In Q1 2026, Korean equities posted the strongest returns among major global markets. The rally was driven by a combination of the HBM boom fueled by AI memory demand and a visible unwind of the Korea discount. Strong buying from Korean retail investors, alongside continued inflows from foreign institutions, pushed the KOSPI higher throughout the past year and ultimately above the 5,000 level.
However, Korea’s younger generation did not simply follow the KOSPI higher. Instead, many turned to U.S. equities or inverse ETFs. Their bearish positioning on the KOSPI, heavy use of leverage, and rapid trading turnover reflect structural features of the Korean market, shaped by widening wealth gaps with older generations and long-standing distrust toward domestic equities.
The belief that traditional paths to long-term wealth accumulation no longer work is spreading globally. In an environment where opportunities for asset formation are constrained, demand is rising quickly for trades that pursue asymmetric upside, including high leverage, short-term trading, prediction markets, and sports betting.
As traditional financial infrastructure struggles to meet these shifting demands, perps have emerged as one of the trading formats best adapted to the new financial environment. A future in which perp exchanges like QFEX absorb a meaningful share of market activity from legacy financial infrastructure may arrive sooner than expected.
In Q1 2026, Korean equities delivered the strongest performance among major global markets. The rally reflected the convergence of two forces: surging AI-driven demand for high-bandwidth memory and a reassessment of the long-standing ‘Korea discount’. As strong buying from Korean retail investors combined with steady foreign institutional inflows, the KOSPI continued its year-long climb and ultimately broke through the 5,000 level, a major political milestone for the current administration.
There are many ways to explain the KOSPI rally, but its core drivers can be narrowed down to three.
The HBM boom: The KOSPI is often described as a leveraged proxy for the semiconductor sector. As demand for AI chips accelerated, SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics, the two central players in the global memory supply chain, delivered earnings that exceeded market expectations. As direct beneficiaries of the HBM narrative, the two stocks rose 36% and 38% YTD, respectively, and led much of the KOSPI’s upside.
The corporate value-up program: Korean equities have long traded at some of the lowest PER and PBR levels globally, with the Korea discount firmly entrenched. The corporate value-up program is a policy package introduced by the Korean government in 2024 to address this discount.
Alongside revisions to commercial law that formally codify directors’ fiduciary duties to shareholders, companies were encouraged to disclose shareholder return plans, including share buybacks, cancellations, and higher dividends. The resulting re-rating of Korean equities and increased attention from foreign investors are widely seen as key supports for the KOSPI rally.
Domestic liquidity reallocation: A reallocation of domestic capital is also cited as an important backdrop to the rally. One of the current administration’s top priorities has been to cool an overheated housing market, stabilize housing conditions, and reduce household debt. To that end, the government has implemented aggressive measures, including tighter mortgage lending, higher taxes on multi-home owners, and restrictions on speculative property purchases. As a result, household assets, pension funds, and domestic institutional capital that had been concentrated in real estate are widely believed to have flowed into equities.
Behind this rally, where multiple positive signals converged, was a powerful buying force known as “Korean retail.” The Korean equity market has long been retail-dominated, with individual investors accounting for an estimated 60–70% of direct equity participation, exceeding the share held by institutions.
More recently, leverage demand has surged to levels not seen in years. In January 2026, net assets in leveraged ETFs jumped 65% month over month. The product that attracted the largest retail inflows was a leveraged ETF tracking 2x exposure to the KOSDAQ 150 index, which saw about $1.1B in net buying over the course of a single month.
There is also an interesting, if non-traditional, indicator of leverage demand. In Korea, retail investors are required to complete mandatory education before trading leveraged ETFs. According to data compiled by the Korea Financial Investment Association, the number of course completers reached 167,000 last month, a 19x increase from about 8,000 a year earlier according to local reporting. At one point, traffic surged enough to temporarily crash the training site.
Korean retail investors are often described in simple terms: strong buying pressure and a high appetite for leverage. That description, however, is incomplete. A closer look at the Korean equity market reveals a structure that is sharply segmented by age.
An analysis conducted by a Korean brokerage based on about 2.24M active accounts over the full year of 2025 shows a stark performance gap across age groups. Women aged 60 and above recorded the highest average return at 26.9%, while men in their 20s posted the lowest average return at just 19%.
This performance gap was largely driven by differences in trading behavior. Average turnover, a proxy for trading frequency, stood at 85% for women, compared with 181% for men, more than twice as high. Among men in their 20s and 30s, trading activity was largely focused on leveraged downside bets such as ‘KODEX 200 Futures Inverse 2X’.
In other words, even during a prolonged KOSPI uptrend, younger male investors repeatedly faded the market and engaged in frequent trading, which likely widened the performance gap.
