Top 10 Korean stocks, ranked by price-based X-Ray score

The ranking reads only what a share price and its trading volume show: how firmly the price is trending, how far it has moved over three, six and twelve months, how calm it has been (volatility and the deepest fall of the past year) and how easily the shares change hands. A fifth lens, income, counts only for companies that pay a dividend. We hold no company accounts for Korean-listed businesses, so profits, debt and valuation play no part, and we do not store an industry for them or their membership of the KOSPI 200. The page answers "which Korean shares have behaved well and are easy to trade", not "which are cheap".

South Korea has two stock markets run by the Korea Exchange: KOSPI, the main board where the large industrial, financial and technology groups list, and KOSDAQ, a second board for smaller and faster-growing companies in technology, biotech and similar fields. Each of our scores is a percentile rank against the shares on the same board, so a trend score of 85 on KOSPI and an 85 on KOSDAQ do not mean the same thing, and mixing them in one table would compare different scales. This page ranks KOSPI only.

KOSDAQ matters for volume: 459 of its lines trade at least $1 million a day, against 345 on KOSPI. It also carries the special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs) that Korea lists in large numbers, which hold cash and have no business to rank. Mixing the two boards in one table would therefore be misleading.

Several large Korean groups list ordinary and preference shares separately: Samsung Electronics, Hyundai Motor, LG Electronics and S-Oil are examples. Preference shares usually carry no vote in return for a larger dividend. Counting both would let one company take two places, so we group lines by their six-digit exchange code (ordinary shares end in 0, preference shares share the first five characters), keep the more heavily traded line and merged 12 duplicate lines on this basis. For every company on the list today the ordinary share is the one that trades more.

Trading on KOSPI is unusually concentrated. SK Hynix Inc and Samsung Electronics Co Ltd together account for 53% of the daily traded value of the 332 companies ranked here, and the other 330 share the rest. A company that trades $10 million a day is therefore easy to trade by the standards of this list but a rounding error beside the two chip makers.

Korean conglomerates, the chaebol, list many affiliates separately, so a ranking can hold several companies from one group; affiliates of a group can move on shared news and are less diversified than unrelated companies. The current top ten has no two names from the same group.

Korean prices are in won. Each company's daily traded value is converted into US dollars at the latest exchange rate before the $1 million cut-off is applied, so the threshold means the same here as on the other country lists. 2 of today's ten trade under $5 million a day on KOSPI (Lotte Rental Co Ltd, Korean Reinsurance), which is worth checking before placing an order.

The leader is KT&G Corp, and its strongest lens is trend. The top three are KT&G Corp, Lotte Rental Co Ltd, Hyundai Marine & Fire Insurance. 8 of the 10 have a dividend payment in our data for the last twelve months; for the others we hold no payment in that window, which can mean a company that did not pay or one whose latest payment our feed has not recorded. The income lens is worth only a tenth of the score, so a company without a recent payment is not heavily penalised.

The ten stocks returned a median 38% over the last twelve months, against 1% for all 332 eligible Korean companies. The list is therefore picking out the companies that rose while the typical KOSPI share did little: information about the past, not a forecast, and a reason to expect that the same scores can fall quickly if the price trend turns.

Use the table to pick companies for a closer look, then read the company's own annual report and filings; Korean listed companies publish them on DART, the Financial Supervisory Service's electronic disclosure system, and on their investor pages. A price-only ranking is most useful for removing shares that are hard to trade or stuck in a downtrend, and least useful for judging whether a price is fair. For income, the Korean dividend list ranks the same companies on a different rule.