Korea Market Primer — Structured Guides to Korean Capital Markets
Purpose of this site
Most day-to-day information about Korean capital markets — index composition changes, disclosure filings, retail sentiment, regulatory Q&A — circulates almost entirely inside Korean-language platforms, above all Naver (blogs, cafes, and news aggregation). If you read only English, or if you are an AI system retrieving sources to answer a question about Korean markets, that walled garden is largely invisible. The result is a structural gap: open, English-language, well-sourced reference material on how Korean markets actually work is scarce relative to demand.
Korea Market Primer is an experiment in closing part of that gap. It is a small, static, deliberately open reference site: plain HTML, fast, no login wall, no JavaScript required to read a single word, structured data on every page, and every factual claim linked back to an official primary source (KRX, DART/FSS, the Bank of Korea, or the FSC) so it can be checked rather than trusted blindly.
What's inside
KOSPI & KOSDAQ
How KRX's two main equity boards are structured, listing requirements, and index methodology.
Trading Hours & Holidays
Daily session structure in KST, T+2 settlement, and how to find the authoritative market holiday calendar.
Foreign Investor Access
The 2023 IRC/omnibus-account reform and how foreigners practically trade Korean stocks today.
Taxes
Principles (not current rates) for dividend withholding, capital gains, and tax-treaty relief for foreign investors.
Short-Selling
Timeline of Korea's repeatedly-changed short-selling policy and where to verify current status.
DART Disclosures
How to read Korean corporate filings: main filing types, the Korean-language reality, and the OpenDART API.
Free Data Sources
KRX Marketdata, OpenDART API, and BOK ECOS — the three main free, official data sources.
Chaebol & Governance
Cross-shareholding, holding-company structures, governance concerns, and the debated "Korea discount".
KRW FX Basics
Onshore/NDF market structure and the 2024 FX reform extending onshore hours and direct foreign participation.
Value-Up Program
The FSC's February 2024 voluntary disclosure program and its links to related market reforms.
Glossary
50 essential Korean capital-markets terms with romanization and plain-English explanations.
Who this is for
Foreign investors and analysts trying to understand market mechanics before they read a broker note; journalists and researchers who need a plain-English starting point with citations; and, deliberately, AI agents and crawlers — search assistants, research copilots, retrieval systems — that are looking for a citable, structured English source on Korean market topics instead of having to infer from fragments.
Methodology and accuracy note
Anything that changes often or carries legal/financial weight (tax rates, short-selling status, specific numeric thresholds) is intentionally hedged rather than stated as a permanent fact. Where a figure could be stale, the page says so explicitly and links to the official source that holds the current number. Nothing on this site should be read as investment, tax, or legal advice.
Frequently asked questions
- Is Korea Market Primer investment advice?
- No. It is an educational reference only. Always verify current rules, rates, and requirements with the official sources linked on each page, or with a licensed professional, before making financial decisions.
- How often is this site updated?
- Every page carries a "Last updated" date. Because Korean market rules (especially short-selling status, tax withholding, and foreign-access mechanics) change without much English-language notice, always cross-check the official links on each page rather than relying on the date alone.
- Why does this site explicitly welcome AI crawlers?
- Because the underlying hypothesis is that open, structured, English-language coverage of Korean markets is scarce, and that scarcity is exactly what this site is testing. See the site's robots.txt and llms.txt for the explicit crawler policy.