The Seoul Economic Daily commissioned a major brokerage firm to analyze the top five net buying and selling targets of approximately 7,900 investors with financial assets exceeding 3 billion won (about US$2.1 million) from October 1st to 20th. The results showed that they began reducing their holdings in large-cap chip stocks and instead concentrated their purchases on ETFs tracking the semiconductor industry or the overall market performance.
This month, the product with the largest net purchases by these investors was the KODEX Semiconductor Leveraged ETF, with net purchases reaching 33.2 billion won. This fund tracks twice the daily fluctuation of the semiconductor index. On the other hand, these investors have been significantly net sellers of Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix for two consecutive months, with net sales of 55.9 billion won and 92.4 billion won respectively in October alone.
Another noteworthy trend is that these investors are beginning to bet on an overall market rise. This month, they net bought 22.5 billion won of the KODEX Leveraged ETF, which tracks twice the daily fluctuation of the Korea KOSPI 200 index; and also net bought 10.5 billion won of the KODEX 200 ETF. In contrast, they net sold 8 billion won of KODEX 200 index futures inverse 2x ETF, which profits when the index falls.
