SeoulMarkets · tag
retail investors
5 stories tagged “retail investors”, each from official Korean data with its source and timestamp.
Korea's exchange prices the same gold twice. The retail bar is not the dearer one.
KRX lists 99.99% gold in two sizes: a 1kg bar and a 100g mini. Over 49 sessions the mini closed higher by a median of 0.015 percent — and it closed lower on 22 of them. On five days the two moved in opposite directions.
Korea's margin debt hit a record. It moved to KOSPI.
Korea's margin loan balance hit a record ₩38.6 trillion on 24 June 2026, up 50% year-on-year. KOSDAQ's share fell from 48% in 2021 to 21% today — this year's leverage moved into large-cap KOSPI, not the smaller, speculative market.
Korean analysts didn't just stop saying sell. They stopped saying hold.
Across 55,580 rated broker reports since 2014, the neutral rating has fallen from 9.7% to 3.3% of all calls. The collapse happened in two steps, in 2018 and 2020, and it shows up inside individual firms — not just in the market average.
Korean gold fell 31%. Trading in it went up, not down.
Korea Exchange gold peaked on 29 January and is down 30.9% since. Turnover in the small, retail-sized 100-gram contract is running 72.3% above 2025's daily average through the whole decline — the fall drew more small buyers in, not fewer.
Korean brokerages posted 26,051 stock reports in three years. Twenty-six said sell.
A complete census of every company report published to Korea's most-read retail research board finds sell ratings at 0.114 percent — one for every 838 buys. Thirteen of the twenty firms never issued a single one.