"Please Spare Me, I'll Never Do It Again"... Fear Index Soars

[Anchor]

Individual investors have fallen into a panic amid the record-breaking plunge. The shock was especially severe as many had concentrated their investments in semiconductor stocks.

Reporter Hong Yeongjae has more.

[Reporter]

Individual investors could not take their eyes off the trading screens, which were dyed entirely in blue all day long.

[Lee Choong-yeon / Yangcheon-gu, Seoul: I woke up in the morning right around 8:58, and Samsung Electronics was down by about 8-something percent. So I thought a correction phase was coming. But suddenly, SK Hynix plunged to minus 10 percent. I was shocked.]

As Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, the two leading semiconductor pillars of the domestic stock market, plummeted, the shock was even greater for investors with a high proportion of these two stocks.

Today (July 28), Samsung Electronics' share price recorded its largest drop in about 17 years since the 2008 financial crisis, plunging 41% compared to its peak last month.

SK Hynix, which had been nearing 3 million won, plummeted by -48%, effectively being cut in half.

[Individual Investor A: I put 100% of my money into semiconductors. I put in all my disposable funds plus loans because I had that much faith in AI. When it drops this heavily, it really drains your energy.]

Online communities flooded with reactions from people saying they could not focus on work, or begging to be spared, vowing never to touch stocks again and only use savings and installment deposits.

[Individual Investor B: It spiked so much during the first half of the year that I figured something like this would happen eventually, so I'm honestly already in a state of resignation.]

As stock prices plunged, the Kospi 200 Volatility Index, known as the Korean fear index, surged more than 7% compared to yesterday, surpassing the 80 mark for the first time in 7 trading days.

[Park Sang-hyun / Research Fellow at iM Securities: We have to consider investor sentiment itself to be quite poor. Because the volatility itself has been so severe in the meantime, individual investors are inevitably experiencing considerable fatigue.]

While the fear of missing out, or FOMO, was dominant when the stock market surged in the first half of the year, the term JOMO—feeling relieved not to own stocks amid the recent plunge—is now spreading.

(Video by Choi Dae-woong | Video Editing by Shin Se-eun | Graphics by Han Heung-soo)
※ Please note: This article was translated by AI and may contain errors.