We provide evidence supporting the presence of investors who prefer lottery-like stocks in the Korean stock market. Our empirical findings are as follows. First, we document that higher MAX stocks earn lower average returns, with MAX defined as the maximum daily return over the past month, as in Bali, Cakici, and Whitelaw (2011. Maxing out: Stocks as lotteries and the cross-section of expected returns. Journal of Financial Economics 99, 427-446). Specifically, we find that average risk-adjusted return differences between stocks in the lowest and highest MAX quintiles is 1.39 percent per month over our sample period. This finding suggests that investors have a preference for lottery-like assets, i.e., assets that have a relatively small chance of a large payoff. Given this preference, investors may be willing to pay more for stocks with lottery-like payoffs, prompting such stocks to have lower returns in the future. In this study, we measure the propensity for a stock to deliver lottery-like payoffs on the basis of MAX, defined as extreme positive returns over the past month, and find a negative relationship between MAX and expected returns in the cross-section. In other words, we demonstrate that lottery-like stocks, which presumably exhibit high MAX, have low expected returns in the Korean stock market, confirming previous findings for the U.S. market. Our finding of a negative relationship between MAX and expected returns appears to be robust to various cross-sectional effects such as size; book-to-market; and momentum, liquidity, and short-term return reversals. Both portfolio sorts and cross-sectional regressions reveal that the MAX-return relationship continues to be significant after controlling for other effects. Further, we find little evidence that the idiosyncratic volatility puzzle, i.e., the negative relationship between the idiosyncratic volatility and average returns in the cross-section documented by Ang, Hodrick, Xing, and Zhang (2006. The cross-section of volatility and expected returns. Journal of Finance 61, 259-299), account for the relationship between MAX and returns. Considering that MAX is, on average, positively related to idiosyncratic volatility, one can argue that the negative MAX-return relationship is a different appearance of the idiosyncratic volatility puzzle. However, our empirical results reveal that the MAX effect is robust to controls for the effect of idiosyncratic volatilities. Second, we find that stocks with high MAX tend to be small and low-priced, and have higher idiosyncratic volatility. Moreover, we observe that high MAX stocks are, on average, heavily traded by retail investors. MAX exhibits a monotonically increasing pattern in retail trading proportions (RTP) in the cross-section, where we define a stock's RTP as the monthly buyer- and seller-initiated retail trading volume divided by the total trading volume of the stock in that month. This finding is consistent with the literature, which regards small, low-priced stocks exhibiting high idiosyncratic volatilities and skewness to have lottery-like features. Last, and most importantly, we find that the negative relationship between MAX and average returns is more prominent among stocks with higher retail trading proportions, using a unique dataset that enables us to identify retail investors' trades. In particular, we find that the MAX-return relationship is more significant and negative among stocks with higher RTP. The strategy of selling high MAX stocks and buying low MAX stocks earns, on average, 1.87 (0.17) percent per month among stocks in the highest (lowest) RTP quintiles. This evidence is consistent with previous studies arguing that retail investors are more likely to have a greater gambling propensity. Collectively, we contribute to the literature on investors' preferences by presenting evidence of investors' preference for lottery-like stocks in the Korean stock market. We also contribute to the literature on retail investors' trading behavior. We use a unique dataset from the Korean stock market that enables the identification of retail investors' trades while providing empirical evidence that retail investors are more associated with the preference for lottery-like assets.