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A daily market brief, published each morning. Markets, stocks, industry, economy, global, and policy — sorted by category.

Column·2026-07-10

[Kwangsoo's Take] Halt Leveraged ETF Trading Now, Debate Later

Host Lee Kwangsoo opened the show by sharply criticizing the fact that most of the day's top-traded names by volume were single-stock leveraged and inverse ETFs rather than actual stocks. Despite a flood of positive overnight news across the semiconductor and AI ecosystem, the index gave back its intraday gains before barely turning positive, a distortion he attributed to leveraged products effectively wagging the market's tail. He noted that leveraged products had even ranked among foreign investors' top net buys over the past 20 sessions, evidence of mechanical, momentum-driven trading rather than fundamentals-based investing. He criticized regulators for repeatedly floating options such as raising deposit requirements, restricting access to professional investors, or capping daily price swings, without taking any concrete action. Among the possible remedies, he argued the most direct step, an immediate trading halt, should come first, with debate over permanent fixes to follow. He acknowledged that policy discussion takes time but insisted the market cannot be allowed to deteriorate while regulators deliberate. He pointed to a specific manipulation risk: an investor could buy a stock while simultaneously buying a 2x inverse product, then sell the underlying shares to profit from the inverse leg, a structural loophole he said was an unintended side effect regulators failed to anticipate when the products were introduced. He warned that a market experiencing 7-8% daily swings, a top-five market in the world by size, effectively resembles a casino rather than a functioning capital market. He said what troubles him most is the erosion of public trust in domestic equities as repeated losses from this volatility push retail investors back toward stigmatizing Korean stock investment. Even so, he urged investors to retain confidence in market and corporate fundamentals, to avoid over-investing or panic-selling, and instead to set a predetermined, tolerable loss threshold and stick to a stop-loss discipline.

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Column·2026-07-09

[Kwangsoo's Take] Wall Street's Rotation Call and Japan's Chip Warning Don't Hold Up

On Morgan Stanley's rotation call urging investors to trim chips in favor of hyperscalers, Lee Kwang-soo argued the report merely rationalizes after the fact what investors were already doing. He said institutions lean on words like rotation because they compete on short-term returns, but that this offers no meaningful guidance for ordinary retail investors who cannot reshuffle holdings every month. He noted Morgan Stanley had previously shocked the market with a 'Winter is Coming' report warning of a memory downturn, only to walk it back roughly six months later. He also recalled allegations of a conflict of interest, where the firm issued bearish notes while reportedly having pre-placed large orders, adding that SK hynix recently excluded Morgan Stanley from its ADR institutional allocation. He directly rebutted Nikkei's report, which cited U.S. antitrust scrutiny to warn that Korean chipmakers' dominant position could lead to a collapse similar to Japan's semiconductor industry in the 1980s. He explained that Japan's decline stemmed not from trade pressure but from its own failure to adapt to the shift toward PCs and commodity chips, whereas Korea, led by SK hynix, is now driving the shift from commodity DRAM to specialized HBM. He also flagged that the Nikkei piece relied on an anonymous Korean source, amplified further by domestic outlets re-citing it. On the front-running case involving the economic broadcaster's staff, he framed it not as individual misconduct but as institutional responsibility, arguing that a media outlet buying stocks ahead of its own market-moving coverage amounts to market manipulation, and called for sanctions and preventive measures against the outlet itself.

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Column·2026-07-09

Leveraged ETFs Are Distorting the Market — Trading Should Be Halted Now

Park Si-dong sharply criticized the fact that leveraged and inverse ETFs keep dominating the top of Kospi's trading-value rankings, saying the market is effectively being turned into a gambling table. He said this pattern of the index swinging roughly 10% in either direction within a single day, without reflecting genuine news or supply-demand fundamentals, keeps repeating. He argued regulators keep voicing awareness of the problem without taking concrete action, and called for trading to be suspended immediately before even debating delisting, restricting access to professional investors, or raising margin requirements. He said the market keeps being damaged while such discussions drag on. He also warned that selling a large volume of a stock while simultaneously buying inverse-leveraged products on it could create a self-reinforcing downward spiral, and said repeated volatility of this kind risks pushing retail investors' hard-won long-term investing habits back toward short-term speculation.

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