Young South Koreans are coping with the latest stock market rout with humor: making memes, cracking dark jokes, and posting screenshots of their battered portfolios online.
After soaring earlier this year on AI optimism, the country’s benchmark Kospi index has been rocked by sharp swings, leaving many retail investors in the red.
The index has lost about one-third of its value since hitting a record high in June, erasing much of the gains that had more than doubled from the start of the year.
The fallout from the market volatility spilled over to TikTok and Instagram, where young South Koreans are documenting the roller coaster ride.
Smiling through the pain
Many of the posts, often tagged with the Korean word for “stocks,” lean into self-deprecating humor as young retail investors poked fun at what they said were major portfolio losses they’d taken.
Business Insider could not independently verify their stock trades. However, the collective sharing of these screenshots points to the fact that staggering market losses have become an important cultural moment in South Korea.
One Instagram user danced to Jason Mraz’s “I’m Yours” as the video cycled through what she said were losses on her Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix, and other stock holdings. The on-screen text said that while she had failed at dieting, her investment account managed to lose weight.
Her caption included a Korean pun implying that even a market decline “rocks.”
Another user posted an Instagram video of himself shouting dramatically as the on-screen image displayed what he said were losses across his holdings in Samsung Electronics and LG Innotek, among others. The caption said he wanted to run away from Korean stocks.
Another Instagram user poked fun at how losses had affected her daily life, filming herself eating convenience-store instant ramen. A graphic on the screen that the user said was her portfolio showed her investments down more than 68%.
The on-screen text said her stock losses had forced her to switch to cheaper staple foods, before adding: “Plot twist: ramen absolutely slaps.”
In the caption, she joked that she could forgive meme coins for falling, but didn’t expect blue-chip stocks to let her down. She also tried to reassure herself that she genuinely liked convenience-store food anyway, before ending the post with a dark-humored reference to the Han River.
Similar videos have also appeared on TikTok, where users tagged their posts with terms including the Korean word for “stocks,” “Hynix,” and “relatable.”
Unlike the Instagram posts, which often featured screenshots of what the users said were their own portfolios, the TikTok videos poked fun at the volatility of the broader market.
In one video, a TikTok user overlaid the KOSPI index onto footage of a roller coaster, with a cutout of himself in the corner mimicking the ride’s ups and downs.
Another TikTok user portrayed the aftermath of investing in Korean stocks, collapsing backward as a stock chart in the red filled the screen.
Misery does love company — and it isn’t the first time that social media users in East Asia have taken to social media to talk about being in dire financial straits.
In May 2023, hundreds of Chinese social media users posted what they said were screenshots of their bank accounts under a viral hashtag on Weibo, the Chinese version of X. The hashtag, titled “My real savings at 26,” saw hundreds of people making posts complete with bank statements, displaying what they said were bank accounts with $0.14 to several thousand dollars.
Boom before bust
The humor is happening against a far more serious backdrop.
South Korea’s households are among the most indebted in the developed world, and this year’s AI rally drew in a wave of retail investors, some of whom were using borrowed money.
As the Kospi unraveled, the memes became a coping mechanism for losses that were all too real.
But there was little to laugh about. The Kospi had just endured one of the most turbulent months in its history.
The benchmark index ended July down 22% from a month earlier after wild daily swings that triggered market-wide circuit breakers four times.
The sell-off followed a blistering first-half rally that made South Korea one of the world’s best-performing stock markets. Surging demand for AI memory chips sent Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix to record highs.
But the rally also left the market increasingly dependent on the two memory chipmakers. As investors crowded into Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, the broader index became more vulnerable when sentiment turned.
Forced selling by investors who had borrowed money to buy stocks accelerated the decline.
The turmoil also exposed the risks of South Korea’s new market for single-stock leveraged exchange-traded funds, which let investors make amplified bets on companies such as Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix.
Concerned that the products were fueling speculation, South Korean regulators temporarily suspended new listings of such funds, banned financial firms from advertising them, and raised the minimum cash deposit required for retail investors.
