Recently, there has been growing interest in stocks and cryptocurrency in Korea. KOSPI, the Korean stock market, hit an all-time high in 2021, and KOSDAQ hit 1000 for the first time since the IT bubble. People are jumping into the stock market regardless of age or gender. The same goes for the Millennials and Generation Z in Korea. It’s just an old saying that young people are not interested in investing. It is ordinary for them to talk about stocks and cryptocurrency in their daily life. According to the Korea Financial Investment Association, stock accounts held by Koreans in their 20s and 30s increased by more than 50% in the first quarter of this year from the same period of last year.

People have already had an unprecedented boom due to the Bitcoin craze in 2017. They have already seen their friends make money in cryptocurrency and stocks several times. Stock and cryptocurrency are not ‘new worlds’ anymore. People are already familiar with investment tools with the activation of online services by the stock firm and the flood of related contents. Thus, the barriers to entry for investment, which was difficult for beginners in the past, have been lowered. Stocks have the advantage of being able to invest regardless of the amount of money for young people. Nowadays, banks indeed pay low interest rates on saving accounts in Korea. People cannot increase their assets through long-term savings like in the past. As economic polarization has increased because of the recent surge of real estate, real estate prices far exceed the annual salary of office workers. Unfortunately, young people cannot get real estate by earned income. As Generation Z figured out that there was a limit to become rich only through company life and their dark future is waiting without investment, they started to share stock information among its members through economic and investment studies since they were students. For example, while employment-related study groups have been popular in the past, stocks-related gatherings are a trend among college students.

Anxiety about the future due to the COVID-19 pandemic also makes people actively buy stocks and cryptocurrencies in the 20s. New employment in companies has decreased significantly. Some hiring has been suspended or canceled. The shutdown of the self-employed business also increased significantly. That leads young generations to choose to invest in stocks and cryptocurrency as a means of responding to the economically unstable future. There is even saying that young do investment trying not to be poor, not to make money. More and more people feel relative deprivation as the size of the asset has risen sharply through stocks and real estate. FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) syndrome, which means the anxiety that only I might be left out, makes them try not to lag behind the success of the investment. The number of people who start to invest late keeps increasing. Some people even took out a loan for investment.

Due to many reasons, young people are getting into stocks and cryptocurrency. This tendency is not just a temporary phenomenon. It became a part of their lives and their way of investing.

Nahyun Lee

Asia Journal