Fund Manager Chae Eunchae (3)
Chae Eunchae grumbled her way over to Makers.
Would it kill him to come with me?
Even she found Lee Jaseung a little frightening. Something about him made him hard to approach. But a hundred billion won hanging by a thread gave her courage.
Protecting my own money is my right. It’s right there in the investment agreement. The investor is the boss!
Don’t flinch. Life is about seizing the initiative first.
She decided to project strength.
Perfect. Today’s concept: the nightmare customer storming the department store for a refund!
A short while later, drawn out by the racket in the lobby, Lee Jaseung found himself face-to-face with a frilled-neck lizard in full, magnificent display.
“Where’s the CEO? Get him out here right now!”
“If you’d wait in the reception room—”
“Yeah, yeah, I heard you. Just go fetch the CEO already. Huh? He’s here. Jaseung oppa!”
Chae Eunchae had been mid-performance of her best “Boss, get out here!” routine when she nearly collided with Lee Jaseung and flinched.
He looked her up and down and sighed.
“You really do the most absurd things.”
“What? What! My hundred billion is about to go up in smoke—am I not allowed to come here? The put options expire in three days!”
“I know.”
“You’re not even worried? It’s trying to rebound from twenty dollars! Everyone’s flipped to the buy side!”
Instead of answering, Lee Jaseung gave a small chin-jerk that said, keep talking.
His indifference made her flinch again, but she forced out the rest anyway.
“Three days. Three days. The puts are all going to zero, and if the shorts get short-squeezed, then what?”
A short squeeze—something she had only ever heard about. From where she stood, the market looked violently volatile. A sudden shift in sentiment that sent every investor stampeding into buys could not be ruled out.
“You said it would fall to seventeen. But it can’t even break the twenty-dollar wall right now. What are you going to do? Come up with a plan. What about hedging even at this late stage?”
She pressed him like a prosecutor.
Ordinarily, when a VIP who had poured in a fortune grew nervous, a fund manager soothed them—offered hope that conditions would improve, or at the very least a little empathy: “I understand you’re worried.” Chae Eunchae had come expecting exactly that kind of comfort. If Lee Jaseung simply said, “I have a plan,” her heart would settle.
She had come to the wrong address.
Lee Jaseung had never, in his entire life, comforted anyone.
“Strange.”
“Huh?”
“I don’t recall any clause in the investment agreement that requires me to manage your psychological well-being.”
“……What?”
“If you need emotional stability, hire a therapist. Don’t come make a scene in someone else’s office over something so trivial.”
Chae Eunchae’s mouth opened and closed like a goldfish.
Trivial? Her hundred billion was about to vanish!
She was half a second from erupting when he spoke again.
“The twenty-dollar line breaks today.”
Like a magic spell, the words instantly quieted her. More than quieted—her eyes came back to life. This was exactly what she had wanted to hear: someone’s absolute certainty to pin her anxiety on.
“You’re sure? It really breaks twenty today?”
A small nod.
“Really? For real? What’s happening today?”
“Lock-up expiration.”
Chae Eunchae tilted her head and pushed back.
“But it’s rebounding right now. Even if the lock-up lifts, I don’t think people will dump immediately. After a forty-percent drop, everyone’s going to be scooping up the dip, right?”
“No. They’ll sell. Want to watch twenty dollars collapse?”
She nodded as if entranced.
Without another word, Lee Jaseung turned to an employee.
“Put up Facenote’s earnings presentation materials and the pre-market chart in Conference Room One.”
“Yes, sir.”
Across the Pacific, Facenote would demolish the twenty-dollar line all by itself—with an utterly disappointing first earnings report.
Normally an earnings release came with a conference call that gathered the major analysts. Facenote’s first conference call was a study in disappointment.
“What percentage of revenue currently comes from mobile?”
“We are not disclosing that figure at this time. Our mobile advertising products remain in the early stages.”
“Marketing expenses have increased. When do you expect that to translate into improved profitability?”
“We are investing with a long-term perspective.”
The analysts stayed up all night writing their reports.
— Vision present, concrete numbers absent.
— No clear monetization strategy visible for the mobile transition.
The morning call notes—the documents that set the investment tone before the pre-market opened—went out to clients at once.
The key clients of an investment bank were pension funds, funds, family offices, and high-net-worth individuals. Naturally, Lee Jaseung’s Makers sat on that list.
In Makers Conference Room One, having received the morning call notes at nine in the evening across the Pacific, Lee Jaseung spoke.
“You got the morning call notes too, didn’t you? Your partner bank was Morgan Stanley, correct? The same firm that underwrote Facenote’s IPO.”
“……Yeah.”
“What does it say?”
Chae Eunchae looked at her laptop with unsteady eyes.
The morning call note from the underwriter itself. And there, like a bomb, sat a single sentence.
“Investment rating downgraded.”
She said it and still could not believe it. The underwriter that had led the listing only three months earlier had reversed its judgment. Such reversals were vanishingly rare—yet Facenote had managed it.
Unbelievable. Even the underwriter is turning its back? Facenote was that bad?
She stared at Lee Jaseung with trembling eyes.
Did he already know everything? How? Did he somehow get Facenote’s earnings report early?
From before the listing, investors’ concerns had been crystal clear: the absence of an advertising revenue model in the mobile market. Of course that was not something three months could fix. So predicting a disappointing first earnings print was entirely possible—
…No, it wasn’t.
Only after knowing the outcome could anyone piece the logic together. Forecasting all of this three months in advance had been nearly impossible.
Yet Lee Jaseung had done it.
Only one prediction remained: that the stock would fall precisely to seventeen dollars.
Chae Eunchae swallowed hard.
……No way?
