Korean retail investors have ramped up U.S. stock purchases this month, shrugging off mounting concerns over a potential artificial intelligence (AI)-driven market bubble, data showed Sunday.
According to the Korea Securities Depository, retail investors logged $3.63 billion in net purchases of overseas equities from Nov. 1 through Friday. Nearly the entire volume of overseas stock purchases went into U.S. equities.
This month’s net buying is far outpacing last month’s, with the volume already more than double that of the same period in October. The buying spree follows October’s record-breaking $6.8 billion in net purchases — 2.5 times September’s total and the highest since data tracking began in 2011.
The sustained appetite suggests that investors are averaging down amid a pullback in major U.S. benchmarks, with some market watchers drawing parallels between the current AI rally and the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s.
Meta Platforms was the most heavily purchased stock by Korean retail investors from Nov. 1 to Friday, attracting $560 million in net inflows. Nvidia, seen as the bellwether of the AI boom, followed closely with $543 million in net buying. Investors also funneled $271 million into a leveraged exchange-traaded fund (ETF) designed to amplify Meta’s price movements by roughly two times.
Excluding two ETFs tracking the Nasdaq-100 and the S&P 500, every other name in the top 10 net-buy list was a tech stock tethered to the AI industry.
“Korean retail investors’ overseas portfolios continue to show a pronounced tilt toward technology stocks,” said Lee Da-young, an economist at the Korea Center for International Finance. “With domestic equities recently outperforming overseas markets, attention is turning to whether this rotation will alter the trajectory of Korean capital flows.”
The surge in overseas allocations comes as foreign investors offload Korean shares at scale. Data from the Korea Exchange show foreign investors sold 9.13 trillion won’s ($6.2 billion) worth of KOSPI-listed equities from Nov. 1 through Friday, locking in profits amid market volatility.