Add to that, stock gains in Korea are often used to finance housing purchases (or real estate investment) so many retail investors are scared of being "locked out" of housing (which is a requisite status symbol for dating or marriage) if they're not making the same capital gains others are.
Currently Korean social media is full of stories of leveraged day traders who've gotten rich the past year, HBM employees who've made bonuses worth decades of salary (e.g. memes of Samsung employees in luxury cars), etc. Lots of comments along the lines of "everyone is getting rich except me". It's all reminiscent of the crypto frenzy in the US a few years ago but way more intense and concentrated.
The turn towards financial nihilism will continue.
Kind of like pathological gambling: Sure, some people are susceptible, but there's also an entire industry around finding them and making them succumb.
Leveraged funds are the safest way for the average investor to get access to leverage because unlike margin there is no risk of margin calls, and your money generally won't go to zero unlike options which are vastly more complicated and can expire.
The reality is that using leveraged funds (or any leverage) is a completely rational move because the average person will never retire wealthy unless they're already making a tech salary or similar.
Investing has always been gambling, even Warren Buffet made his biggest early wins on all-in bets.
(Which is not to imply that these are smart men).
https://www.reutersconnect.com/item/south-korean-retail-inve...
But it seems there's still a lot in their FA phase in the FAFO cycle.
Also you might painting too wide a brush with “the West”. I wouldn’t assume that Americans and, say, Austrians have similar exposure to public markets.
That said, there's no question that US households have grown fat on the massive expansion of the tech giants. A one trillion $ market cap was shocking not long ago, now you've got Apple and Nvidia at $4-$5 trillion, each about as valuable as China's top 25-30 stocks combined. The US wealth base is highly exposed to a PE multiple compression event, which is likely whenever the bubbly valuations centered around the AI boom reduce.
Also to put a reference figure on it, China's top 500 stocks are roughly worth $11.5 trillion. Nvidia + Apple are worth a combined ~$9.6 trillion.
If China decides to take over Taiwan and nationalises TMSC, redirecting their top tier silicon to 100% Chinese companies then what are the American firms worth?
That is what Jane Street (IIRC) was accused of. Some of its traders then went to another hedge fund and did the same trick there, reducing Jane Street's profit, and ended up being sued by Jane Street. (BTW, Jane Street claims it was not manipulation, but basis trade arbitrage.)
Of course, 9 out of 10 gambler end up in the red.