A firsthand account of South Korea's "golden age": Foreign investors made money, while retail investors took the fall.

Text | Sleepy、Daria

On the morning of July 7th, Samsung Electronics released its best quarterly results in history. Preliminary operating profit for the second quarter was 89.4 trillion won, approximately $58 billion, nineteen times that of the same period last year, and significantly higher than the most optimistic analyst forecasts.

At 1:51 PM, the Korea Exchange halted the entire stock market. The KOSPI index fell below 8% intraday, triggering a circuit breaker, and trading was suspended for twenty minutes, with the index hitting a low of 7389.22 points.

This is the sixth circuit breaker this year.

This system, established nearly thirty years ago, has only been triggered twelve times, half of which occurred this year. Other instances include the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008 and the market crash of 2020 due to the pandemic. In 2026, the KOSPI is hitting record highs, and everyone calls it a golden age. The brakes preparing for a crash are applied more frequently during this golden age than in years of disaster. Another unusual aspect of this day is that before and after the circuit breaker was triggered, foreign investors sold off heavily, while South Korean retail investors became the main buyers. Intraday statistics show that foreign investors net sold nearly 4 trillion won, while individual investors net bought over 4.5 trillion won. The best-ever earnings report and a circuit breaker occurred on the same day, less than four hours apart. These past few days, we've talked to several South Korean individual investors about those four hours and the entire year that preceded them. Nawon just graduated from university this year and hasn't found a job yet. In May, she bought her first stock, Samsung Electronics, just one share. She said she'd never touched stocks before, but all her friends were talking about them, and she didn't want to fall behind. That one share earned her 127,000 won, equivalent to over 600 yuan—the first time in her twenty-odd years of life that she'd made money from her own money. She plans to reinvest it in other stocks.

In South Korea today, there's a newly coined term, "霹雳贫贫" (Bili Poor Person). "벼락" (Bili, meaning "thunderbolt from a clear sky"), refers to those who diligently work, save money, and frugally accumulate their wages, only to suddenly discover that those around them have multiplied their assets several times over through stocks and real estate, while they themselves, despite not earning less, have inexplicably become poor.

There's a newly coined term in South Korea today: "霹雳贫贫" (Bili Poor Person). It refers to those who work hard, save money, and diligently accumulate their wages, only to suddenly find that those around them have multiplied their assets several times over through stocks and real estate, while they themselves, despite not earning less, have inexplicably become poor.

At the end of *Parasite*, Ki-woo, living in a semi-basement, writes a letter to his father. He says he has a plan: once he earns enough money, he will buy that house, and then his father will only need to walk up from the basement. The year the movie was released, some media calculated this for him; at the average person's income, it would take over five hundred years. Ki-woo's plan is the same as Ryang-ryong's stock holdings. A young man, facing an unchanging house, holds onto the only hope he can grasp.