Red is a gain here.

Open a Korean brokerage app and the screen looks like a crash. It is not. Every red number on it is money made.

Read the colors as

상승

sang-seung, up

하락

ha-rak, down

Red is fortune.

Across East Asia red is the color of luck and prosperity. It is on the envelopes money is given in, on doors at new year, on anything meant to bring good things. Putting it on a rising price was never a decision anyone had to argue for.

The West got there backwards.

Western accounting wrote losses in red ink. Being in the red meant owing. That habit hardened into the trading screen, so the color that means fortune in Seoul means a deficit in New York.

South Korea, Japan, China and Taiwan all run red for up. Korea takes blue for down where China takes green. The numbers do not change at the border, only what the color means.