CLSA Securities Korea places it as high as 73 percent.

The mechanism behind this is important to understand because it explains why the figure has grown so quickly. Single-stock, inversely leveraged equity futures ETF tracking two times the daily returns of Samsung and SK Hynix—sixteen total products—were launched only on May 27. Within about a month, assets under management surged from roughly $3 billion at launch to around $9.1 billion, and 92 percent of holders are individual retail investors, locally known as “ants”. Retail traders net-bought about $8.2 billion worth of these products in the first month alone, reflecting 63 percent of all retail ETF purchases in the market during that period.
The volatility amplification mechanism is truly mechanical and predictable. To maintain a constant 2x leverage ratio, fund managers must buy more of the underlying stocks when prices rise and sell more when prices fall, every day during rebalancing. On June 23, when Samsung fell 12.31 percent and SK Hynix fell 12.47 percent on their worst one-day drop since the 2008 financial crisis, which sent the KOSPI down nearly 10 percent, Bloomberg Intelligence estimated that managers mechanically sold about $6 billion of those two stocks just to rebalance the leveraged products, directly deepening that day’s crash. The country’s volatility gauge, VKOSPI, has risen from an average of 53 before these products were launched to nearly 89 now.
There is also a structural quirk typical of the Korean market that makes it worse: individual stock futures in Korea continue trading until 3:45 p.m., fifteen minutes after the ETF and the underlying stocks themselves stop at 3:30. This timing creates a bizarre pricing anomaly; on one occasion, a leveraged SK Hynix ETF finished trading at a 6–7% premium to its own NAV because futures were still moving in the final minutes after the ETF itself had already stopped.
Regulatory responses so far also appear more reactive than preventive. The governor of the Financial Supervisory Service himself has publicly voiced regret over what he called a rushed approval, and an opposition lawmaker has asked for the products to be removed entirely from the list, but no concrete corrective steps have been announced. Fund performance has been downright brutal: all fourteen original single-stock leveraged equity products averaged losses approaching 27 percent since launch—an important reminder that leveraged products mathematically decay even in a choppy market without direction; a stock that falls 10 percent and then rises 10 percent will not return to breakeven for a 2x product.
For anyone monitoring South Korea’s semiconductor exposure or leveraged-product risk more broadly on Gate, the key thing to watch is whether the regulator truly moves beyond just expressing regret into real constraints—position limits, tighter margin rules, or partial delisting of products—because so far, this concentration means Samsung and SK Hynix price moves are no longer merely reflecting fundamentals; the moves are instead mechanically amplified by products designed to bet on them, both upward and downward.
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