Why didn't a strong rebound occur after South Korea cleared the margin positions?
Looking back at history, let's see what happened during the 2015 A-share bull market margin call crash.
In the first half of 2015, there was a bull market; in the second half, a stock market crash. The crash was not a one-time drop but was completed gradually through three rounds of stampedes.
The first round was from June to early July, when regulators cleaned up off-exchange margin financing. High-leverage margin accounts with 10x and 8x leverage were the first to burst. The index plunged from 5178 points down to 3373 points, with a total of 16 days of 1000-stock limit-downs within 3 months.
Then on July 9, the central bank provided unlimited re-lending to the China Securities Regulatory Commission, and relevant departments started cracking down on malicious short selling. On that day, the Shanghai Composite Index surged 5.76%, over 1200 stocks hit the daily limit-up, and all 194 tradable stocks on the ChiNext board hit limit-up.
Thus, the market began to rebound.
Those who avoided the first round of the crash eagerly rushed in to bottom-fish, only to catch the market halfway down the slope. Doesn't this look like what's happening now?
The second round of the crash started on August 18, with the Shanghai Composite Index dropping 6.15%. On August 24, it broke below the July low, and on August 26, it hit a new low of 2850.71. The index fell from 4000 to 2850, a drop of about 29%, while the ChiNext board fell about 32%.
Trust funds and on-exchange financing were forcibly liquidated in this round. The China Securities Regulatory Commission later confirmed that the margin financing balance dropped from 2.2 trillion yuan to about 960 billion yuan, and off-exchange margin financing was cleaned up by 60%. Of course, after hitting bottom, the market started to rebound again.
From the end of the year to early 2016, there was a third round of circuit breaker-induced crash. The circuit breaker mechanism was implemented on January 4, 2016. It was triggered twice on January 4 and January 7, causing the Shanghai Composite to drop about 26% over four trading days, evaporating 8 trillion yuan in market value.
As a result, the circuit breaker mechanism was urgently suspended on January 8.
In total, there were three rounds of crashes, two seemingly substantial rebounds. Each time, people shouted that the bottom was reached, and large numbers rushed in to catch the falling knife, only to end up halfway down the slope.
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