Korea's exchange-traded gold has fallen 31% since January, and the small-lot contract is busier than ever

The Korea Exchange runs a gold market. It is not a futures market or a fund — buy on it and you own metal in a vault, quoted in won per gram, settled like a stock. The exchange publishes every day’s close and turnover, and the full history goes back to the start of 2020.

Read the whole file at once and two things stand out.

The run, and then the fall

Won per gram, 1-kilogram contract. Across the whole period, +227.9%.

The year-to-date figure understates what happened inside 2026. Gold peaked at 269,810 won on 29 January and closed at 186,430 on 3 August. That is −30.9% in six months. In won, the metal gave up 83,380 per gram — twice the 40,910 it gained across the whole of 2024.

Turnover did not collapse with the price

Here is the part the price table hides. Daily turnover, in hundred-million won:

Through the first 143 trading days of 2026 — a period in which gold lost nearly a third of its value from the peak — the small contract traded 72.3% more per day than in all of 2025, and the large contract 35.4% more.

Split 2026 at the January peak and the picture sharpens rather than reverses:

• The 20 days to the peak: 74.3 per day in the 100g contract, 2,134.5 in the 1kg
• The 123 days since: 41.2 and 1,024.7

So activity did fall by roughly half after the top — turnover chased the price up and thinned on the way down, as it usually does. But the post-crash run rate in the small contract, 41.2, is still 55% above the average for the whole of 2025, a year gold rose 60%.

Whoever is trading the 100-gram contract has not gone away. They are doing more business at 186,000 won than they were doing at 129,000.

One caveat the data insists on: the small contract has never been more than 5.9% of gold turnover in any year, and was 3.7% in 2026. This is a large market with a small retail-sized corner, and the corner is what grew.

The other market on the same feed

The same API carries the Korea Exchange petroleum market, which publishes something unusual: two volume-weighted prices for each fuel each day — one for trades matched on the open order book, one for trades negotiated between counterparties.

The gap between them is a direct readout of how much the public order book is worth. In 2021, the average absolute gap across the three fuels was 31.1 won per litre. In 2025 and again in 2026 it was 10.1 won — a 68% narrowing.

In 2021 a negotiated deal reliably beat the screen by 23 to 38 won a litre. In 2026 the two prices are within a few won of each other, and for kerosene the sign has flipped. A market built to make fuel pricing transparent now shows very little difference between the transparent price and the private one.

The kerosene line carries its own warning. On 259 of 1,614 days — one day in six — no competitive trade happened at all, and the feed records a zero. Read as a price, that zero would put kerosene at nothing. It means the order book was empty.

Two markets, the same money

Over these six and a half years the gold market turned over 48.50 trillion won and the petroleum market 48.72 trillion — within half a percent of each other.

They got there completely differently. Fuel ran at 150 to 210 hundred-million won a day of diesel, year after year, and is running lighter in 2026. Gold sat at 43 hundred-million won a day as recently as 2023, went nearly vertical through 2025, and now trades at twenty-seven times its 2023 rate on a price 31% below its peak.

One of these is infrastructure. The other is a position.