The bus for the campaign against short sellers in Seoul.
Source: Korea Stockholers Alliance
Source: Korea Stockholers Alliance
In the US, small investors have defied short sellers by grouping online, renting billboards in Times Square and even flying banners from airplanes; In Korea, I drive a bus.
A group of influential Korean retailers has declared a “war on short sellers” in a campaign they call “K-streetbets”, mimicking the now-famous RedSit WallStreetBets bettors forum that coordinated an increase in video game retailer GameStop Corp. to squeeze short sellers.
On Saturday, the Korean Shareholders’ Alliance launched a “bus campaign” to make its anti-short-selling message heard.
The bus is painted with cartoons of people holding signs that say things like “I hate short selling”, “missing selling should be abolished” and a call for stock regulator Financial Services Commission, which is tasked with short resumption – sale, “abolished”. It will start circulating around the capital Seoul today, for an hour every day, until sometime in March. On its route: the Blue House, the FSC building and the National Assembly in the city’s financial district.
The pulse is most recent by the group of nearly 30,000 day traders to make a permanent ban on short selling imposed by Korea earlier last year to tame its markets as the pandemic spread.
Korea imposed a ban on short selling in March last year, with several countries such as France and Italy joining in stopping transactions against borrowed shares to tame markets as the pandemic worsened. This month, Indonesia will gives up the ban, leaving only Korea as a major global market that does not allow trading strategy. Korea intends to extend the ban beyond the expiration of March 15, as retail investors dominating the stock market are increasingly lobbying shorts.
Short-sellers under siege everywhere are doing very badly in Korea
More than 200,000 individual traders in Korea have signed an anonymous petition posted on Korea’s presidential website, a threshold that requires President Moon Jae-in to respond to the petition.
Short sellers are the “axis of evil in Korea,” Jung Eui-jung, the alliance’s chief executive, told Bloomberg in an interview, saying Korean short selling rules favor professionals, not small traders like their group.
Before the short-lived ban was imposed, retail investors who came to dominate investment in the country last year faced stricter restrictions on short sales than professionals. They see the trading strategy as the playground of foreign hedge funds that intend to hurt local champions.
While stocks targeted by short sellers, such as Gamestop Losing Money and AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc. they captured the rage of US day traders, once the very short-circuited biotechnology pieces are Korea’s amateur investors.
The Jung Group said on its website that it wants to “protect” Korean companies Celltrion Inc., a $ 45 billion biosimilars producer, and HLB Inc. cancer drug pipeline has led to increased stock 770% in 2019.
– With the assistance of Shinhye Kang