RaymondsIndex

Two regulatory events this week frame today's deep dive better than any hypothetical could. On July 1, Korea's strengthened delisting rules took effect. Market-cap floors rose to 30 billion won for KOSPI and 20 billion won for KOSDAQ (rising again in January 2027). A new penny-stock rule puts companies trading below 1,000 won for 30 consecutive sessions on the watchlist. And full capital impairment now triggers delisting review at the half-year mark — regulators no longer wait for the annual report. Meanwhile in Washington, the House took up an NDAA amendment that would bar major defense contractors — companies drawing more than half their revenue from Pentagon contracts — from buying back their own stock. The Senate Armed Services Committee adopted an even broader version covering dividends and other capital distributions. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Aerospace Industries Association, and the Business Roundtable urged the House Rules Committee to reject it, calling buybac...

On July 1, 2026, Korea's Fair Trade Commission announced it had referred Google — the U.S. parent plus its Singaporean and Korean entities — to full deliberation over the "Games Velocity Program" (GVP), internally known as Project Hug. The examiners' report alleges that from July 2019 to March 2026, Google subsidized major game developers' costs for Google Cloud and advertising on one condition: most-favored treatment for Google Play. New titles had to launch on Play no later, and with content no worse, than on any rival app marketplace. The FTC calculated related sales of $9.21 billion — roughly ₩14.16 trillion — exposing Google to a fine of up to 6%, or ₩849.6 billion (~$547 million). Google Play holds more than 80% of Korea's Android app market. Google denies any violation and has eight weeks to respond. Notably, this is a repeat encounter: in 2023 the FTC fined Google ₩42.1 billion for conditioning preferential Play placement on developers avoiding One Sto...

Every insider-trading scandal tells the same story twice. The first telling is legal: who knew what, when, and whether they were allowed to trade on it. The second telling is structural, and it matters more for ordinary investors: someone in the network always sees the event before the market does — and whoever sees it last pays for it. **The case.** On May 22, Chinese regulators cracked down on cross-border securities firms. Shares of Futu Holdings and Tiger Brokers fell hard. But in the weeks before the announcement, unidentified traders had quietly accumulated roughly 200,000 short-dated put options on exactly those two names — turning a $12 million position into more than $100 million in profit. Susquehanna International Group, the market maker that sold many of those puts, says it lost over $70 million. It filed suit in Manhattan federal court on June 29, won a freeze order and the right to subpoena brokers for the account holders' identities on June 30, and by July 2 both the...

Failure in public markets is rarely a single dramatic event. More often it is a slow leak — a company that keeps reporting, keeps trading, keeps its lights on, while the resources that minority shareholders actually own quietly flow somewhere else. This week gave us two versions of the same story, one macro and one micro. The macro version — Japan. More than half of Japan's listed companies now sit in a net cash position. The median firm holds roughly 33% of its market capitalization in cash, and another 16% in long-term investments. On paper this looks like fortress balance-sheet strength. In practice it is capital that has stopped working. The Tokyo Stock Exchange is now revising its Corporate Governance Code — the first revision in five years, expected mid-2026 — precisely to force companies to justify why so much cash is idle rather than reinvested. When a regulator has to intervene to make companies deploy their own money, the reinvestment signal was flashing long before the ...

Raising capital is the easy part of a press release to celebrate. What rarely makes the headline is the quieter, more revealing fact: where the money goes next. This month, two companies on opposite sides of the world offered an unusually clean look at that question — and at why the destination of cash, not its arrival, is the real governance signal. In the United States, Fair Isaac Corporation (FICO) amended its credit agreement in early June to add a $1.5 billion unsecured term loan maturing in 2028, then used the proceeds to fund an accelerated share repurchase under a newly authorized $2 billion buyback program. This was not surplus cash being returned; it was new debt raised specifically to retire shares. In Korea, KOSDAQ-listed Agent AI disclosed on June 19 a ₩1.5 billion convertible-bond issue whose entire proceeds are earmarked to redeem, ahead of maturity, an earlier ₩1.5 billion CB — one held by Sangsangin Savings Bank (₩1.0 billion) and Sangsangin Plus Savings Bank (₩0.5 bi...

Over the past ten years, Korea's benchmark KOSPI index climbed roughly 370%. Over the same decade, the share price of S-1 Corp — a profitable, cash-rich Samsung-affiliated security company — fell about 30%. That gap is not a rounding error. It is a 400-percentage-point divergence between a market and one of its supposedly defensive blue chips, and this week it became the center of one of the first major activist tests under Korea's revised Commercial Act. On June 24, 2026, Flashlight Capital Partners (FCP) — an activist fund founded by a former head of KKR Korea — went public with a campaign against S-1. FCP, holding over 1% of the company, laid out five demands ahead of the October annual meeting: a three-year target price, a five-year business vision, a concrete plan for excess cash, more transparent communication with shareholders, and a board run in the spirit of the new fiduciary-duty rules. The financial core of the complaint is blunt: S-1 holds cash equal to roughly hal...