‘I misplaced $14,000 in a month’: Traders hit by Korean inventory market’s wild swings

Financial institution employee Yongjoon Kim misplaced 20 million Korean gained ($14,000; £10,500) on the South Korean inventory market final month.

Kim’s cash was meant to assist purchase a house, as he’s getting married later this 12 months.

As a substitute the worth of his tech investments slumped by round 25% in July.

“It may sting and I’ll should work actually laborious to make up for this,” Kim says. “However for others who’ve taken extra threat, they will really feel the ache.”

A lot of his mates are worse off, and now in a “determined” state of affairs after “going all in” with their financial savings, he says.

Whereas loads of traders are piling into expertise shares, sharp market swings imply the bets do not all the time repay, with costs typically shifting on each main headline.

Nowhere is that instability extra pronounced than in South Korea’s tech-heavy Kospi, extensively thought to be the world’s most risky inventory index.

A worldwide frenzy round synthetic intelligence has pushed wild swings within the worth of the nation’s largest chipmakers.

The Kospi confronted “one of many sharpest corrections” in its historical past between June and August, similar to the drops seen throughout Covid-19 and the 1997 Asian monetary disaster, says Wee Khoon Chong from monetary companies firm BNY.

The index greater than doubled its worth because the begin of the 12 months to rise above 9,000 factors in mid-June, earlier than plunging to five,500 inside a couple of weeks. It has now recovered some floor to about 6,800 factors.