Korean Stock & Equity Research

Global Markets/Supply Chain & Geopolitics

At an August 7, 2026 mining industry roundtable, MP Materials' CEO held up a palm-sized case containing two silver magnets and told Trump: "This is 100% American — mined in California, refined in California, made in Texas." It was a carefully staged moment in a much larger story: a three-way race between the US, Japan, and Australia to break China's near-total grip on heavy rare earth elements, ..

Global Markets/Supply Chain & Geopolitics

Copper just came within striking distance of an all-time high, and cobalt is climbing alongside it. The trigger traces back to a single government order out of the Democratic Republic of Congo — the world's dominant cobalt producer and a major copper supplier — banning the export of unprocessed copper and cobalt concentrate. For Korean battery and semiconductor supply chains, both heavily expose..

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..

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..

Global Markets/Supply Chain & Geopolitics

On June 23, 2026, China's securities regulator quietly moved to shut down a financial mechanism that had let wealthy Chinese investors bypass capital controls to buy foreign tech stocks — including Korean semiconductor names. The move offers one plausible explanation for part of Korea's summer stock decline, though as with most China-related capital flow stories, hard data is scarce and much of ..

Global Markets/AI & Tech Finance

Japan's US Treasury holdings created a structural bottleneck for any Yen-supporting intervention: to buy Yen, authorities need Dollars, and the traditional way to raise them — selling US Treasuries on the open market — risks spiking US bond yields and drawing political friction with Washington. A previous post covered how the FIMA Repo Facility solved half of this problem. This post looks at the..

Global Markets/AI & Tech Finance

2026.08.05 - [Finance] - The Other Half of the Yen Intervention: Inside the Exchange Stabilization Fund The Other Half of the Yen Intervention: Inside the Exchange Stabilization FundJapan's US Treasury holdings created a structural bottleneck for any Yen-supporting intervention: to buy Yen, authorities need Dollars, and the traditional way to raise them — selling US Treasuries on the open market..