World’s Longest Short-Selling Ban Coming to an End in Korea

  • Korea’s top 28 brokers will lend stocks to retail investors
  • Retail traders’ forum seeks “fairer” short-selling rules
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Starting next week, investors in South Korea will be able to short sell the nation’s biggest stocks as Seoul ends the world’s longest pandemic-imposed ban on the trading strategy. That’s much to the dismay of retail traders, who now dominate the local market.

On May 3, Korea is set to partially liftBloomberg Terminal the ban it imposed in March last year on the key hedge fund strategy. When it does, individual traders -- who have come to take up about three quarters of the market’s daily trading volumes amid the pandemic -- will find a once-insurmountable trading strategy a lot easier to carry out, thanks in part to an increased number of brokerages queuing up to lend them shares.