KOSPI Hit 9,000 — So Why Are Retail Investors Still Getting Killed?

The news is in an uproar over stock prices again. It got me thinking.

It feels like just yesterday that the KOSPI was trapped in a brutal "boxpi," shuffling around 2,000. Even then it was chaos. Everyone sang the same song: "The Korean market sucks retail investors dry," "If only the KOSPI hits 5,000, retail investors will all live happily ever after." When was it that people called the Korean market "a retail slaughterhouse"?

But before long the index passed 7,000, then charged all the way to the dream number of 9,000.

At this point, shouldn't retail investors be screaming with joy? Shouldn't everyone be laughing, hit by a rain of money? Yet when you lift the lid, a "hellgate" worse than the 2,000 era has opened. Watching the index pull back and get pushed down to 6,000 leaves me speechless.

Isn't something off? We reached the index the news screamed about, the number we only saw in dreams — and yet the ones bleeding and dying are still the retail investors.

In my fifty years of life I have never seen such an enormous index. But the higher the KOSPI climbs, the more ironic it is that retail investors always die off. This must mean something is fundamentally wrong with the Korean market itself. Even if the KOSPI reached a million, retail investors would still be retail investors. That seems like an unchanging truth.

I don't even want to utter clichés like "the KOSPI is a casino" or "the stock market is the problem." I just wish people would stop the death wailing already.

I can state this categorically: go to any stock market in the world and there is no such thing as "a market that exists for retail investors." After going through this much, isn't it time retail investors learned? They believed a bull market would make everyone rich together — and the reality left at the end of that illusion is simply bitter.