The bus to campaign against short sellers in Seoul.
Source: Korea Stockholers Alliance
Source: Korea Stockholers Alliance
In the United States, retail investors challenged short sellers by joining online, renting billboards in Times Square and even displaying airplane banners; in Korea, they are driving a bus.
A group of influential Korean retail traders declared “a war against short sellers” under a campaign they are calling “K-streetbets”, imitating gamblers on Reddit’s now famous WallStreetBets forum that coordinated an increase in video game retailer GameStop Corp. to squeeze short sellers.
On Saturday, the Korea Stockholders Alliance launched a “bus campaign” to get its anti-short message out loud.
The bus is painted with cartoons of people holding placards that say things like “I hate short selling”, “short selling must be abolished” and an appeal to the Financial Services Commission that regulates shares, which is responsible for the resumption -sale, “dissolved”. He will begin to circulate in the capital Seoul from today for an hour every day until March. On its way: Casa Azul, the FSC building and the National Assembly in the city’s financial district.
The initiative is the latest of nearly 30,000 day traders to make permanent the ban on short selling imposed by Korea at the beginning of last year to control its markets as the pandemic has spread.
Korea imposed a ban on short selling in March last year, joining several countries like France and Italy in suspending negotiations against borrowed stocks to tame markets as the pandemic worsened. This month, Indonesia will lift their ban, leaving only Korea as a large global market that does not allow the trading strategy. Korea is planning to extend the ban beyond its expiration on March 15, as retail investors who dominate the stock market increasingly lobby against short selling.
Short sellers under siege everywhere are very bad in Korea
More than 200,000 individual traders in Korea have signed an anonymous petition posted on Korea’s presidential website, a limit that requires President Moon Jae-in to respond to the petition.
Short sellers are “the axis of evil in Korea,” Jung Eui-jung, chief executive of the alliance, told Bloomberg in an interview, saying that Korea’s short selling rules favor professionals, not small traders as your group.
Before the ban on short selling was imposed, retail investors who came to dominate investments in the country last year faced tougher restrictions on short selling than professionals. They see the trading strategy as the playground of foreign hedge funds with the intention of harming local champions.
While stocks are in the sights of short sellers like Gamestop, which loses money, and AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc. captured the craze of US day traders, since the heavily sold biotech companies are the darlings of Korean amateur investors.
Jung’s group said on its website that it wants to “protect” Korean companies Celltrion Inc., a $ 45 billion biosimilar manufacturer, and HLB Inc., pipeline of cancer drugs has led its stock to increase 770% in 2019.
– With the help of Shinhye Kang