South Korea’s booming stock market mints generation of novice investors
South Korean stocks are soaring, drawing first-time investors in a nation where property has long reigned supreme. Seoul, South Korea – When Kim Ha-young, a
South Korean stocks are soaring, drawing first-time investors in a nation where property has long reigned supreme. Seoul, South Korea – When Kim Ha-young, a Seoul office worker in her 30s, came into a little unexpected cash last year after paying the deposit on her rented apartment, she did something she had never done before. She bought shares. With little knowledge of the market, Kim picked SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics, South Korea’s largest manufacturers of memory chips used for AI, on a whim. “I mean, when you think of Korea, you think of Samsung, right?” Kim told Al Jazeera, explaining that she started investing “with no prior research at all”. Then, in September, Kim’s shares began to climb rapidly. At first, Kim told herself she’d be happy with a gain of 50,000 won ($33). But as SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics’ stock price continued to soar, she continued buying and selling shares before deciding in February to hold onto her stock. Since then, Kim’s stakes in Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix have both more than doubled in value. “I was in the green, so I told myself to just wait it out – it had climbed nicely over the past half year,” Kim said. Kim is among a swelling number of everyday South Koreans who have waded into the stock market for the first time during the most spectacular rally in the country’s history. The number of South Koreans who own stocks surged from about 6 million in 2019 to more than 14.5 million at the end of 2025, according to the Korea Securities Depository. That number has likely ballooned over the past six months, as South Korea’s benchmark Kospi has nearly doubled in value, making it by far the best-performing major index worldwide.
As of May, the number of active stock trading accounts in the country stood at 105.22 million, a rise of 6.93 million from the end of last year, according to the Korea Financial Investment Association. The boom is a remarkable turnaround for South Korea’s stock market, which was long written off by investors as a laggard compared with its global peers. Despite birthing household names, such as Samsung and Hyundai, South Korea was for decades infamous for the “Korea discount”, a label used to describe the usually low valuations of Korean firms. “The same business would be valued lower here than in global markets,” Jung Jiggwang, head of corporate finance at Woori Bank, told Al Jazeera. Market watchers have attributed the South Korean market’s poor performance to weak corporate governance under the country’s family-run chaebol system and, above all, meagre shareholder returns. Korean firms long had a reputation for disregarding the interests of small investors, Jung said, which bred a culture of short-term trading and “unnecessary volatility”. Like his predecessors, South Korean President Lee Jae-myung came into office pledging to shed the country’s image as an investing backwater and vanquish the “Korea discount” once and for all. During his campaign for the presidential election last June, Lee pledged to lift the Kospi to 5,000 points, a milestone the index blasted past in January and has since far exceeded. Once a small-time day trader who, in his telling, regularly lost money in the market, Lee’s administration has spearheaded a series of stock market reforms, including allowing minority shareholders to concentrate their votes on their preferred candidates when electing board members. Lee has expressed his hope for more everyday citizens to invest in the market, in part to loosen Koreans’ attachment to property, the traditional store of wealth in Asia’s fourth-largest economy.
The BriefWire