SEOUL - A 24-year-old South Korean trader who briefly turned 20 million won in savings into nearly 300 million won using five-times margin leverage before losing the gains within four weeks said Monday that the experience had taught him an invaluable lesson: the next leveraged trade must be larger.
The trader, profiled by Reuters amid a national surge in margin borrowing, said he still hopes stock-market gains can help him reach financial milestones such as buying a Seoul apartment. His account ultimately fell below his original investment after the rapid reversal.
Brokerage executives described the episode as a triumph of financial inclusion, noting that sophisticated wealth-destruction tools once reserved for hedge funds are now available through a tiny circle inside a smartphone app.
"Historically, a young person needed decades of bad investment decisions to experience this much emotional range," said a fictional retail-markets strategist. "Technology has compressed that journey into one month."
South Korea's retail trading boom has pushed margin debt to records as investors chase fast-moving stocks with borrowed money. Platforms have competed to make leverage increasingly frictionless, ensuring users can transform a momentary feeling of confidence into a legally binding capital structure before the feeling passes.
Risk managers cautioned that leverage magnifies losses as efficiently as gains. Traders acknowledged the concern and asked whether that also means it magnifies the gains needed to recover the losses.
At press time, the brokerage app had unlocked a celebratory badge reading "Experienced Investor" after detecting that the user had experienced nearly everything.
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