Financial institution employee Yongjoon Kim misplaced 20 million Korean received ($14,000; £10,500) on the South Korean inventory market final month.
Kim’s cash was meant to assist purchase a house, as he’s getting married later this 12 months.
As an alternative the worth of his tech investments slumped by round 25% in July.
“It is going to sting and I’ll must work actually exhausting to make up for this,” Kim says. “However for others who’ve taken extra threat, they’ll really feel the ache.”
A lot of his buddies are worse off, and now in a “determined” scenario after “going all in” with their financial savings, he says.
Whereas plenty of investors are piling into technology stocks, sharp market swings imply the bets do not at all times repay, with costs typically shifting on each main headline.
Nowhere is that instability extra pronounced than in South Korea’s tech-heavy Kospi, extensively considered the world’s most unstable inventory index.
A worldwide frenzy round synthetic intelligence has pushed wild swings within the worth of the nation’s largest chipmakers.
The Kospi confronted “one of many sharpest corrections” in its historical past between June and August, akin to the drops seen throughout Covid-19 and the 1997 Asian monetary disaster, says Wee Khoon Chong from monetary providers firm BNY.
The index greater than doubled its worth for the reason that begin of the 12 months to rise above 9,000 factors in mid-June, earlier than plunging to five,500 inside a number of weeks. It has now recovered some floor to about 6,800 factors.
