'I lost $14,000 in a month': Investors hit by Korean stock market's wild swings

Here is a story making headlines in the economy: 'I lost $14,000 in a month': Investors hit by Korean stock market's wild swingsImage source, Kim YongjoonImage caption, Yongjoon Kim, pictured with his partner, planned to use his investments to fund a new home as they are getting married later this yearByOsmond ChiaBusiness reporterPublished2 hours agoBank worker Yongjoon Kim lost 20 million Korean won ($14,000; £10,500) on the South Korean stock market last month. Kim's money was meant to help buy a home, as he is getting married later this year. Instead the value of his tech investments slumped by around 25% in July.

"It's going to sting and I'm going to have to work really hard to make up for this," Kim says. "But for others who have taken more risk, they're going to feel the pain. "Many of his friends are worse off, and now in a "desperate" situation after "going all in" with their savings, he says.

Economic Details

While plenty of investors are piling into technology stocks, sharp market swings mean the bets don't always pay off, with prices often moving on every major headline. Nowhere is that instability more pronounced than in South Korea's tech-heavy Kospi, widely regarded as the world's most volatile stock index. A global frenzy around artificial intelligence has driven wild swings in the value of the country's biggest chipmakers.

The Kospi faced "one of the sharpest corrections" in its history between June and August, comparable to the drops seen during Covid-19 and the 1997 Asian financial crisis, says Wee Khoon Chong from financial services company BNY. The index more than doubled its value since the start of the year to rise above 9,000 points in mid-June, before plunging to 5,500 within a few weeks. It has now recovered some ground to about 6,800 points.

A key reason for the sell-off in recent weeks has been concerns over the huge amounts of money being spent on AI, Wee adds. The slump has had a big impact on many of the country's personal investors who bought tech stocks over the past year. For Woongsa Kim, a look at his shares trading app is a painful reminder of what he had made then lost by investing in the South Korean stock market.

Analyst Views

At the start of the year, he used about half of a bonus from work to buy shares in tech giant SK Hynix. The stock quadrupled in value before most of those gains were wiped out, leaving his investment, now worth about 300 million won, at roughly half the value of its peak. "Thinking about it just brings tears to my eyes," Kim told the .

Image source, Woongsa KimImage caption, Woongsa Kim put half of a bonus into SK Hynix sharesThe sell-off came after tech shares had soared for months, "generating the extreme euphoria" that has moved some personal investors to take out loans to invest, says investment analyst Tobias Reger. It has been most acutely felt by people who used leverage - a form of borrowing in the financial markets. Leveraging lets an investor control a larger number of stocks than their own cash would otherwise allow, which delivers a bigger profit if the shares rise.

Financial markets are tracking the development closely as investors assess the likely impact.