The bus for campaign against short sellers in Seoul.
Source: Korea Stockholers Alliance
Source: Korea Stockholers Alliance
In the U.S., small investors have defied short sellers by teaming up online, renting billboards in Times Square and even flying banners from airplanes; in Korea they ride a bus.
A group of influential Korean retailers have declared war on short sellers under a campaign they call ‘K-streetbets’, mimicking followers of Reddit’s now famous WallStreetBets. forum that coordinated an increase in video game retailer GameStop Corp to pursue short sales.
On Saturday, the Korean Shareholders’ Alliance launched a ‘bus campaign’ to make its message heard at short selling.
The bus is painted with comics of people holding signs that say things like “I hate short sales”, “short sales should be abolished” and a call to let the financial regulation commission rule the shares. -sell, “dissolve”. It will travel around the capital Seoul for an hour every day from today until March. On its route: the Blue House, the FSC building and the National Assembly in the city’s financial district.
The push is the last of nearly 30,000 group of traders who made a short-selling ban imposed by Korea early last year to tame its markets as the pandemic spread.
Korea imposed a short-selling ban in March last year and joined several countries such as France and Italy to trade borrowed shares to tame markets as the pandemic worsens. This month, Indonesia will abandons its ban, and leaves Korea only as a major global market that does not allow the trade strategy. Korea plans to extend the ban after the March 15 expiration, as retail investors dominating the stock market are increasingly working against shorts.
Short sellers under siege are bad everywhere in Korea
More than 200,000 individual traders in Korea have signed an anonymous petition posted on the Korean presidential website, a threshold that requires President Moon Jae-in to respond to the petition.
Short sellers are “Korea’s ashes of evil,” Alliance chief executive Jung Eui-jung said in an interview with Bloomberg, saying that Korea’s short selling rules benefit professionals and not small traders like their group.
Before the ban on short-circuiting was introduced, the retail investors who invested in the country last year had stricter restrictions on short-selling than professionals. They view the trading strategy as the playground of foreign hedge funds that want to harm local champions.
While stocks are targeting short sellers such as money losses Gamestop and AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc. captured the mania of American day traders, while for the first time the biotech plays with a short circuit are Korean amateur investors.
Jung’s group said on its website that it wants the Korean companies Celltrion Inc., a manufacturer of biosimilars, $ 45 billion, and HLB Inc., of which the cancer drug pipeline has led its stock to rise 770% in 2019.
– With the help of Shinhye Kang