Watching the market feel more like a card table lately

Watching the numbers jump around at 9 AM

I remember waking up last Tuesday, coffee in hand, and checking my brokerage app as usual. It’s become a bit of a morning ritual, or maybe a bad habit. These days, the movement on the screen doesn’t really feel like traditional investing. It feels erratic. I looked at the charts for the major tech players, the ones everyone calls the ‘Sam-Hynix’ heavyweights, and just watched the red arrows sink. It’s strange because a few months ago, everyone was talking about these as the safest bets. Now, reading headlines about ‘casino’ environments in the KOSPI feels less like political hyperbole and more like a description of the vibe in my group chat. My friends are either silent or panic-posting about leverage ratios. I don’t even know if half of them understand the math behind those leveraged ETFs, but they’re holding them anyway because, for a while, it was the only thing that seemed to move.

The shift from holding to betting

There was a moment last month where I considered putting a few million won into one of those 2x leveraged products. It was tempting. I was sitting at a cafe near Yeouido, and you could hear snippets of people talking about margins and daily swings. I ended up staying out of it, mostly because the thought of waking up to a 10% drop felt physically exhausting. People call it a ‘Squid Game’ market now, which is a bit dramatic, but I see what they mean. You enter, the stakes are high, and the house—or the market structure itself—seems designed to trap you if you don’t jump out at the right second. The price of entry feels low, maybe a few thousand won per unit, but the psychological cost of staring at those flickering screens is high.

Why foreigners seem to be leaving early

I saw a report somewhere that mentioned foreign investors are finding the exits. I can’t blame them. When I look at how fast the sentiment turns, it’s not rational. It’s momentum, pure and simple. There’s no fundamental analysis happening at the dinner table; it’s just, ‘Did you buy the dip?’ or ‘Are you still in the leverage?’ It’s weird to think about the regulatory side, like the Audit Office looking into high-risk products. If they really start digging into why these things were allowed to grow so fast, I wonder if it’ll change anything. Probably not. The structure is already baked in, and the 60% concentration in just two companies is a heavy weight to carry for a whole market index.

Stuck with the aftermath of volatility

I’m currently holding a few positions that are down, and honestly, I just stopped checking them every hour. The urge to ‘fix’ the portfolio by shifting into something even more volatile is still there, nagging at me, but I’ve learned that usually just makes it worse. It’s funny, I used to think of the stock market as a place for long-term growth, but lately, it feels like I’m just trying to survive a bad streak at a table where the game is rigged. I don’t have a plan for how to ‘win’ back what’s been lost. I think, for now, I’m just waiting for the noise to die down. Maybe I’ll delete the app for a week and see if my blood pressure improves. There’s a lingering doubt that this is just the new normal, and that maybe none of us are actually investing anymore, just gambling on when the next drop hits.