South Korea has the best performing stock market in the world for the second year running — and it's also in the middle of one of the worst bear markets on earth. The KOSPI is down around 27% from its June peak, more than 1.2 million retail accounts have been hit with margin calls, and hundreds of thousands of Korean investors have been wiped out entirely. But this isn't a story about meme stocks or worthless companies. Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix are enormously profitable businesses at the center of the global AI boom, and the traders buying them were right about the trend. In this video I look at how a national stock index became a two-stock bet on artificial intelligence, how single-stock leveraged ETFs turned ordinary volatility into a mechanical feedback loop, why Korea's retail "ants" took on so much leverage in the first place, and what Victor Haghani's famous biased-coin experiment tells us about how you can be completely right about a market and still lose everything.

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