LEVERAGED IN SEOUL

This week on Bid/Ask: the Korean ants. Who the gaemi are, why Korea's margin debt is growing at double the pace of the US and China, and why traders there are paying nearly 10 percent interest to stay levered long. With Samsung and SK Hynix making up 42 percent of the entire KOSPI, a crack in Seoul becomes a crack in MU, SNDK, and the whole photonics complex by the New York open. Plus the flow data that should be on every momentum trader's radar: Korean retail is now buying 2x long AND 2x short ETFs on the same US stock at the same time, building synthetic volatility positions that have historically marked late-stage exhaustion. Then in the back half: the June CPI print. The biggest monthly decline in inflation since April 2020, why a peace deal wrote that number and not the Fed, what it does to the July FOMC decision, and why the oil chart that gave us this print is already threatening to take it back. Signal over noise.