Korean Stocks

[Parsad]

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/panic-sweeps-korean-stocks-biggest-075144038.html

 

Cheers!

[Milu]

I wonder how much of this is just a bit of steam coming out of a market that was going vertical for last year or so vs any genuine war fears. 

 

 

[rogermunibond]

Isn't this mostly DRAM related as Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix are a huge chunk of Kospi?

[Minseok]

Korean market was highly margined, samsung sk drop was more severe than MU/SNDK. 
Seeing as the index drop was more severe than other countries, perhaps there is a US invasion of North Korea fear related derisking being played here added to some margin calls and profit taking? Who knows.

 

 

 

[Peregrine]

Korea and Japan are pretty similar demographically, economically and culturally. Yet, the Koreans react to stasis by margining heavily and going for broke while the Japanese keep stuffing more money under the mattress. Wonder why that is?

[dcollon]

The Kospi isn't an "index".  It's a concentrated technology fund.  

[Parsad]

47 minutes ago, Peregrine said:

Korea and Japan are pretty similar demographically, economically and culturally. Yet, the Koreans react to stasis by margining heavily and going for broke while the Japanese keep stuffing more money under the mattress. Wonder why that is?

 

LOL!  That's actually pretty insightful.  Cheers!

[Spekulatius]

IBKR now allows individuals stock trades in their platform. I just checked my account and requested approval which occurred very quickly. mow what to do if anything in this market?

 

[Dalal.Holdings]

All the fintwit guys excited about IBKR opening up Korean market + the memory/Semiconductor surge tells me I should probably wait...

[Spekulatius]

3 hours ago, Dalal.Holdings said:

All the fintwit guys excited about IBKR opening up Korean market + the memory/Semiconductor surge tells me I should probably wait...

Perhaps, but there are stocks on Korea that are not related to the semi boom.

[Fly]

Might want to check KDEF holdings and start there for some non-semi plays

[brobro777]

I know KT&G, da cig company of Korea has done pretty well last 5 years, and EWY tripled in a year

 

That much I do know

[moatrep]

Pearl abyss is quite interesting to follow. They have hit with a game and have a top engine of their own. The current valuation is fair, around 30x my stimate of earnings. But next game may take 3 years, and last time they took much more time than expected with the other project (arguably because they were making the engine that took half of the time).

 

The stimate of earnings is grabbing the net profit of 10m copies of Crimson Desert, sold around 50$ (retail price is 70$, but making adjustment for promos and physical copies), and with marketing around 200m. You get 300m profit, and divide by the cycle to the next ip, maybe 3 to 5 years from now. 

 

So it may take 4 years you get a profit per year of 60m net on the engine and ips.

 

Or 1.8b market cap (30x pe)

Plus cash of 400m

2.2b.. current market cap is 2.45b

 

I didn't take the development costs because they financed the development with the income from their mmo online Black Desert, but if we did, and we put a value to black desert of 700m, still you arrive at the same price.

 

The development of Crimson Desert took 133m, but half of that may be demmed as costs to develop the engine. Still all I use in the examples are quite conservative numbers.

 

I think they have "Taiwan like economics" on video games, and the new engine is refreshing for the industry. Some may speculate they will likely be adquired, because this kind of independent AAA studios are few and the engine can provide a lot synergies to big players.

 

Right now I am playing a little with the next earnings release, but this is speculation, if not I will be just following at this price.

 

Edited May 4 by moatrep

[Paarslaars]

10 hours ago, Dalal.Holdings said:

All the fintwit guys excited about IBKR opening up Korean market + the memory/Semiconductor surge tells me I should probably wait...

 

Quite often there will be a better time than after a rally to pick up these stocks.

Then again that is what many said about Nvidia, if memory demands and forward earnings are correct, some of these large players are currently trading at like 5x forward earnings... not sure if they're going to get much cheaper unless outlook changes.

[schin]

On 3/4/2026 at 12:11 PM, Peregrine said:

Korea and Japan are pretty similar demographically, economically and culturally. Yet, the Koreans react to stasis by margining heavily and going for broke while the Japanese keep stuffing more money under the mattress. Wonder why that is?

 

@Peregrine Where do Chinese fit into this? lol

Edited May 5 by schin

[nsx5200]

China Chinese?  They're at the whims of their government.  When the government "encourage" them to buy real estate, they buy real estate.  Many of them got burned when the government withdrew the push for real estate.  Tons of stories like this keeps happening, and until they rise up, all they can do is keep grinding at it while their government do whatever they want...  The people are treated just like cogs in their machine.  At the risk of sounding too political, the ones that can, leave, or at least have a plan B for outside of China.  The ones that can't, grind on.

[brobro777]

Holy moly look at EWY go off, 

 

oh man I'm so tempted to short this, so tempted