Key points
- Korea's financial regulators apologized on July 29 for the single-stock 2X funds and are reviewing whether to cut the leverage ratio or bar retail investors from them.
- On July 29 the fund that pays when SK Hynix falls changed hands more than the one that pays when it rises, a first. Two days later the Kospi rose a record 17.91%.
- PLUS Samsung Electronics Futures Single-Stock Inverse 2X fell 52.61% on July 31. Samsung rose 26.81% to 262,500 won ($184 USD), its best day ever.
- Both SK Hynix funds listed at 20,000 won ($14 USD) on May 27. The one betting against the stock closed Friday at 7,695 won, down 59.95% in a day.
Korea's financial regulators apologized on July 29 for a set of funds they had approved two months earlier. The funds pay double whatever Samsung Electronics or SK Hynix does in a day, or double the opposite if you want to bet a stock falls, and they've pushed a lot of ordinary investors here into trades they had never made before.
The people trading them describe it as gambling. "Coldly, how is this any different from baccarat?" one wrote on a message board last week. "You can't trade stocks like it's odds or evens," wrote another.
One man spent Thursday afternoon on the Korean forum 에펨코리아 asking strangers whether he should do it. He posted at 3:06, 24 minutes before the Seoul market closed.
"It's my first short and I have to curse the stock down, so I'm nervous," he wrote. "Give me courage. I'm thinking of going in with everything I have at exactly 3:15. It'll fall tomorrow, right?"
Somebody tried to stop him, and the warning is worth reading twice.
"Please don't start doing things you've never done. You're already losing on what you do know, so why try something new."
His answer explains most of what happened in Korea this week.
"I'm losing on what I was doing, so I'm trying the opposite."
The regulators have arrived at the same conclusion
The funds started trading on May 27. Two months on, the boards that carry them sound like this. "Two-times leverage or inverse isn't retail investing, that's a jackpot chaser." And, from someone watching people switch in both directions, "the insane odds-or-evens game has started again."
On July 29 Lee Euk-won, chairman of the Financial Services Commission, and Lee Chan-jin, governor of the Financial Supervisory Service, apologized at a National Assembly committee session. It was the first formal apology either body has made over these products.
"The financial authorities are the final responsible party for the financial market, so our responsibility is naturally heavy," Lee Euk-won said. The Commission added that it was sorry for failing to live up to the public's trust. Both are now looking at whether to cut the funds back from double, or to let only professional investors buy them at all.
The Korea Capital Market Institute looked at what changed after the launch and found that both Samsung and SK Hynix started swinging around more once the funds existed. To keep their promise the funds have to buy and sell the real shares every day, and that buying and selling moves the shares around.
What happened to the man who asked for courage
He posted again at 3:33, three minutes after Thursday's close.
"In the end I went all in on the Samsung inverse. All week I was in leverage hoping for a long and the losses were severe. When I saw it fail to rise even on a day like today and turn negative, I thought this isn't it. So I had no choice, I abandoned the long position and switched to the short. If it falls tomorrow I'll sell right away and get out. Please cheer me on. I want to make back even a little of what I've lost."
Four replies came inside a minute. Three made the same joke, which was that his buying the inverse meant the market would now go up.
On Friday Samsung Electronics closed up 26.81 percent at 262,500 won in Seoul, the best single day in the company's history. The fund he'd bought fell 52.61 percent.
He was not the only one making that trade
The same move shows up in the money. On July 29, 5.9 trillion won changed hands in SOL SK Hynix Futures Single-Stock Inverse 2X, the busiest day the fund has had, and for the first time it passed the fund that pays double when the same stock rises. On July 30 it did another 5.0 trillion. The Samsung inverse did 491.1 billion won that day, and seven of that product's ten busiest sessions ever fell inside July.
It wasn't only beginners. 키움증권 tracks its top 1 percent of traders by the previous month's returns. On July 30 the two things they sold most were SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics. Third on that list was the KODEX fund that pays double whatever SK Hynix gains. The second and third things they bought most were funds that pay when the stocks fall.
Nobody publishes how many people made the switch, and I'm not going to invent a figure. What can be counted is the money, and the money moved.
The part almost nobody prices in
These funds reset every day. They deliver double the daily move, not double the move across a month, so a stock that falls hard and then rises hard takes money out of the leveraged version and the inverse version at the same time.
"The leverage long and the short both listed at 20,000 won. Neither one is above 10,000 now."
