The KOSPI fell 10.84% on July 28. In dollars it fell 10.47%. The gap is the won — a position no U.S. investor in Korea has been able to opt out of since 2020.
Nvidia is taking a 4.5% stake in Naver — ₩1.48tn (~$1.01B) via a third-party share issuance, Naver’s first in 22 years.
Korea’s market whipsawed all week: down 4.46% Monday, up 4.40% Thursday to reclaim 7,000 for the first time in six sessions, then down 5.72% Friday.
On July 24 President Lee Jae-myung stood in San Francisco — after meetings with the CEOs of Nvidia, OpenAI, Anthropic and Broadcom — and declared Korea…
The US wants Korean shipyards, and Korea’s shipbuilding supercycle is real — but “US Navy orders = a jackpot for Korea’s listed shipbuilders” breaks in…
Only about a dozen Korean companies trade as US ADRs — so most of Korea looks unbuyable from a US account. It isn’t.
For years a Korean buyback was only half a buyback — companies could resell the treasury shares later.
Korea’s defense primes — Hanwha Aerospace, Hyundai Rotem, KAI — carry a combined order backlog past ₩111.9tn (~$76B), yet none trades as a US ADR.
On July 16 the Bank of Korea raised rates for the first time in three and a half years — not to fight a slump, but a boom.
SK Hynix reports Q2 on July 29. An analyst just cut the estimate to ₩60.4tn (from a ~₩65tn consensus) — yet kept the price target.