Section
Equities
Listed Korean stocks, indices, ETFs and equity derivatives.
How long each Korean industry keeps the people it hires, from 16 years down to under four
Listed companies file their workers' average tenure in their own annual reports. Weight it by headcount and rank Korea's 44 biggest industries: carmakers hold people 16 years, research firms under four.
How much of a Korean company's life does its average worker see? At most two-fifths of it
Long tenure and old firms go together at 0.66 — the tenure ladder is partly an age ladder. Measured against firm age, no sector's workers have stayed even half the company's life; research looks churny only because its firms are young.
In Korea, the industries that hold their workers longest are mostly the ones that pay them most
Rank 44 listed industries by how long they keep people and by what they pay, and the two line up at 0.67. Long-tenure sectors pay 1.7 times the high-churn ones — but retail keeps people cheaply, and research pays for talent it cannot keep.
Eight Korean brokers publish fractional-share lists. Only 46 stocks are buyable at all eight.
The industry body posts each broker's list of stocks you can own in fractions. Put the eight side by side and the longest list turns out to be mostly sell-only — and 1,202 of the 2,586 listed stocks cannot be bought in fractions anywhere.
Market value per employee ranges 3,100-fold across Korean firms. Almost all of it is an artifact.
Divide a company's market cap by its staff and the spread is absurd — 3,100 times. Remove the holding companies and pre-revenue biotech, and what survives is a 17-fold gap between industries: capital intensity, not what anyone produced.
Korea's convertibles create new shares at a 24% discount. Cash raises, 12%.
Measured against the market price on the day the shares are created, convertibles dilute at a 23.8% discount and cash raises at 12.5%. Control for the 456 companies that used both and the convertible still discounts 7.7 points deeper.
One in three Korean listed companies files its headcount in pieces. Forty-two add it up.
The employee table in a Korean annual report carries no required total. Read only the first row — as we did until yesterday — and 482,227 people disappear from a sample of 853,817.
Korean firms with more women underperformed by 17 points last year. Control for industry and the gap vanishes.
Across 2,573 listed companies, staff tenure and female share both look like they predict returns — in opposite directions. They are the same fact counted twice. One survives an industry control; the other does not.
Korean analysts didn't just stop saying sell. They stopped saying hold.
Across 55,580 rated broker reports since 2014, the neutral rating has fallen from 9.7% to 3.3% of all calls. The collapse happened in two steps, in 2018 and 2020, and it shows up inside individual firms — not just in the market average.
A Korean ETF above its stated value falls back tomorrow — unless it holds Asian stocks, in which case it rises
Across 605,072 fund-days, a premium on a domestic or US-tracking ETF predicts a 0.48-point underperformance tomorrow. On an Asia-tracking synthetic fund it predicts a 0.32-point gain. Same number, opposite meaning.
Four of Korea's ten best-paying listed companies employ fewer than 200 people
Every listed company files its average pay per employee. Read the ranking without checking headcount and you will misread what it measures — four of the top ten are head offices, not workforces.
In 76 percent of Korea's large listed companies, men stay longer than women
Companies file average tenure by gender in their own annual reports. Across 1,836 listed firms employing 1.81 million people, the weighted gap is 2.11 years — and it is widest in the industries Korea exports.
The KOSPI has moved more than 3% on 53 days this year. The five years before it managed 20.
Korea's benchmark is down 31.3% from its 22 June peak and still up 48.5% on the year. The drawdown is the smaller story: the average daily move has tripled, and July alone had ten sessions above 5%.
Korean banks are up 6% since the KOSPI peaked. The index is down 31% because it is 60% semiconductors.
Of 160 tradeable Korea Exchange indices, twelve have risen since 22 June. Electronics is 60.1% of KOSPI market capitalisation, fell 38.7%, and dragged the benchmark with it. Banks, pharma and staples never joined the fall.
Korean brokerages posted 26,051 stock reports in three years. Twenty-six said sell.
A complete census of every company report published to Korea's most-read retail research board finds sell ratings at 0.114 percent — one for every 838 buys. Thirteen of the twenty firms never issued a single one.