Online communities in South Korea have been circulating a table showing how many times the domestic stock market triggered circuit breakers under each president. According to BlockTempo, the figures are accurate: before 2026, the KOSPI circuit-breaker mechanism, introduced in 1998, had been triggered only six times in 28 years. Under President Lee Jae-myung, it was triggered eight times in 2026 alone, more than the combined total of all previous administrations and the highest annual count in South Korean market history, above the level seen during the 2008 financial crisis.
Read on its own, that table suggests the market simply kept crashing during Lee’s tenure. BlockTempo argues the story changes once sidecar data is included. The issue was not a one-way decline, but a market that had lost any normal pace on both the way up and the way down.
Nearly half of emergency brakes were triggered by surging prices
South Korea’s stock market uses two emergency tools. A circuit breaker halts trading across the market when the index falls more than 8% in a single day. A sidecar pauses program trading for five minutes when futures prices swing sharply. Sidecars are split into sell sidecars during declines and buy sidecars during rallies.
From Jan. 2 to July 24, 2026, the KOSPI sidecar was triggered 41 times. Of those, 21 were sell sidecars and 20 were buy sidecars. The total exceeded the annual record of 26 set in 2008 during the global financial crisis.
That means nearly half of the market’s emergency stops in 2026 were caused by prices rising too quickly. BlockTempo’s point is that counting circuit breakers alone narrows the picture. Adding sidecars shows a market moving at abnormal speed in both directions.
KOSPI climbed from about 2,700 to above 8,000
Lee took office on June 4, 2025, when the KOSPI was around 2,700. During the campaign, he promoted the idea of a “KOSPI 5000 era,” a slogan many had treated as campaign rhetoric at the time.
The move that followed was fast. The KOSPI first rose above 4,000 in October 2025. It broke 5,000 on Jan. 22, 2026, and the ruling party described that move as part of a “normalization of the capital market,” just over seven months after Lee took office. The index then passed 6,000 on Feb. 25, 7,000 on May 6, and 8,000 on May 15. The jump from 7,000 to 8,000 took only seven trading days.
By June 2026, the KOSPI had traded above 8,000, more than tripling from its level around the time Lee entered office. The article also notes that JPMorgan raised its target for the KOSPI to 15,000 in late June, citing an ongoing AI hardware cycle and calling South Korea the preferred market in Asia.
In BlockTempo’s telling, an index that runs from 2,700 to 8,000 in 11 months does not need much explanation to look dangerous. But at the time, the market mood was headed the other way: the government treated the rise as an achievement, sell-side targets kept moving higher, and retail traders saw a market that accelerated every month.
Approval of 2x single-stock ETFs became the flashpoint
The article identifies May 2026 as the key turning point. In the same month that the KOSPI surged from 7,000 toward 8,000, the Korea Exchange approved listings for 2x leveraged single-stock ETFs tied to Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix.
BlockTempo describes those products as difficult to misunderstand. They were not portfolio-allocation tools, but products built for directional bets. They also came to market when both stocks were near the top of what the article calls an epic rally.
For ordinary investors, the approval itself carried a signal. If regulators allowed the products to list and brokers promoted them, many would read that as a sign that the trade was acceptable. The article argues that retail anger did not begin with the crash. It began earlier, when that message was being absorbed.
More than 1.2 million leveraged accounts hit margin-call levels
After the market peaked in June 2026, the retreat began, and it moved faster than the rise. On July 13, more than 1.2 million leveraged accounts hit margin-call thresholds. About 320,000 to 360,000 of those accounts were forcibly liquidated.
By July 16, the KOSPI had fallen 25% from its June high. On July 28 and July 29, the index dropped another 16.2% in two days and fell below 6,000, triggering circuit breakers on two consecutive trading days for the first time in South Korean market history. For the month of July, the index was down nearly 30%.
The article says those figures point to a specific group of investors rather than an abstract market category. Many were not professional traders. A large share were younger investors who had only opened accounts in the last year or two and used margin financing and 2x leveraged ETFs to buy the country’s two best-known companies. Forced liquidation, it notes, does not ask why a trade was made; it only looks at maintenance ratios.
Regulators moved quickly in mid-to-late July
On July 15, Lee directly mentioned the single-stock leveraged ETFs linked to Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix while receiving a policy briefing, calling on officials to “quickly and properly prepare supplementary measures.”
Financial Supervisory Service Governor Lee Chan-jin later publicly acknowledged a failure in oversight and said he regretted not doing more to stop those products from being listed in the first place.
Policy action followed in quick succession. On July 28, reports emerged that South Korea would cap leverage for retail investors in single stocks at 20%. On July 29, the government formally imposed that ceiling while saying the country’s economic fundamentals remained sound. Starting July 31, the deposit threshold for leveraged products was raised in one move to 30 million won from a lower level.
BlockTempo’s argument is not that any one measure was inherently wrong. It is that the timeline changed how investors viewed them. The products were approved in May, the stress hit in mid-July, and the clampdown arrived at the end of the month. In between, more than 1.2 million securities accounts had already hit margin-call territory.
Retail frustration is aimed at more than losses
The article cites a South Korean investor whose post spread widely online after the selloff and was later quoted by the media: “You were the ones who encouraged us to enter the market, and now you say this is someone else’s problem.”
According to BlockTempo, that line captured the shape of the backlash. Many investors understand that the buy orders were their own. What angered them was something else: the same officials and institutions that had celebrated the rising index and approved the products later stepped forward to examine the speeding vehicle, rather than explain why it had been set in motion that way.
The piece closes on that contrast. If the KOSPI had stayed near 2,700 during Lee’s term, there would have been no eight circuit breakers and no comparable emotional whiplash. The dispute now is not only about how fast the market fell, but also about how quickly it had been pushed higher before the break.