On the afternoon of July 7th, South Korea's KOSPI index at the stock exchange plummeted by 8%, triggering a circuit breaker and halting trading for 20 minutes. Affected by this, shares of two storage industry giants, SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics, tumbled, with related leveraged ETFs also suffering significant losses. The Southern 2x Leveraged SK Hynix ETF once fell more than 20% during the session, ultimately closing down 15.64% for the day; the Southern 2x Leveraged Samsung Electronics ETF dropped 16.44%, with both products' prices having 'halved' from their historical highs. High-leverage trading has dual characteristics. Since the beginning of this year, the strong performance of AI and semiconductor sectors has fueled bullish sentiment in global markets, leading to a rapid expansion in the scale of leveraged trading tools in the US and South Korea. Notably, the assets under management of leveraged ETFs in South Korea reached a historic high of $45 billion. However, recent frequent circuit breakers and rising volatility in South Korean stock indices have begun to reveal the 'amplification effect' of leveraged trading. The Bank of Korea and several institutions have recently issued dense (can be translated as 'frequent' or 'intensive' based on context, here 'frequent' is used for smoothness) frequent risk warnings, pointing out that leveraged funds are highly concentrated in tech heavyweight stocks, and their pro-cyclical trading mechanisms are transforming from market boosters into structural risk points. Once market trends reverse, it could trigger indiscriminate selling and a liquidity crisis on a global scale.
