RaymondsIndex

Diligent Market Intelligence counted 205 shareholder activist campaigns across Asia in 2025. Japan accounted for 56% of them, and 32% of the 100 campaigns recorded in the first quarter of 2026. Activists won 37 board seats at Japan-based companies last year — up from seven in 2024 and 23 in 2023. In Korea, sixty companies faced activist demands in Q1 2026 alone, matching the full-year total for 2025. The standard interpretation of these numbers is that activism produces capital efficiency. Tokyo Stock Exchange's 2023 directive telling management to be "conscious of cost of capital and stock price" gave funds a framework, funds applied pressure, and boards responded by folding ROE and PBR targets into their medium-term plans. That story is true as far as it goes. But it describes the second half of the sequence, not the first. What a campaign actually costs An activist campaign is slow, public, and expensive. A fund must build a position large enough to matter, absorb...

Two regulatory moves landed within nine days of each other, on opposite sides of the Pacific and in opposite directions. Neither one changed a single figure on any company's financial statements. Both changed something a financial statement has never contained: who is permitted to reach a board. What happened In Korea, an amended Commercial Act makes cumulative voting mandatory from September 10 for listed companies with total assets above ₩2 trillion. Until now the mechanism existed — it entered the Commercial Act in 1998 — but companies could switch it off in their articles of incorporation, and most did. From September 10 they cannot. Where two or more directors are elected at once, a shareholder receives votes equal to shares held multiplied by seats being filled, and may pour all of them into one candidate. A path into the boardroom opens for holders who could never win a seat under straight voting. In the United States, the SEC submitted a proposed rule for interagency re...

Two control contests reignited in Seoul in the first week of September, and the market priced them in opposite directions. At Hanjin KAL, the holding company for Korean Air and Asiana, Hoban Construction lifted its stake to 20.15% in July. Chairman Cho Won-tae and related parties hold 20.57%. Hankyung reports the gap as 0.42 of a percentage point; Money Today reports 0.41. The stock closed at 146,000 won on September 4, up 9.12% on the day and 21.3% over the month. At Korea Zinc, where Young Poong and MBK Partners opened a hostile approach two years ago, accumulation is largely complete and the contest has moved to an audit-committee election at an extraordinary meeting on September 9. That stock fell close to 10% across two sessions. Same category of event. Opposite reaction. The variable is not size. One number, read correctly The headline validation figure for RaymondsIndex is an 85.9% concordance across a sample of 3,109 Korean listed companies. That figure is routinely over-r...

Korean retail investors hold roughly $112 billion of US equities. Against a market that size, that is about 0.2 percent — a rounding error, and the number most often used to argue that Korean retail flow cannot matter systemically. Then look at the same money through a different denominator. At the end of August, Korean investors held $5.24 billion of the Direxion Daily Semiconductor Bull 3X Shares, or SOXL — 27 percent of that fund's $19.3 billion market capitalization. They held 38.8 percent of Direxion Daily TSLA Bull 2X, 37.6 percent of Direxion Daily MSCI South Korea Bull 3X (KORU), 20.9 percent of ProShares Ultra QQQ and 12.6 percent of ProShares UltraPro QQQ. Net purchases of SOXL alone came to $2.43 billion this year, 1.5 times their buying of the second-ranked Invesco Nasdaq 100 ETF. Roughly $10 billion went into leveraged ETFs in the first half. The event. On Sept. 1, Blue Ocean ATS suspended trading in 18 securities, most of them leveraged or inverse, including SOXL ...

On September 2, 2026, at its fifteenth regular meeting, Korea's Securities and Futures Commission referred an investor-relations officer at a KOSDAQ-listed company to prosecutors on suspicion of trading on material non-public information. The facts, as the regulator described them, are compact. The officer, working in IR, obtained the topline result of a Phase 1 clinical trial and news of a signed drug-licensing agreement before either became public. Between March and June 2024, shares in the company were bought through an account held in another person's name. The gain was approximately 20 million won. The officer also failed to file the ownership report that Korean law requires of insiders. Under the Financial Investment Services and Capital Markets Act, an insider who uses material non-public information in trading faces imprisonment of at least one year, or a fine of up to six times the unlawful gain, with an administrative penalty of up to twice the gain also available. ...

On September 1, GoPro announced it was being acquired. Starman Optical, a privately held maker of optical transceivers, will take roughly 90% of the company in a $285 million deal. Existing shareholders receive $1.14 per share in cash and retain about 10% of the combined business, which stays listed on Nasdaq; closing is expected by the end of 2026, subject to regulatory and shareholder approval. GoPro's roughly $92 million of outstanding debt is repaid in full at closing. The context matters more than the headline. In an August filing, GoPro told regulators that years of operating losses and deteriorating finances had raised "substantial doubt" about whether it would have enough cash to pay its bills and debts over the next year. Second-quarter revenue came in at $105 million, down 31% from a year earlier, alongside a $51 million net loss. Quarterly revenue had peaked above $630 million in the final quarter of 2014, shortly after the company went public. Back in April,...