Wealthy investors who made money in stocks this year piled into this one name

According to Financial News, high-net-worth investors this year have bought the most Samsung Electronics and SK hynix among domestic stocks.

On the 16th, KB Securities analyzed which domestic stocks high-net-worth investors — defined as those with an average securities account balance of at least 1 billion won — had been net buyers of from the start of the year through the 9th. Samsung Electronics came in first.
Samsung Electronics accounted for 29% of their total net purchases of domestic stocks. The second most heavily bought stock was SK hynix, which drew 18% of total net purchases.
Roughly half of high-net-worth investors’ total net purchases of domestic equities this year were concentrated in these two stocks. As expectations grow that the memory market will remain strong on the back of rising demand for artificial intelligence (AI), they appear to have aggressively accumulated semiconductor shares.
Hyundai Motor, with a 9.9% share, was the third most purchased stock. Buying interest seems to have been fueled after Hyundai Motor Group unveiled its next-generation humanoid robot "Atlas" and presented its AI robotics strategy at the Consumer Electronics Show 2026 (CES 2026) this January, the world’s largest consumer electronics and IT trade show.
They also bought Doosan Enerbility (4.9%), Naver (3.4%), Alteogen (2.6%), and Samsung SDI (2.6%) in that order.
In addition, the Samsung KODEX KOSDAQ 150 ETF and the KODEX KOSDAQ 150 Leverage ETF, which are exchange-traded funds (ETF) that bet on a rise in the KOSDAQ Index, also ranked among the top net-buy names.
This trend is seen as reflecting the perception that there is considerable upside potential for the KOSDAQ Index, given that its gains have so far lagged behind those of the Korea Composite Stock Price Index (KOSPI), while expectations are rising for government measures to revitalize the KOSDAQ market.
In overseas stocks, they were found to have broadly accumulated major U.S. technology names. Alphabet was their single largest pick, accounting for 7.2% of high-net-worth investors’ total net purchases of foreign stocks.
Alphabet is a holding company that owns Google and various other subsidiaries, and it operates across a wide range of businesses including search, advertising, cloud, AI, hardware, autonomous driving, and life sciences.
Micron Technology followed as the second most purchased stock with a 7.1% share, trailed by Tesla (5.9%), SanDisk (5.3%), the Direxion Daily TSLA Bull 2X Shares ETF (3.3%), Nvidia (2.9%), and Microsoft (2.2%).

moon@fnnews.com Moon Young-jin Reporter