Regulators Stops South Korea’s Version of WallStreetBets

Only the hedgefunds are supposed to game the market, not the little people:

A group of retail investors here have dropped their plans to conduct a mass buying of a certain stock on the Seoul bourse, which was initially supposed to take place this month to protest against short-sellers, most of whom are foreign and institutional investors.

The Korea Stockholders Alliance (KSA) announced Sunday that the decision was made after taking into account the advice from its legal advisers and the predictable scenarios.

“Our campaign has been described as a form of speculation aiming for a short-term margin, and above all, short-sellers’ interruptions that rattled the market have created negative public sentiment toward us,” one of the alliance’s managers wrote on its website.

The group had tried to emulate U.S. social media platform Reddit’s WallStreetBets internet forum users, who sparked a short squeeze of the GameStop stock on the New York Stock Exchange in January through a mass-purchase of the American video game retailer’s stocks.

The campaign conducted by retail investors surprised global market insiders at that time, because an unexpected hike in the GameStop stock price caused large losses to several hedge funds that had bet on the price fall.

Korea Times

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