Korea Stock Guide publishes English-language research on Korean equities for international investors.
The Problem We Exist to Solve
Korea hosts one of the world’s largest equity markets. Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix, and Hyundai Motor are not obscure companies — they sit at the center of global semiconductor, battery, and automotive supply chains.
Yet for an investor outside Korea, researching them is unreasonably hard.
- Regulatory filings are in Korean. DART, the mandatory disclosure system, publishes the audited financials and material event filings that matter — almost entirely in Korean.
- Sell-side research is in Korean. The analysts who cover these companies most closely publish for a domestic institutional audience.
- Financial media is in Korean. The reporting that surfaces a governance dispute or a capex revision rarely reaches English readers, and when it does, it arrives late and stripped of context.
- Market structure is unfamiliar. Price limits, holding company discounts, preferred share classes, chaebol cross-shareholdings, and the Value-Up program have no clean analogue in Western markets.
The result is a market that international investors can now access, but cannot easily evaluate.
What We Do
We read the Korean primary sources and write about them in English.
Not translation — research. We work from DART filings, company IR materials, earnings presentations, and exchange data, then produce original analysis grounded in those documents. Where we cite brokerage research, we cite the facts, name the source, and do our own thinking.
Our sourcing and attribution standards are set out in full in our Editorial Policy. We would encourage you to read it before deciding whether to trust anything here.
What You Will Find Here
- Getting Started — practical guides for accessing and trading the Korean market from abroad
- Market Basics — how KRX actually works: structure, rules, taxes, settlement
- Sectors & Themes — semiconductors, defense, shipbuilding, batteries, and the rest
- Companies — deep dives grounded in filings, not narrative
- Policy & Macro — Value-Up, governance reform, index reclassification, currency
- Data & Tools — reference tables, screeners, and tracking series
What This Is Not
This is not investment advice, and we are not a registered investment adviser. Nothing published here accounts for your financial situation, objectives, or risk tolerance. Please read our Disclaimer — it is not boilerplate, and it matters.
We are also not neutral about our own limitations. We do not have management access. Translation introduces interpretive risk. And analysis is judgment under uncertainty — we will be wrong sometimes, and when we are, we correct it in public.
How This Site Is Funded
Through display advertising and affiliate relationships. No company we cover pays for coverage, and no advertiser sees content before publication. Full details are in our Affiliate Disclosure.
Who Writes This
Korea Stock Guide is written by a single analyst based in Seoul.
The background: a degree from Seoul National University, financial consulting at EY, and equity research at a boutique Korean securities house. The relevant part of that is narrower than the résumé — the primary sources this site is built on are read in Korean, in the original. DART filings, IR decks, earnings call material, and domestic sell-side research do not pass through a translation layer before they reach the analysis. They are read the way a Korean institutional investor reads them.
Why this exists: the view that Korean analysts and market professionals actually hold rarely reaches investors outside Korea. It sits behind a language barrier, and by the time any of it surfaces in English it has usually been flattened into a headline. Foreign retail investors are asked to commit capital to this market with a fraction of the information a domestic investor takes for granted. This site is an attempt to close part of that gap, at no cost to the reader.
Articles are published under the John & Lee Equity Research name rather than a personal byline. Editorial responsibility — and liability — sits with that entity, and mail sent to the address below reaches the person who wrote whatever you are reading.
Contact
Questions, corrections, or source suggestions: [email protected]
We read everything, and we particularly want to hear about errors.