[REPORTER'S NOTEBOOK] Korea's stock market is missing 'long money'

Koreans were largely skeptical when President Lee Jae Myung took office last June with the goal of pushing the KOSPI from 2,000 to 5,000. They had reason to be. According to the Korea Corporate Governance Forum, a 100 million won ($70,691) investment in the U.S. stock market a decade earlier would have grown to 340 million won by 2024, including dividends and capital gains. The equivalent investment in Japan and Taiwan would have reached 280 million won and 260 million won, respectively, compared with just 160 million won in Korea. It was a market that offered investors only "a little sense of reward," as Park Yoo-kyung, former managing director of emerging markets equities at APG Asset Management, once put it. That dismal record helped explain the enthusiasm among global investors for Lee's efforts to improve corporate governance and shareholder returns, tackling the so-called "Korea discount." Then came the artificial intelligence (AI) boom, with Korea's two semiconductor giants at the center. The KOSPI surged 75.89 percent in 2025, the strongest performance among major markets. After br