The migration
At the end of 2022 Korean investors held $44.2 billion of US stocks in custody at the Korea Securities Depository. At the end of 2023 it was $68.0 billion, at the end of 2024 $112.1 billion, at the end of 2025 $163.6 billion. The total first passed $200 billion on 11 May 2026, set a record of $206.3 billion on 2 June, and stood at $200.2 billion on 5 October (Figure 1) [1, 2]. Part of the rise is price: the names they own have gone up. Part is new money: $5.0 billion of net purchases in January 2026 alone, and $8.3 billion over June to September [1, 2].
Koreans call these investors seohak gaemi, the "western-study ants," a pun on the donghak gaemi who piled into the KOSPI during the pandemic [2]. They are young: brokers report the growth concentrated among investors in their twenties and thirties [3]. They pay to leave. Gains on Korean listed shares are untaxed for anyone below the large-shareholder threshold; gains on foreign shares are taxed at 22% after an annual deduction of 2.5 million won, about $1,800 [2]. They went anyway, and they kept going through the best year the home market has had: the KOSPI passed 5,000 in January 2026, and holdings of US stocks set a record the same month [3]. When the government offered an income deduction in the spring for proceeds brought home from foreign stocks, holdings fell to $146.5 billion in March; by June they were at a record again [1, 2].
The business built on this is large. The twelve biggest Korean securities firms earned 1.95 trillion won, about $1.35 billion, in overseas brokerage commissions in the first eleven months of 2025, more than three times the 2023 total; nearly half of individual investors' overseas accounts were in loss, and the regulator warned the firms against promoting foreign stocks without explaining exchange-rate and tax risk [5].
What they own
The holdings are concentrated and they lean on leverage (Figures 2 and 3). Tesla is the largest position, $22.1 billion on 5 October; NVIDIA is second at $19.2 billion; the two together are a fifth of everything Koreans hold in the United States. Alphabet is third at $8.9 billion. The fourth-largest holding is not a company but a leveraged fund: Direxion's 3× semiconductor fund, SOXL, at $5.8 billion, just ahead of the Invesco QQQ [1]. Palantir, Apple, Microsoft and ProShares' 3× Nasdaq fund complete the top ten in the January ranking [2].
The leveraged funds are where Korea is not a minority. At the end of August 2026 Korean investors held 27% of SOXL ($5.24 billion of a $19.3 billion fund), 38.8% of Direxion's 2× Tesla fund, 37.6% of its 3× Korea fund, 20.9% of ProShares' 2× Nasdaq fund and 12.6% of the 3× one; they put an estimated $10 billion into leveraged ETFs in the first half of the year [6]. The appetite is the same at home: in the month after the Korean market's June 2026 peak, Citi estimated that retail investors lost $38.7 billion in leveraged ETFs on Korean assets, most of it in funds on SK hynix, Samsung Electronics and the KOSPI 200, while adding $6.2 billion of new money as the funds fell [7].
The leveraged fund is doing a particular job in these portfolios. It is the Korean retail investor's substitute for an option: it gives leverage on a name, it trades like a stock, in the hours they have, at any size, with no derivatives account. What it does not give is the thing an option gives: a loss that stops. A 3× fund has no floor short of the whole stake and resets daily, so a 13% fall in SOXL in one session, as in one October week, cost Korean holders about a trillion won [8].
Through whom, and at what hour
Seoul is fourteen hours ahead of New York in winter and thirteen in American summer time. The Korea Exchange trades 09:00 to 15:30; the New York regular session is 23:30 to 06:00 Korean time in winter; a Korean who wants to buy Tesla during the US session does it at midnight (Figure 4, which marks the hour it is now in Seoul). The industry's answer has been the US overnight market. Since Samsung Securities connected to the Blue Ocean alternative trading system in February 2022, followed by Mirae Asset, Korea Investment, Toss and the rest, Korean apps have offered a "daytime session" for US stocks from 10:00 to 18:00 Seoul time, which is 20:00 to 04:00 in New York, the hours when almost no one in America is trading. Korean orders came to about 40% of Blue Ocean's volume in 2024 [9]; overnight trading as a whole was under 0.11% of US share volume in 2025 [10]. A fifth of a trillion dollars is being managed, in its owners' working hours, through a venue that carries a thousandth of the market.
The venue has shown its limits twice. On 5 August 2024, during the sharpest fall of that year, Blue Ocean cancelled every trade executed after 14:45 Seoul time: 630 billion won of trades across about 90,000 accounts at 19 Korean brokerages, erased, with no compensation from the venue or the brokers; the brokers suspended daytime trading from 16 August and did not resume it for more than a year [11]. On 1 September 2026 Blue Ocean suspended trading in 18 securities, SOXL and the 3× Korea fund among them, to stay under the SEC's Fair Access threshold, which applies when a venue carries 5% of a security's volume; Korean brokers rerouted orders to two smaller overnight venues that do not publish real-time quotes, so customers now place limit orders in those names without seeing a bid or an offer [6].
