Seo Dong-joo, a lawyer and broadcaster, has shared updates on her ongoing effort to reduce losses by consistently buying more SK hynix shares. [Seo Dong-joo YouTube channel]
Seo Dong-joo, a lawyer and broadcaster, has shared updates on her ongoing effort to reduce losses by consistently buying more SK hynix shares. [Seo Dong-joo YouTube channel]

"From the 280th floor down to the 239th — I'm holding on by averaging down." (Lawyer and broadcaster Seo Dong-joo)

"Every time the share price dropped, I bought more." (Travel content creator Kwak Tube)

When SK hynix shares, which had once climbed to 3 million won ($2,240), went into a sharp decline, many retail investors began averaging down their positions. Seo Dong-joo, a lawyer and broadcaster, is among them — she has been consistently buying additional shares to reduce her average cost and recently shared an update on where things stand.

She has brought her average purchase price down from the 2.8 million won range to the 2.39 million won range through repeated averaging down.

On Friday, Seo posted a video to her YouTube channel titled "Stock update: Seo Dong-joo, who entered at the 280th floor and now has a 'companion hynix.'" In the video, "floor" refers to her average purchase price for SK hynix shares, expressed as an analogy to apartment floor numbers. "Companion hynix" is a play on the Korean word for pet, implying she has ended up holding the stock for the long haul, much like a lifelong companion animal.

In the video, filmed on Aug. 26, Seo revealed her brokerage account and disclosed a return of negative 27.89 percent. "At the peak, I got in somewhere around the 280-something floor," she said. "Since then I've been steadily averaging down. Yesterday the price dropped to the 1.5 million won range, so I bought more again."

Travel content creator Kwak Tube has said he bought more SK hynix shares despite sitting on a loss. [Kwak Tube YouTube channel]
Travel content creator Kwak Tube has said he bought more SK hynix shares despite sitting on a loss. [Kwak Tube YouTube channel]

Travel content creator Kwak Tube also revealed that he had put nearly all of his investment funds into SK hynix and is now sitting on a double-digit loss. "I put almost all my stock money into SK hynix — basically threw in everything I had," he said. He has been buying more shares each time the price falls, he added, and his current return stands at negative 14 percent. He signaled he intends to keep buying.

Whether these retail investors' averaging-down bets will ultimately pay off remains to be seen, though the brokerage community is broadly optimistic about SK hynix's share price outlook.

Mirae Asset Securities raised its target price for SK hynix to 3.1 million won on Monday, citing expectations of stronger earnings as the volume and price of high-bandwidth memory chips — the HBM used in AI semiconductors — continue to rise.

JPMorgan set a target price of $245 for SK hynix's American depositary receipts, equivalent to around 3.3 million won. Investment industry sources said JPMorgan recently initiated coverage of SK hynix ADRs with an "overweight" rating and the $245 target.

The bank cited a structural shift in AI infrastructure investment as the central rationale. With global big-tech companies ramping up server capacity in what JPMorgan calls the era of "agentic AI," the bank projects that the resulting surge in memory chip demand will not be a short-lived boom but a structural, long-term upcycle lasting at least five years.


park@heraldcorp.com