Direxion Daily MSCI South Korea Bull 3X ETF

KORU

Market cap $2.19B

South Korea's AI-fueled rally has made it the world's sixth-largest stock market, and the rally may be far from over. Investors may want to keep South Korea ETFs on their radar.

In previous decades, South Korea has always been a cultural and financial afterthought after Japan, with its dominance in electronics and engineering through companies like Sony, Toyota, JVC, Honda, and Mitsubishi; and China, with its enormous low cost manufacturing, geopolitical and military clout, and expanding middle class prosperity.

Earnings are the principal driver behind the breathtaking rallies achieved by Korean and Taiwanese benchmark indices in 2026, and Goldman Sachs thinks the market is still underestimating the longevity of the chip cycle.

The benchmark consumer-price index rose 3.1% from a year earlier in May, reflecting the effects of higher oil prices amid Middle East tensions and the won's weakness against the U.S. dollar.

Korea has gone mad for AI. Capital-M Mad, the kind that turns a niche 3x leveraged country fund into the most-watched ticker on Korean retail brokerage screens.

South Korea's KOSPI has gone from emerging-markets afterthought to the best major equity story of 2026, and the engine is sitting inside every advanced AI server on Earth.

Peter Kim, global investment strategist at KB Financial Group, says from a valuations and fundamentals perspective, we are "not even halfway through" the rally in South Korea's semiconductor and memory giants Samsung and SK Hynix. He also discusses the net-selling of the KOSPI index by foreign institutional investors, and the potential risks of labor unions action in the two companies.

The Direxion Daily MSCI South Korea Bull 3X Shares (NYSEARCA:KORU) is up roughly 274% year to date and a stomach-churning 1,500% over the past twelve months, which is a chart that pulls retail money out of money market funds and into a product most of those buyers do not understand.

News that Samsung management had managed to negotiate successfully with labor unions prompted a steepling rally in SOuth Korean stocks, augmented by the bullish comments from Nvidia's CEO about the AI industry

Investors are focusing on AI developments in North Asia. China is coming out of more than three years of deflation measured by the producer price index.