The won
Every one of these positions is a dollar asset held by a won-based saver, and almost none of it is hedged. The won traded near 1,450 to the dollar in February 2026, close to seventeen-year lows, and slid from 1,345 to 1,389 in one week of September; the Bank of Korea said the pressure came from resident demand for dollars, not foreign speculation, with resident dollar deposits at a record $119 billion [2]. The government's response has been to make staying home more attractive (the Corporate Value-up Programme, eased dividend taxation, directors' duties to all shareholders, the repatriation deduction) and to ask exporters and the National Pension Service to sell dollars [2]. For the individual holder the arithmetic is simple and unavoidable: when the dollar falls 7% against the won, the US portfolio loses 7% in won terms, and there is no retail instrument that hedges a direct Tesla holding against it.
Korea on Hyperliquid
The same households are the largest retail crypto population in the developed world, and that is where the Korean-hours market has gone. Sixteen million Koreans, about a third of the population, held accounts at the domestic crypto exchanges by early 2025 [16]. Their holdings then halved as the money moved into stocks, at home and in New York: from 121.8 trillion won at the end of January 2025 to 60.6 trillion at the end of February 2026, with daily volume on the five exchanges falling from $11.6 billion to $3 billion [17]; it came back in August, when Upbit's daily volume rose 273% in two days to $1.84 billion [18].
What is new is that Korean stocks now trade on the same rails as crypto, at every hour, and nowhere near a Korean broker. SK hynix, Samsung Electronics, SK hynix's US depositary shares, the 3× Korea fund and the Korea ETF each trade as perpetual futures on Hyperliquid, priced in dollars from the Seoul share price. On 28 July 2026, the day the KOSPI fell 10.8% through a marketwide circuit breaker and SK hynix closed down 14.7%, the SK hynix perpetual traded $959 million in 24 hours with $407 million of open interest, and fell to $927 in Korea's pre-market window before recovering within two minutes [19]. On an ordinary day, 31 October, the five Korea-linked perpetuals traded about $352 million between them, $203 million of it in SK hynix [20]. Table 1 shows the five now, with the one-share at-the-money put on each. Sixty percent of all equity-perpetual volume on the venue trades outside US market hours [15].
Table 1.The Korea-linked perpetual futures on Hyperliquid, priced in dollars, and the one-share at-the-money put on each on Iridium's chain, expiring 4 December.
| Perpetual future | Price | 24h | 24h volume | Open interest | At-the-money put, one share |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SK hynixSKHX | $1,064.30 | −1.0% | $296M | $250M | $102.10 · 9.6% |
| Samsung ElectronicsSMSN | $165.71 | −1.0% | $49M | $41M | $14.16 · 8.5% |
| SK hynix ADSSKHY | $151.62 | −0.3% | $86M | $106M | $13.45 · 8.9% |
| Direxion South Korea Bull 3XKORU | $10.95 | −3.9% | $53M | $6.8M | $2.05 · 18.7% |
| iShares MSCI South KoreaEWY | $154.73 | −1.4% | $37M | $11M | $10.09 · 6.5% |
| Five Korea-linked perpetuals | $521M | $416M |
Connecting to the live feed (0 of 5 quoted): showing the values as published, 16:51 UTC on 3 November 2026, 01:51 on 4 November in Seoul. Volume and open interest are Hyperliquid's; the put is half the at-the-money straddle at the mid.
A Korean stock now trades hundreds of millions of dollars a day, and close to a billion on a crisis day, in Korea's hours, on a venue that no Korean brokerage connects to. Whoever is trading it, that is where Korean-hours liquidity for Korean and American names has gone.
The same pattern elsewhere
Korea is the most visible case because its depository publishes the custody data every week. The pattern, a large retail population reaching for dollar assets and American stocks through apps and stablecoins in its own hours, is wider. In Chainalysis's 2025 adoption index the ten countries with the most grassroots crypto use were India, the United States, Pakistan, Vietnam, Brazil, Nigeria, Indonesia, Ukraine, the Philippines and Russia, with Asia-Pacific on-chain value up 69% in a year to $2.36 trillion [21]. Indonesia had 20.2 million registered crypto investors at the end of 2025 and 22.9 million by mid-2026 [22]. Brazil had 5.4 million individuals on its stock exchange at the end of 2025, who traded R$517 billion of equities in the year [23]. Turkey's largest investment app, Midas, has 3.5 million customers trading Istanbul stocks, US stocks and crypto in one place, and raised $80 million to add derivatives on US equities [24]. Outside the United States, each of these is a population the listed US options market does not reach, in a time zone it does not keep, holding the dollar it needs in a wallet rather than a brokerage account.
What the money can do from Seoul, and what it cannot
Table 2 sets out the instruments a Korean individual can use on a US position, with the hours in Seoul time, the minimum size, and the gate.
