Hakyung Kim

Hakyung Kim examines how financial markets behave when they clash with the economic story, using data-driven reporting to explain puzzles across equities, bonds, currencies and crypto rather than just tracking daily moves. She works as a markets reporter at the Financial Times, contributing regularly to its Unhedged coverage of stocks, macro trends and investor positioning. Her recent work ranges from the reaccelerating job market and its implications for growth to the way concentrated indices, war, inflation and interest rates reshape the risk landscape for investors.

Market puzzles and labour data

Kim’s coverage often starts from a contradiction between headline economic data and market behaviour, and then works through the gap. In her piece on a reaccelerating job market, she focuses on whether stronger hiring really signals a broader economic reacceleration or a more complicated late-cycle dynamic, tying labour data to output, spending and financial conditions.

She brings the same approach to macro topics like GDP growth and currency moves, co-authoring analysis that looks at how traders “trade the trends in GDP” while she concentrates on the yen and what its moves say about global risk appetite and monetary policy expectations. On the Unhedged podcast she extends this style to consumer balance sheets, using a “guns and butter” frame to examine the state of consumer credit, household spending and their links to inflation and growth.

Across these pieces, crypto markets sit alongside equities, rates and currencies as part of the same risk spectrum, treated as assets whose pricing and flows must make sense against the labour, output and credit data she is tracking.

Equity concentration and global indices

Kim spends significant time on how index construction and sector concentration change what equity markets actually represent for investors. Her charts and reporting on the S&P 500 show how a handful of large technology names pushed the cap-weighted index far ahead of its equal-weighted counterpart, and how a subsequent tech slump and rotation into energy, industrials and staples reversed that dynamic. She extends that concentration story to emerging markets, highlighting how what once offered diversification now mirrors developed market tech-heavy structures.

In her coverage, she notes that a decade ago the entire IT sector made up less than 20 per cent of the MSCI emerging markets benchmark, whereas today just three chipmakers - TSMC, Samsung and SK Hynix - account for roughly a fifth of the index, reducing both sector and geographic variety.

She also compares valuation and sector mix across regions, pointing out that AI-heavy US and Taiwan markets look expensive on both forward and cyclically adjusted measures, while the UK and Europe screen cheaper and Korea stands out as an outlier in that landscape. Crypto sits in these pieces as another concentrated theme trade, discussed in terms of how its boom-and-bust cycles interact with index-level exposure and investors’ appetite for high-beta assets.

Bonds, rates and portfolio strategy

Another strand of Kim’s work tracks the changing role of bonds and interest rates in portfolio construction and market psychology.

She writes about the traditional 60-40 stock-bond allocation and how, with a 5 per cent “risk-free” Treasury rate and the return of high inflation since 2021, plain Treasury bonds have become less reliable as diversifiers. Her reporting explains how shifts in the convenience yield of Treasuries have made long-dated government bonds trade more like equities, eroding the hedging properties that underpinned the classic allocation model.

In a series of pieces framed around the war in Iran and confrontation in the Strait of Hormuz, she tackles the puzzle of equities outperforming US government debt when a textbook response would be a flight to Treasuries. She traces how stock indices fell alongside 10-year Treasuries, with yields climbing towards 4.5 per cent, and links this to elevated oil prices, inflation worries and changing expectations for policy rates. Kim connects these moves to broader questions about whether bond markets, especially at the short end, are oversold and whether investor rate expectations have run ahead of central banks’ stated stance.

This fixed-income work routinely considers where crypto fits relative to bonds and equities in diversified portfolios, focusing on whether it behaves as a risk hedge or amplifies market stress.

Unhedged audio and cross-asset analysis

Kim is a regular voice on the Financial Times’ Unhedged podcast, where she brings the same cross-asset, puzzle-driven lens to audio segments. In episodes on “guns and butter and credit” she and her co-host move quickly from historical analogies about the 1960s and 1970s to present-day questions about consumer credit quality, inflation pressures and how those feed into equity and bond pricing. Other instalments pair trading strategies around GDP trends with her focus on currency moves, allowing her to connect macro themes to real-world positioning in foreign exchange and rates.

These appearances reinforce a defining trait of her work: she treats crypto, stocks, bonds, currencies and credit as parts of one system, and uses clear explanations, charts and historical context to show how that system responds when shocks, policy changes or sector booms hit.