Where did the bearish KOSPI positioning, heavy use of leverage, and unusually fast turnover among Korean men in their 20s and 30s come from? It is convenient to explain this behavior as a result of overconfidence or higher risk tolerance among young men, but that explanation is unconvincing.
This is not a question of temperament or hormones. It is a question of market structure. To understand why these patterns emerged, it is necessary to look at the broader conditions of the Korean market.
Avoidance of the KOSPI
First, there is long-standing distrust toward the KOSPI. While Korean equity multiples have improved more recently, the KOSPI spent over a decade stuck between 2,000 and 3,000 through 2024, reinforcing its image as a stagnant market.
This stagnation becomes even clearer when viewed through a global comparison. Over the past ten years, the S&P 500 delivered cumulative gains of about 180%, while the KOSPI rose only about 35%, implying a performance gap of more than five times.
Valuations tell a similar story. The KOSPI has traded at an average PER of around 9x and a PBR near 1x, far below the S&P 500’s about 22x PER and 4.5x PBR, placing Korean equities among the cheapest major markets globally.
This prolonged undervaluation became ingrained over time. For investors in their 20s and 30s, Korean equities came to be viewed as a market that struggled to generate meaningful returns. Since this cohort began entering the workforce around 2010, the KOSPI’s growth has remained subdued.
As a result, avoidance of the KOSPI has become internalized among younger generations. No matter how often parents recommend long-term holding of Samsung Electronics, betting against Korean equities often feels more natural to these investors.
The Widening Wealth Gap with Older Generations
The tendency of younger Koreans to gravitate toward leverage and short-term trading can also be traced to the widening wealth gap with older generations. More precisely, this cohort has been effectively excluded from Korea’s real estate market.
Since the 2000s, real estate has been the dominant vehicle for wealth accumulation in Korea, reshaping the broader capital market around property ownership. Over time, excessive speculation led to deteriorating housing affordability and rising household debt, prompting successive government interventions.
In the process, housing prices and regulatory frameworks built by older generations have created high barriers for new entrants.
As of 2024, real estate accounts for 75% of average household assets in Korea (30% in the U.S., 36% in Japan).
As a result of the expansion of the housing market, the price-to-income ratio (PIR) has risen to around 9x in the Seoul metropolitan area.
Under debt service ratio (DSR) rules designed to curb multi-home speculation, borrowers are limited to annual principal and interest payments of no more than 40% of their income.
These figures capture the reality of Korea’s housing market. In an environment where asset accumulation is driven by property ownership, rising home prices do not create opportunity. They shut new participants out.
For younger cohorts with lower income levels, access to borrowing itself is constrained. As a result, they remain excluded from the housing market, burdened by rental costs, and face delayed capital formation.
This helps explain why many market interpretations point to soaring housing prices and widening generational wealth gaps as factors that push younger investors toward short-term, high-stakes strategies. As discussed earlier, today’s housing market is highly equity-dependent. Rather than building wealth gradually through long-term financing, the more urgent task for younger investors is to secure initial equity just to enter the capital market.
High leverage, short-term trading, and contrarian bets can all be understood as attempts to accelerate capital formation under these constraints. In the same context, the extreme buying behavior often observed among Korean retail investors in crypto markets becomes easier to understand.
If younger investors are sidelined from mainstream markets such as the KOSPI and real estate, where do they go? Having learned that they lack informational and capital advantages in markets already dominated by older generations, they begin searching for alternatives with more asymmetric return potential. The clearest expression of this shift is the surge in demand for U.S. equities and leveraged ETFs.
U.S. equities/ETF
Data analyzing more than 100,000 retail brokerage accounts between 2020 and 2022 clearly illustrates the preference of younger cohorts for U.S. stocks. Nearly 60% of stock accounts held by investors in their 20s contained overseas ETPs, with particularly strong demand for U.S. leveraged and inverse ETP products.
This trend has persisted in recent years. The Korean government has attempted to encourage a return to domestic equities to stabilize the KRW-USD exchange rate, introducing policies such as so-called “RIA accounts” that offer tax benefits for selling overseas stocks and purchasing Korean equities. These efforts, however, have had limited impact.
Instead, Korean investors’ holdings of U.S. equities reached an all-time high of about $170B as of January 2026 according to local reporting. In the same month, net purchases of U.S. stocks totaled about $5.1B, a 2.5x increase month over month. Despite a strong dollar and government incentive programs, Korean retail investors’ preference for U.S. equities has remained firmly intact.
Single-stock leverage
What retail investors increasingly want is not index-based leveraged ETFs tied to baskets of 150 stocks, but leverage on individual names. This demand becomes clearer when looking at the details of the KOSPI rally.
In 2025, the KOSPI index rose by about 25%, yet just two stocks, Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, accounted for around 49% of the total increase in market capitalization according to estimates. Despite this concentration, the Korean market did not offer single-stock leveraged ETFs.
