Korean stocks, explained by someone who actually lives here.
Korea is one of the most important markets on earth — the memory chips inside every AI server, the batteries in your next EV, the ships, the K-everything. Yet for an English-speaking investor it can feel like a locked room: the filings are in Korean, the company names are unfamiliar, and the context that moves a stock rarely survives translation.
TheGatBull exists to unlock that room.
Meet Mr.Gat
The name is a mash-up: the gat (갯) — the traditional Korean horsehair hat — on top of a Wall Street bull. A gat-wearing bull, where Korean heritage meets global markets.
Mr.Gat is our way of making the KOSPI and KOSDAQ a little less intimidating — your local insider who reads the filings and knows the difference between a headline and what’s actually happening in the engine room.
Why we publish under a character, not a face
We write under Mr.Gat rather than a personal name. That is a choice, not a hedge, and you deserve to know the reasoning.
Korean market coverage in English is thin enough that a single writer’s name carries little information on its own. What should carry the weight instead is the method — where each number came from, how confident we are in it, and what we do when we get it wrong. Those are checkable. A byline is not.
So everything below is offered in place of a face. If it does not hold up, the character is worth nothing.
Who is behind it
A Seoul-metro-based operator with 20 years of business experience and a daily habit of reading Korean corporate disclosures in their original language. Not a licensed financial adviser, not affiliated with any brokerage, asset manager, or listed company discussed on this site.
How a number gets onto this site
These are the working rules we hold ourselves to. They exist because each one came from a mistake.
- Closing prices come from market data, not from news reports. Media figures are treated as something to verify, not as the source.
- One time standard: the KRX regular session close, 15:30 Seoul time. Korea now has an alternative trading venue, and combined figures circulate widely. We do not put those in the body of an article. Every price on this site is the regular-session close unless labeled otherwise.
- Intraday is never promoted to closing. If an index touched a level during the day but did not close there, we say so in the same sentence.
- Primary sources first. DART filings, exchange data, issuer disclosure documents, regulator releases — read in the original Korean, in the original document, wherever we can get to it.
- Every figure carries how well we know it. A figure we read in the original filing, a figure reported by the press, and a figure we calculated ourselves are three different things, and the article says which is which. When a source is second-hand, that appears next to the number, not in a footnote.
- Superlatives require a matching baseline. “Record” and “biggest ever” only appear when we have checked the prior record on the same measurement basis. Otherwise we give the number and skip the adjective.
- Two reviews before anything publishes. A draft is checked line by line against the source material for factual accuracy, and separately read cold by someone who has not seen the research, to catch what a first-time reader would misread. Either one can stop publication.
How we use AI, plainly
Drafts are prepared with AI assistance. Every article is then verified against the original Korean filings, edited, and released by a human. AI does not decide what is true here — the filing does, and a person checks that the filing says what the article claims.
We say this openly because you would be right to ask.
When we are wrong
We correct it in the article, and we say what changed. Corrections are not quietly edited in.
If you find an error — a number, a name, a date, a mistranslation — tell us. Reader corrections are the fastest quality mechanism this site has, and they get priority over whatever we had planned that day.
What we do not do
- No recommendations. We describe structure and evidence. What to do with it is yours. Nothing here is investment advice — see the full disclaimer.
- No paid coverage. No company, brokerage, or fund pays for a mention, a rating, or placement. Where affiliate links exist, they are disclosed on the affiliate disclosure page.
- No borrowed conclusions. If an analyst or a brokerage said it, the article names them and marks it as their view, not ours.
What you’ll get here
- Plain-English breakdowns of Korean companies, always anchored to names you already know — “Korea’s Amazon,” “Korea’s Micron, but ahead on HBM.”
- More than one point of view. Owners vs. unions, retail vs. foreigners, bulls vs. bears — the tension that actually drives the price.
- The local texture. The donghak gaemi (동학개미, Korea’s retail “ant army”), kookminju (국민주, the “national stocks” everyone owns), and the pace of a market that moves faster than most.
- What the regulator and the central bank actually said — the part of Korean market news that almost never gets translated.
TheGatBull is an independent publication. Not investment advice.