KORU’s 274 Percent YTD Gain Looks Stunning Until You See How Fast Daily Resets Can Reverse It
Key takeaways
- The analyst who called NVIDIA in 2010 just named his top 10 stocks and KORU wasn t one of them.
- KORU exists to solve a narrow problem, which is how to express a short-term bullish bet on Korean equities with borrowed firepower.
- Under the hood, KORU holds roughly 78.53% of its book in the iShares MSCI South Korea ETF (NYSEARCA:EWY) with the remaining 21.47% in US dollar instruments, then uses swap contracts to lever that exposure.
KORU’s 274 Percent YTD Gain Looks Stunning Until You See How Fast Daily Resets Can Reverse It FOTOGRIN / Shutterstock.com Omor Ibne Ehsan Mon, May 25, 2026 at 6:45 PM GMT+7 5 min read KORU KEP EWY KF NVDA Quick Read Direxion Daily MSCI South Korea Bull 3X Shares (KORU) is up 274% year-to-date and 1,500% over twelve months by delivering three times the daily return of the MSCI Korea 25/50 Index through daily resets and swap contracts, but its five-year total return of 99% trails buy-and-hold Korean equity exposure due to volatility decay from compounding. iShares MSCI South Korea ETF (EWY) and the Korea Fund (KF) offer cleaner alternatives to capture Korean market upside without the daily reset mechanics and fee drag.
KORU’s extreme recent gains mask a fundamental mathematical problem: daily rebalancing punishes volatility, making the leveraged fund lose money even when Korean stocks finish flat over choppy periods, a trap that has snared retail investors who poured $100 million into the product during crises.
The analyst who called NVIDIA in 2010 just named his top 10 stocks and KORU wasn t one of them. Get them here FREE.