SEOUL, June 17 (AJP) - An Elon Musk-linked stock has once again become a favorite among South Korean retail investors.
Despite missing out on SpaceX’s initial public offering, Korean individual investors poured more than $800 million into the company on its Nasdaq debut, making the space company one of the most aggressively bought foreign stocks in Korean market history.
According to data compiled from 11 brokerages, including Mirae Asset Securities, Korea Investment & Securities and Toss Securities, Korean retail investors made net purchases of 1.23 trillion won ($810 million) in SpaceX shares on June 12, the day the company began trading on Nasdaq.
The buying spree was among the largest single-day overseas stock purchases ever recorded by Korean retail investors. The amount was more than 30 times the day’s second-largest overseas net purchase, ProShares UltraPro QQQ, a triple-leveraged ETF tracking the Nasdaq-100, which drew $24.9 million.
Korean retail investors bought about $834.6 million worth of SpaceX shares while selling $38.7 million, according to the Korea Securities Depository’s Seibro portal.
SpaceX priced its IPO at $135 per share. The stock opened at $150, rose as high as $176 intraday and closed its first session at $161.11, up 19.3 percent from the offering price.
Based on the closing price, Korean retail investors bought roughly 5 million shares in a single day, placing SpaceX as the top 30 most-held U.S. stocks among Korean retailers.
Their bet proved right so far as SpaceX's epic rise has rewritten the leaderboard in a matter of days, catapulting the company to the world's fifth-most valuable listed company by Tuesday, with shares ending at $192.68.
The frenzy followed an earlier wave of pivot to the space sector. Before SpaceX’s listing, Korean investors had poured more than $316 million over the previous month into the Tema Space Innovators ETF, a U.S.-listed space technology fund widely seen as a proxy play on SpaceX before its debut.
For many Korean investors, SpaceX is no longer just a space company. It is increasingly viewed as a long-term bet on artificial intelligence, satellite infrastructure and the future of technology. Missing out on the IPO appears to have done little to cool that enthusiasm.
SpaceX is the latest chapter in South Koreans' long-running Musk trade. Tesla remains their top overseas holding at $24.17 billion as of June 11.
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