is the largest single establishment year still on the register, at 13,925 codes. Because closed funds leave the register, older years are counted through survivors only, so that figure is what is left of that year rather than what the year produced.

Not investment advice. Counts of public registry entries, prepared with AI assistance and checked against the source file.