“Why bar us from leverage investment?” : Korean Gen Z rages against new regulation on Leverage ETF

The government has identified double-leveraged products tied to “Samjeon-Nix”—Samsung Electronics and SK hynix—as a major factor behind recent volatility in the domestic stock market and has raised the entry threshold for purchasing them. In response, some young investors who are trapped in loss-making single-stock leveraged products are protesting that “the government is not even allowing us to average down.”
Financial authorities previously raised the minimum deposit required for ordinary retail investors to invest in single-stock leveraged products from 10 million won to 30 million won. Young investors have complained that the measure is “disadvantageous to young people with limited assets” and that it “restricts their opportunity to recover losses by averaging down,” meaning purchasing additional shares after a price decline to lower the average purchase price.
University student Lee Min-a, 24, invested about 15 million won last July in a leveraged product linked to a single small modular reactor company. When the share price fell by as much as 40 percent, she planned to make additional purchases to lower her average purchase price.
However, that plan was thwarted when the minimum deposit requirement was raised to 30 million won. Lee now has only about 4 million won remaining in total assets.
“How many people in their twenties have 30 million won in cash?” she said. “This regulation seems to work even more harshly against young investors with fewer assets.”
Civil servant Kim Ha-young, 25, has also seen the return on an aerospace-related leveraged product fall as low as minus 56 percent.
“I began making aggressive leveraged investments because I believed I would never be able to buy a home on my salary alone,” Kim said. “Now it has become difficult even to buy more shares.”
The main investors in single-stock leveraged products are people in their twenties and thirties. According to the Korea Financial Investment Association, of the 746,450 people who completed the required advanced education related to these products between April and the 13th of last month, 258,660—or 34.6 percent—were in their twenties or thirties.
“Many of my friends turn to leveraged products because they feel hopeless about the reality that it is difficult to close the wealth gap even through stock investment,” Kim said. “They invested in leverage because they lacked money, but now they are being denied even the chance to recover their losses simply because they do not have 30 million won in cash.”
According to the Bank of Korea, the average household debt per borrower in their twenties rose from 16.11 million won in 2013 to 30.47 million won last year, an increase of 89.1 percent. Among borrowers in their thirties, it rose from 53.74 million won to 102.18 million won over the same period, an increase of 90.1 percent.
In the first half of this year, the number of young people in their twenties and thirties classified as “resting”—those who had been without a job for at least one year or had no previous employment experience—reached 427,143, up 13.5 percent from 2024.
Many young people are expressing anxiety and helplessness over investment losses on social media. On Blind, an anonymous workplace community platform, users operate “stock investment loss verification rooms,” where they post screenshots of their losing accounts and console one another.
Users share their investment returns or write posts saying that they “will stop thinking about stocks for the time being.”
On the 26th of last month, a post was uploaded to X, formerly Twitter, claiming that an acquaintance had made large profits from stocks and cryptocurrency, but later lost all of their assets and fell into debt while trying to recover subsequent losses, before ultimately taking their own life.