South Korean retail investors buy $4.6B in US stocks as domestic market craters

South Korean retail investors, affectionately known as “ants” for their collective strength in numbers, poured $4.6 billion into US equities in July. That’s their largest monthly haul since January 2026, and nearly double their average monthly purchases of $2.7 billion throughout 2025. The timing is not coincidental. Back home, the KOSPI index just posted its worst monthly decline since the 2008 global financial crisis, dropping roughly 40% from its June peak. A domestic market in freefall South Korea introduced single-stock leveraged ETFs on May 27, and retail investors dove in headfirst. Those products attracted roughly 14 trillion won in net buying from retail participants, the equivalent of $9.4 to $9.7 billion depending on exchange rates at the time. When the underlying stocks, particularly AI darlings like Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, reversed hard, the leverage worked in the opposite direction. The damage was staggering. Estimated retail losses from leveraged positions totaled somewhere between $38.7 billion and $39 billion. More than 1.2 million accounts were hit with margin calls, affecting over 3.4% of South Korea’s adult population. Foreign institutional investors w...