00:03One share. That's all it took to drive SK Hynix to its daily lower limit in Nextrade's
00:08pre-market this summer. From January 18th, Nextrade will open with a single price auction to stop that
00:15from happening again. And the pre-market it is fixing now handles about a fifth of Nextrade's
00:20turnover. It's Wednesday, October 21st. Here's what investors are watching in Korea today.
00:26Nextrade, Korea's Alternative Stock Exchange, currently matches pre-market orders the instant
00:32prices meet from 8 a.m. When the order book is thin, a tiny early order can set the opening
00:37price.
00:38Under the new rule, orders will be pooled from 8 o'clock to 8.02 a.m. and filled at
00:44one price
00:44before continuous trading begins. Here's what the numbers show. One share traded at the July 28th
00:50pre-market open pushed SK Hynix to its lower limit. And that price fed into overseas crypto-linked
00:56derivatives, causing losses of about $80 billion won, or $60 million. On August 5th,
01:03Samsung Electromechanics and AltioGen each hit their upper limit on a single share,
01:08and SK Hynix hit the lower limit again the next day on 11 shares. Nextrade restricted pre-market
01:14limit price orders on August 12th and added a static volatility interruption on September 14th.
01:20From October 1st to 19th, pre-market trading averaged 2.6 trillion won a day, about $2 billion,
01:27or 22.2% of Nextrade's total turnover. Separately, Korean investors bought a net $267.67 million,
01:36about $350 billion, of KORU, a US-listed, triple-leveraged Korea ETF from October 13th to 19th,
01:45even after it lost 40.39% in a week when the Kospi fell 14.46%.
01:52So what does this mean for global market followers? Earlier, we said one share was enough to send
01:57SK Hynix to its limit. Here's what that actually means for you. A pooled, single-price open should
02:03make Nextrade's pre-market a sturdier early signal. But industry officials caution that thin
02:09institutional and foreign participation means it still does not represent the whole market.
02:14The January 18th launch of the 8.02am single-price open. Whether institutional and foreign
02:20investors step into Nextrade's pre-market. The pre-market's share of Nextrade turnover,
02:25which has held at 20% to 25% a month this year. That's today's AI Prism, Securities Daily.
02:31This episode was produced with AI Assistants based on Seoul Economic Daily reporting,
02:37and reviewed by a human editor. AI Prism is a WANIFRA award-winning series. We'll be back tomorrow.