The first market to fill this gap was Hong Kong. In October 2025, Hong Kong-based asset manager CSOP launched ETFs that provide 2x leveraged exposure to Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix. According to the Korea Securities Depository, Korean investors purchased around $4.5M of the CSOP SK Hynix Daily 2X Leveraged ETF within the first two weeks of launch as reported. Over the same period, the product ranked among the top five net purchases on the Hong Kong exchange.
More recently, the Korean government has moved to ease regulations to allow the launch of single-stock ETFs. As a result, single-stock leveraged ETFs based on high-quality assets are likely to become available in the Korean market in the near future.
Looking at the KOSPI rally from multiple angles, one side of the Korean market can be summarized as a combination of distrust toward domestic equities, widening wealth gaps with older generations, a preference for U.S. stocks and ETFs, and strong demand for single-stock leveraged and inverse products.
Source: X(@Travis_Kling)
Source: Financial Nihilism
While this article has focused on Korea, largely because it is the market the author knows best, this is clearly a global phenomenon. Across the U.S. and Europe, younger generations are increasingly coming to believe that traditional paths to long-term wealth accumulation no longer work.
Globally, home prices relative to income have reached levels that are effectively inaccessible, while expected returns in spot equity markets are no longer sufficient to meaningfully close generational wealth gaps.
In an environment where opportunities for asset accumulation are increasingly constrained, demand for high leverage, ultra-short-term trading, prediction markets, and sports betting continues to rise. These instruments share a common objective: capturing asymmetric upside, and this demand reflects a structural shift rather than a short-term trend.
Legacy financial infrastructure, however, struggles to absorb this demand. Spot equities offer limited leverage and little flexibility for frequent repositioning. Short-dated options and CFDs introduce significant frictions, including high trading costs, rollover complexity, and broker risk. ETNs are further constrained by country-specific regulations, limiting access to single stocks and global assets and reducing overall trading flexibility.
Source: QFEX
As existing financial infrastructure struggles to meet shifting demand, perps have emerged as one of the fastest-growing trading formats globally. They allow traders to maintain leveraged exposure without maturity rollovers, while supporting high-frequency trading in single assets and broad access to global markets. In this sense, perps address alternative trading demand across nearly every dimension.
Source: QFEX
One platform that closely aligns with this outlook is QFEX. QFEX is a CLOB-based perp exchange that offers rollover-free leverage on traditional financial assets, instant settlement, and a 24/7 trading environment. Beyond this, QFEX presents a broader vision of integrating the core functions of traditional finance, including exchange, clearing, and brokerage, into a single unified trading infrastructure.
QFEX is not aiming to compete with crypto-native perp DEXs or conventional centralized crypto exchanges. Its focus is not limited to crypto-native users, but on building an exchange capable of absorbing broad trading demand for traditional assets. In line with this direction, QFEX currently supports trading in major U.S. equities such as TSLA, AAPL, and NVDA, commodities like GOLD and SILVER, as well as indices including US100 and FX products.
The platform is also supported by talent drawn from leading global trading firms such as Tower Research Capital, Jump Trading, Hudson River Trading, Optiver and Jane Street. This background provides the level of market structure and risk management expertise required to build an alternative trading environment centered on traditional financial assets.
Going forward, QFEX plans to expand the reach of its product by focusing on markets with clear demand and strong timeliness. Its geographic expansion strategy begins with East Asia, where demand for leveraged products and product adaptability is high, extends to Europe, where traders are already familiar with short-term options and CFDs, and eventually targets emerging markets where access to global assets remains limited.
(This article briefly outlines QFEX’s vision. A more detailed analysis will be covered in the next installment.)
Although this article began with the KOSPI, it ends with the concept of financial nihilism. As the WSJ frames, this trend is better understood not as reckless risk-taking or gambling, but as a rational adaptation by younger generations to an environment in which social mobility has eroded. It is less a phenomenon tied to a specific country or cohort, and more a shared symptom of a capitalist system shaped by accumulated generational inequality and a structural loss of opportunity.
Perps are one of the trading formats best adapted to this shift. For ordinary investors who are neither oil producers nor farmers, contract maturity and rollovers have become unnecessary constraints. Features such as 24/7 trading, instant settlement, and global asset exposure reflect trading standards that have evolved to fit the current financial environment.
From this perspective, perp exchanges are likely to emerge as core trading infrastructure in future capital markets, alongside crypto, sports betting, and prediction markets. A future in which platforms like QFEX absorb a meaningful share of market activity from traditional financial infrastructure may arrive sooner than many expect.
Dive into 'Narratives' that will be important in the next year
QFEX
Mantle
Ondo Finance
Hyperliquid