IJin Insight

At 10:04:55 on the morning of Friday, October 30, the Korea Exchange suspended sell orders from program trading on the main board for five minutes. The most-traded KOSPI 200 futures contract had fallen more than 5% from its reference price and stayed there for a full minute. A few minutes later, the KOSPI itself was down 4.79%, at 5,653.02. Samsung Electronics was down 5.28%, and SK Hynix 8.72%. On Wednesday and again on Thursday, the same mechanism had fired in the opposite direction — a pause on program buy orders — as chip stocks surged on SK Hynix's results, which came in above forecasts, and its plans for large shareholder returns. Buy, buy, sell, in three trading days. This mechanism is called a sidecar — a KOSPI sidecar, when it fires on the main board — and most American investors have never heard of it. In Korea this year it has become a regular part of the morning. According to figures reported by Etoday on October 30, the sidecar has been triggered 55 times on the m...

On Monday, October 26, Meta Platforms launched public offerings of about $35 billion in new stock to pay for its AI buildout. The package has two parts: $22.5 billion of Class A common stock, sold through forward sale agreements, and roughly $12.5 billion of mandatory convertible preferred stock. Meta also said it plans a separate program of up to $60 billion more, sold "at the market" over time, in a new class of non-voting Class C shares that it expects to begin trading in the first quarter of 2027. Meta's shares fell as much as 4% after the announcement, then recovered to trade about 1% higher, according to Investing.com. The market's reaction was mixed. The fact underneath it is not. For most of this cycle, the money for AI data centers came out of the profits of the companies building them, topped up with borrowing. My read is narrower than a call on AI, and I think more durable: on Monday, one of the most aggressive spenders in the group decided its own profi...

Last week, the main Korean stock index fell for seven sessions in a row — its longest losing streak since September 2024. On Thursday, October 15, it dropped 7.57% in a single day to close at 5,554.22, with circuit breakers halting trading on both of Korea's main markets. Over the week, Samsung Electronics fell 17.8% and SK Hynix 24.3%, their steepest weekly declines since the 2008 financial crisis. Then, on Friday, the index rose 2.05%. On Monday it added another 1.76%. I am not offering that as a forecast. Two up days say nothing about the next two weeks. I am offering it because of who was selling on Thursday. Between October 13 and 16, forced sales — positions liquidated because investors could not meet their brokers' margin requirements — topped 50 billion won in every session, 286.2 billion won in all. Cash waiting in brokerage accounts fell by more than 6 trillion won in the same four days. Some of those people chose to leave. Some had the choice made for them. All o...

On October 8, Samsung Electronics reported the best quarter any Korean company has ever reported. Preliminary operating profit for July through September came to 107.4 trillion won, up 782.5% from a year earlier — the first time a company in Korea has cleared 100 trillion won of operating profit in a single quarter. Revenue was 195 trillion won. Both numbers topped the record the company had set only three months before. The profit figure also came in slightly above the consensus estimate — the average of analysts' forecasts, which FnGuide put at about 106 trillion won. That afternoon, Samsung's shares closed down 2.42%, at 268,500 won. A record, a beat, and a falling price, all on the same day. It looks like a contradiction. It is not, and the reason is worth understanding this week in particular, because the American earnings season is starting, and the same arithmetic is about to be applied to hundreds of companies at once. Here is the judgment I keep coming back to: an...

On June 22, 2026, Korea's KOSPI closed at 9,114.55, the highest close in its history. Two trading days later, on June 24, the money Korean investors had borrowed from their brokers to buy stocks reached a record of its own: about 38.6 trillion won. Read those two dates in order. The record in price came first. The record in borrowing came after it. By July 29 the index had fallen as low as 5,262.77, with circuit breakers halting trading two days in a row. By the end of July the margin balance was down to about 28.9 trillion won. Roughly a quarter of the borrowing was gone in five weeks — some of it repaid by choice, some of it sold out from under the people who owed it. On Friday, October 2, the KOSPI closed at 7,003.74. I live in Korea, so I watched this one from close up. And the judgment I keep returning to is simple enough to fit on one line: fear of missing out rarely buys the wrong company. It buys the right company, late, with money that belongs to someone else. Korea...