A few days ago, halfway through lunch, I took out my phone and opened my stock trading app. I had decided it was time to let go of a position I'd held for a long while. I hesitated a moment between the red button and the blue one, pressed the blue, and a moment later a single word appeared on the screen: ‘filled’. I checked it and went back to my noodles. Not the least bit curious about where my order had gone, or whose order it had met. And yet in that brief moment there was, somewhere, a place where my order and someone else's order actually met. And for the past seventy years, one single company has run that place. The Korea Exchange — the place most people just call KRX.
Up to now we have walked past walls you could see. Casinos and cigarettes, electricity and gas, apps and phone plans, the things we eat every day. Now we go down one floor beneath those walls. The plumbing that money flows through. Monopolies that stay entirely out of sight in ordinary times, showing themselves only in the moment something opens, or something collapses. The first of them is this company — the one I passed straight through while eating my noodles.
A Seventy-Year Wall
This wall was unusually complete. The Korea Exchange held, all by itself, the door through which stocks are listed, the courtyard where trades are matched, and even the back-room tidying-up where transactions are finally cleared. Among the walls we've seen so far, some were built by law and some by habit; this one was close to all of the above. The front entrance, the lobby, and the basement plumbing room of the building called the capital market, managed whole by a single company.
The Year the Door Opened
Then, in March 2025, that door opened. An alternative exchange named Nextrade opened for business, and for the first time in seventy years there was one more place where a stock trade could be matched. What was surprising was the speed. Within a little over two months of opening, the new exchange had taken a quarter of total trading value in the stocks it was allowed to trade. Half a year later it was approaching a third. Like Kangwon Land's casino license or SGI Seoul Guarantee's Insurance Business Act, the Korea Exchange's wall had in the end been built by the system — and when the system changed its mind, the wall cracked in an instant.
And Yet, It Earned More Than Ever
Here the paradox of this story begins. In the very year its seventy-year monopoly broke, the Korea Exchange earned more money than at any time since its founding.
| Korea Exchange | 2025 |
|---|
| Net profit | approx. 708.9 billion won (+67%) |
| The event | Nextrade launches in March; the monopoly begins to break |
The secret lay not in the wall but in the weather. Money poured into the stock market that year and trading exploded, and the more trading there was, the more the fees the exchange takes off the top swelled along with it. The sound of the wall cracking was drowned out by the noise of the festival outside the window. Come to think of it, somewhere in that crowded courtyard there must have been an order about the size of my noodle bill. I have no memory of ever paying a fee, and yet those unremembered sums added up to a number called the biggest in history. It resembles the paradox we saw earlier in semiconductors. Even while your share is shrinking, if the whole market grows, the profit in front of you can actually rise. But that profit comes not from the wall being sturdy; it comes from the courtyard being briefly crowded. Optical illusions are, as a rule, most dangerous when they look their best.
The People Who Don't Leave
| Company | Employees | Average annual pay | Average tenure | Net profit per employee |
|---|
| Korea Exchange | 1,005 | 131.98 million won | approx. 13 years | approx. 710 million won |
※ Based on 2025 disclosures. Net profit per employee is a rough figure: annual net profit of 708.9 billion won divided by headcount.
Life inside this quiet wall is a comfortable one. Average tenure at the Korea Exchange runs to thirteen years, and average pay exceeds 130 million won. As befits a company that keeps the market's infrastructure, people stay a long time. But the number in this table that really deserves a look is on the far right. A little over a thousand people manage every trade in this country, and each of them leaves behind 710 million won a year. That is the density of a seat in the plumbing. Even in the year the wall opened, the timetable inside it barely wavered. The cracking of a wall and the stability of the people inside it often move at different speeds.
The Korea Exchange is the first company in this book to show us, in real time, the moment a wall begins to come down. And the fact that it posted a record profit at that very moment is exactly why, when you look at a monopoly, you must not look only at the top line of the income statement. You have to ask, at the same time, whether the door has opened, and how far. The next time I press the blue button, will the trade still happen in the same courtyard, or will it have crossed, without my noticing, into another one? The word on the screen will tell me nothing. I probably won't check this time either — and on that very indifference, somewhere, a wall is cracking a little more today.
Seen with those eyes, the plumbing of finance is full of doors that have opened in different ways. The Korea Exchange is a place where the door has only just opened. The company in the next story is a place where the door was always open. It's the story of the companies behind the things we call insurance — the ones that insure the insurance itself.
This piece is part of the "Korea Value Chain" series and is an original work. It is an analysis based on public data and industry sources; some figures and assessments are estimates. It is not intended as a direct basis for investment decisions.
By Alexandro Lee · July 2026
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