The bus for campaign against short sellers in Seoul.
Source: Korea Stockholers Alliance
Source: Korea Stockholers Alliance
In the US, small investors have defied short sellers by partnering online, renting billboards in Times Square, and even flying banners from airplanes; in Korea they drive by bus.
A group of influential Korean retailers have declared ‘a war on short sellers’ under a campaign they are calling ‘K-streetbets’, mimicking the gamblers on Reddit’s now famous WallStreetBets forum that a wave of video game store GameStop Corp. coordinated to suppress short sellers.
On Saturday, the Korea Stockholders Alliance launched a “bus campaign” to get its anti-short-selling message heard.
The bus is painted with cartoons of people holding up signs saying things like ‘I hate short selling’, ‘short selling should be abolished’ and a call to regulate the Financial Services Commission on stocks, which is responsible for resuming short selling sales, “dissolved”. He will drive around the capital Seoul for an hour every day from today until sometime in March. On the route: the Blue House, the FSC building and the National Assembly in the financial district of the city.
The pressure is the latest from the nearly 30,000-strong group of day traders to impose a permanent ban on short selling that Korea imposed early last year to tame the markets as the pandemic spread.
Korea banned short selling in March last year, joining several countries such as France and Italy to halt trading of borrowed shares to the markets as the pandemic worsened. This month, Indonesia will do that Dropping the ban, leaving Korea alone as a major market worldwide that the trade strategy does not allow. Korea plans to renew the ban after March 15, as the private investors who dominate the stock market increasingly lobby against shorts.
Short sellers who are under siege everywhere are really bad in Korea
More than 200,000 individual traders in Korea have signed an anonymous petition on Korea’s presidential website, a threshold that requires President Moon Jae-in to answer the petition.
Short sellers are “Korea’s axis of evil,” Jung Eui-jung, CEO of the alliance, told Bloomberg in an interview, saying that the rules for short selling in Korea are beneficial to professionals and not small traders like their group.
Before the ban on short selling was imposed, the retail investors who came to dominate investing in the country last year faced stricter restrictions on short selling than professional investors. They see the trading strategy as the playground of foreign hedge funds who want to hurt the local champions.
While stocks in the sights of short-sellers such as money-losing Gamestop and AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc. have conquered the American day traders’ mania, once heavily shorted biotech plays 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 maker of biosimilars, and HLB Inc. pipeline for cancer drugs led to an increase in inventory 770% in 2019.
– With the help of Shinhye Kang