Korean Stock & Equity Research

Market Structure/Market Psychology & History

In 2008, a 25-person team of quantitative analysts spent an entire month running every economic and financial dataset they had, then delivered their monthly findings with a single conclusion: "all the numbers look good." They said this as the global financial crisis was already unfolding beneath them. Their failure wasn't incompetence — it was a structural limitation built into data analysis its..

Macro & Policy/Currency & Rates

The Yen recently touched its weakest level against the Dollar in roughly 40 years, even as the Bank of Japan holds its policy rate at 1.00% and signals more hikes are coming. That combination — a central bank tightening while its currency keeps sliding — is the story of a fiscal and monetary policy tug-of-war playing out in Tokyo right now, one directly connected to the joint US-Japan interventi..

Global Markets/Supply Chain & Geopolitics

South Korea just scaled back an ambitious plan to build six Samsung and four SK Hynix fabs in the country's southwest — down to four fabs backed by roughly 800 trillion Won. But the more interesting story isn't the fab count. It's a question the government's own announcement left largely unanswered: where is the electricity going to come from? Table of ContentsThe Revised Plan: Four Fabs, 800 Tr..

Korean Equities/Company Deep Dives

When China's CXMT listed in Shanghai on July 27, 2026, its shares surged 472% on debut, briefly making it the largest company by market cap on the STAR board. The IPO raised roughly $8.55 billion — the largest semiconductor listing in Chinese history — and came at a moment when, as covered in our earlier piece on China's TRS crackdown, capital that had been flowing offshore into Korean and US te..

Korean Equities/Company Deep Dives

Samsung Electronics just reported second-quarter operating profit of 89.4 trillion Won — up 1,810% from the same quarter a year earlier, and roughly 5–6 trillion Won ahead of analyst expectations. But the more interesting story sits three years in the past: during a year Samsung posted a full annual loss, it made its largest-ever capital investment. That bet is what's paying off now. Table of Co..

Macro & Policy/Currency & Rates

The 30-year US Treasury real yield recently hit its highest level since the 2008 financial crisis — even as textbook logic suggests an oil price shock should push real yields lower, not higher. Understanding why requires breaking the nominal interest rate down into its component parts, and tracing a structural supply-demand imbalance building in the Treasury market. This piece also covers the Au..

Global Markets/AI & Tech Finance

In the late 1990s, the promise that "the internet would change everything" fueled a wave of fiber-optic cable buildout that ultimately buried 2 trillion dollars in telecom value and left 95% of laid cable dark for years. Today, a similar circular financing structure is emerging around AI infrastructure — this time centered on Nvidia, OpenAI, and Oracle. Understanding the parallels, and the diffe..

Global Markets/Supply Chain & Geopolitics

On July 28, 2026, at around 4:27 PM local time, a magnitude 7.1 earthquake struck Kumamoto in Japan's Kyushu region, with a shallow focal depth of 10km and a maximum intensity of 7 — the highest level on Japan's seismic scale. Beyond the immediate human impact, the region carries outsized importance for the global semiconductor supply chain, as it hosts TSMC's Japanese subsidiary JASM, Sony's im..