Table 2.What a Korean individual can use on a US stock position, with the hours in Seoul time (US winter), the minimum size and the gate, as of November 2026.
| Instrument | Hours, Seoul time | Size | Gate |
|---|---|---|---|
| US stocks, regular session | 23:30 to 06:00 | one share; fractions at some brokers | a foreign-stock account; commission and an FX spread |
| US stocks, “daytime” on the overnight venues | 10:00 to 18:00 | one share | thin books; trades cancelled (2024) and names suspended (2026); no quotes on the fallback venues [11] |
| US listed options, through Korean brokers (Kyobo 2022, Samsung 2024, Mirae 2024, Shinhan 2025, a mobile-pay app 2025) [12] | 23:30 to 06:00 (from 21:30 on 29 names); not on the overnight venues | 100 shares per contract: one Tesla covered call needs $40,343 of Tesla; one NVIDIA put covers $20,242 | a derivatives account: a 10 million won deposit, one hour of education and three hours of mock trading [13]; mandatory pre-training for overseas derivatives since 15 December 2025 [14] |
| Leveraged ETFs (SOXL, TSLL, TQQQ) | 10:00 to 18:00, and the US session | one share | none beyond a short course; no floor on the loss |
| A hedge on the dollar | – | – | not available to retail on a direct holding |
| One-share options on the perpetual future (Iridium, public test) | any hour | one share: a Tesla covered call needs $403; ten shares are hedged with ten puts | a sign-in and USDC collateral; mock money today, real money only where permitted |
Prices from 2 November 2026: Tesla $403.43, NVIDIA $202.42, on perpetual-future marks.
Three things stand out. The options exist, but not when Koreans are awake: every Korean broker that offers US options offers them in the US session, because that is when they are quoted, so the hedge on a Tesla position is available at 02:00 and the position is managed at 14:00. The options are too big for the positions: one contract is 100 shares, $40,343 of Tesla, and the money arriving is young [3]; a position of ten shares cannot be hedged with a contract of a hundred. And the options come with a derivatives account that the stocks and the leveraged funds do not need, which is why the funds are where the leverage went.
Hedging Tesla from Seoul
Take the largest holding in the country, Tesla, in a position of ten shares, worth $4,034 at the 2 November price. The holder wants protection to the first week of December. One listed put covers 100 shares and, at the money, costs $2,398, 59% of the position's value, and can be bought only in the US session, overnight in Seoul (Figure 5). The alternatives are to over-hedge ten times, which turns the holding into a short; to buy a QQQ put and carry the basis; or to do nothing, which is what the custody data say most do. Ten one-share puts on the Tesla perpetual cover exactly ten shares for $240, 6% of the position, at 14:00 Seoul time, because the perpetual trades then and the put is hedged in it. A covered call is the same arithmetic in the other direction: 100 shares, $40,343, against one share, $403.
The same applies at home, where the losses were larger. SK hynix and Samsung Electronics trade as perpetual futures on the same venue, so a Korean investor who holds SK hynix leveraged funds, the position that lost the most in the summer, can buy a one-share put on the SK hynix perpetual in Seoul's afternoon. Iridium quotes those chains, with Tesla's and NVIDIA's, in its public test; the point here is not the venue but the instrument. A loss that stops, in the owner's hours, at the owner's size, is what the $10 billion of leveraged funds was reaching for and could not get.
What it says
- The migration is large, and accelerating. One of the largest retail migrations into US stocks is coming from a country fourteen hours away: $44 billion to $200 billion in under four years, through a record year at home and a 22% tax on the way out.
- It is concentrated: two names are a fifth of it, and Korean investors hold a quarter to two-fifths of several leveraged funds on US exchanges, which are their substitute for options.
- It is managed in the owners' working hours through a sliver of the market: overnight venues that carry a thousandth of US volume, that cancelled 630 billion won of trades in a day in 2024 and suspended the most-held fund in 2026.
- The hedges exist and are out of reach three ways at once: the hour (quoted at 02:00 in Seoul), the unit (100 shares against a position of ten), and the account (a derivatives deposit and course that the stocks and the funds do not require). The dollar exposure has no retail hedge at all.
- The Korean-hours market has moved on-chain: Korean stocks trade as perpetual futures on Hyperliquid, close to a billion dollars a day in SK hynix on a crisis day, with no Korean broker connected.
- A one-share option on a perpetual future that trades in Seoul's day removes the hour and the unit; whether it removes the account depends on the rules where the money is. It does not hedge the dollar, and it does not change the odds of a 3× bet; it gives the bet a floor.
Notes
- Quotes in Figure 5 and the sizes in Table 2 are house quotes on perpetual-future underlyings from Iridium's public test, with mock collateral, after the US close on 2 November 2026, on the 4 December expiry; Table 1 as published is from 16:51 UTC on 3 November 2026. Live, the figures show the current quotes on the non-daily expiry nearest 32 days. The at-the-money put is taken as half the at-the-money straddle at the mid.
- Hours in Table 2 use Eastern Standard Time. In American summer time every US window is one hour earlier in Seoul; Figure 4 moves them when it is.