Same stock, opposite bets, both down more than half from where they started. Citi has put what Korean retail has lost on these products at about 56.3 trillion won, near $38.7 billion.
Friday morning on the boards
Two posts went up on 에펨코리아 within 40 minutes of Friday's open and took about 876,000 views between them. One was titled "Hynix gopbeoseu -52 percent" and the body was a single line, "Account cut in half in one day." Gopbeoseu is the local name for these funds, built from the Korean word for double.
Underneath, somebody asks what happened to the people who made the switch, and another user answers with the arithmetic.
"Yesterday the short closed around 19,000 won. Today it opened at 9,500. Your seed just got cut in half."
I checked that against the fund. SOL SK Hynix Futures Single-Stock Inverse 2X closed Friday at 7,695 won, down 11,520 on the day, which puts Thursday's close at 19,215. It was quoted down 44.63 percent inside the first twenty minutes. The poster's numbers are right.
One person got out of the way by luck. "Honestly, yesterday I almost cleared out my account at minus 50 percent and got on the inverse, but I held off. I came within an inch of being completely wiped."
Somebody else was working out how far back he had to go. "Hynix has to reach 3,340,000 for me to break even." It closed Friday at 1,718,000.
Then somebody did it again, at Friday's close
At 3:02 on Friday afternoon, with the index up more than 17 percent and the inverse funds down 60, a post went up titled "I've made the last bet of my life." It has since taken about 30,000 views and 240 comments, more than a hundred times the traffic on Thursday's all-in post.
The body is four lines.
"After cutting Jeju Semiconductor at minus 50 percent. Micron inverse at minus 30, cut. Finally, now I've gone all in on the Hynix inverse, and I'm hoping for Monday."
Two holdings sold at a loss and the money from both put into the trade that had just halved other people's accounts that morning. Monday is August 3, and there's no way to know yet how it goes.
The thread underneath is not all mockery. "You shouldn't mock the Hynix inverse today," one post argues, and another simply reads "To those of you who got liquidated."
The rule meant to slow this down started Friday morning
Buying a single-stock leverage fund now takes a cash deposit of 30 million won, near $21,000, and shares or bonds already held don't count toward it.
Yoo Dong-soo chairs the National Assembly's National Policy Committee. He pulled account data from six brokerages and read it to the regulator on July 29. Accounts holding less than 30 million won are 94.1 percent of the total, and they account for 58.1 percent of the money that moves through the market each day.
"Did the financial authorities who make and enforce the policy understand what 30 million won means when they made this?" he said. "I wish they would actually trade an ETF, experience on the ground what problems come up, and then make the law knowing what the risks are."
About 3 trillion won moved through these funds on Friday, against 12.4 trillion on Thursday. The gate worked on the morning the funds moved 60 percent.
What we don't know
I don't know what either of them lost. Neither posted a number or an account screenshot. The first man said he'd sell straight away if it fell. It rose instead, so his own plan tells us nothing about what he did next. Before Friday's open he was still posting, asking what the chances were that Samsung would reach 240,000 won. It closed at 262,500.
I've left out their names, and the links to their posts as well. They were talking to a message board, and neither of them signed up to be an example of anything.
Both Friday threads carried comments about the Han River and about taking your own life, and one predicted there would be deaths. None of that can be checked and I'm not repeating it as fact. It is what the boards sounded like. Korea's suicide prevention line is 109, it's run by the Ministry of Health and Welfare, and it answers around the clock.
Sources
- 뉴스핌, 이억원·이찬진 "단일종목 레버리지 ETF로 변동성 확대, 무겁게 받아들여", on the July 29 regulator apology and the measures under review
- 한국경제, 삼전닉스 버리고 곱버스 베팅하더니…초고수들 순매수 1위는, on what Kiwoom's top 1% of traders bought and sold on July 30
- 머니투데이, 주식 계좌 94%가 레버리지 ETF '매수불가'..."3000만원 의미 알고 정책 만드나", on the account data and the Yoo Dong-soo remarks
- 자본시장연구원, 단일종목 레버리지·인버스 ETF 출시 전후 주식시장 동향 및 시사점, on how much the two stocks moved after the May 27 launch
- 에펨코리아 주식 게시판 and 포텐터짐, posts and comment threads dated 2026-07-30 and 2026-07-31
Won figures are converted at 1,424 won to the dollar, the July 31, 2026 rate. Forum posts are translated from Korean, lightly cleaned for language, and quoted without usernames. This article is for information only and is not investment advice.