The clock had already slipped past 10:20 p.m. Ten minutes until the Nasdaq opened.
“Shall we start with the pre-market?”
Lee Jaseung picked up the remote.
With the morning call notes circulating, the pre-market would already have priced them in. The moment the chart appeared on the screen, Chae Eunchae gasped.
“Twenty-fifty? Wait—when did this happen?”
The previous close had been $22.84. In the pre-market it had already plunged to $20.50—a ten-percent drop in an instant, courtesy of institutional investors finally moving their heavy backsides after reading the notes.
Staring at the stock clinging precariously to the twenty-dollar line, she muttered,
“If the pre-market looks like this, once the regular session opens—”
“The twenty-dollar line will collapse.”
Her mouth went dry. She grabbed a glass of water and drank. This was not fear. It was excitement—the pure thrill of wondering what would happen when the bell rang.
Once the lock-up lifts and the early investors dump their shares into the market…
If that solid psychological support line cracked, a slide all the way to seventeen would be entirely reasonable. Once panic ignited, no investor would throw their body on the fire to put it out.
Wristwatch, phone, wall clock—she checked every timepiece roughly every ten seconds, then shouted,
“It’s time!”
10:30 p.m. Korean time. 9:30 a.m. New York time.
“Chart, chart, chart!”
Her nails drummed a rapid tattoo on the table. Lee Jaseung let out a short laugh and obligingly put the live chart on the big screen.
The instant it appeared, pure delight flooded Chae Eunchae’s face.
$20.10
Facenote opened twelve percent lower than the previous close.
$19.98
Within seconds it slipped under twenty dollars.
$19.85, $19.76, $19.50……
Thud. Thud. Thud.
It collapsed with the steady rhythm of a heartbeat.
“Yes! Yes!”
Chae Eunchae shot to her feet and charged toward Lee Jaseung.
“I believed you, oppa!”
He casually slid his chair sideways and escaped. A dry smile crossed his face.
“That kind of rapid attitude adjustment is practically a talent.”
“Mm-hmm. Fine by me. I like talent.”
Ignoring the nonsense, Lee Jaseung kept his eyes locked on the chart. Volume on the screen was already three times normal. The selling pressure had grown even more ferocious. Panic was amplifying itself.
And when the price finally printed seventeen dollars, he rose from his seat.
“Start the liquidation.”
Liquidation was not difficult. The put options had been approaching expiration anyway, and the liquid, falling market made covering the short positions easy as well.
One week later.
Having locked in the profits, Makers sent out the investment reports.
Han Juhyeong and Chae Eunchae—after a week of pure dopamine—met again to confirm the results together.
With solemn ceremony, Han Juhyeong opened the letter.
Dear Investors,
This fund focused its efforts this quarter on investments related to the Facenote IPO… (omitted) …and achieved outstanding returns. Below are the detailed results for your investment:
He was about to turn the page when he stopped. Chae Eunchae looked at him curiously.
“What?”
“Just… give me a second to breathe.”
“Ugh. You’re so dramatic.”
“You try dropping three hundred billion sometime!”
“I’m not a chaebol like you, so I can’t just casually write three-hundred-billion checks, okay?”
Three hundred billion had not been easy money for Han Juhyeong either. If his father found out, he would get beaten with a golf club. Looking back it had been insane, but so what? He hadn’t gotten caught, and he had won.
He glanced sideways at Chae Eunchae.
Good thing I invested with Lee Jaseung instead of her.
“……What? Why are you looking at me like that?”
When it came to money, Lee Jaseung was more honest than anyone. He never did the kind of thing that almost wiped out an investment, unlike certain people.
Praising his own judgment, Han Juhyeong reverently turned the page.
And nearly went into cardiac arrest.
Initial Investment: 30 billion won
Net Profit This Quarter: 28.84 billion won
Net Return This Quarter: 96.13%
Current Valuation: 58.84 billion won
“Kehk!”
He could not even form a proper word—just a cough.
Chae Eunchae, buzzing with excitement, scooted right up beside him.
“What? What is it? How high was the return?”
“N-n-ninet—”
“Nine? Nine percent?”
Frustrated, she tore open her own envelope. The moment her eyes hit the number on the page, a scream ripped out of her throat.
“Ninety-six percent!”
She had put in ten billion and made 9.6 billion!
Then the man who had put in three times that much—
“Three hundred billion!!!!”
Precisely 28.8 billion in profit.
Han Juhyeong leapt around the room in pure frenzy.
“Waaaaaah!!! Three hundred billion in three months! A hundred billion a month! Waaaaaah I’m going insane!!!”
Chae Eunchae was stunned. This return was absurd. Funds were normally judged by annualized returns. A quarterly return of ninety-six percent annualized to—
Three hundred eighty-four percent!
Even granting that short positions could produce high short-term returns, this number was unreal.
Among everyone who shorted Facenote, didn’t we just post the highest return?
There was a reason people called shorting gambling: catching market volatility was simply too hard. Yet Lee Jaseung had picked the exact bottom with surgical precision. Skinning the market this cleanly was almost impossible.
Then curiosity struck her.
Her own net profit: 9.6 billion. Han Juhyeong’s: 28.8 billion.
“How much did Jaseung oppa make?”
“Lee Jaseung put in seventy billion, so……”
They hammered the calculator and spoke at the same time.
“Insane.”
“Insane.”
67.3 billion won?!
But that was not the end.
Han Juhyeong said,
“There’s also the fees. The fees I paid alone were 7.4 billion.”
The industry standard was the classic 2-and-20 structure: two percent management fee, twenty percent performance fee.
Recalculating……
“Hah! Fees alone are 15.7 billion! Wow, the fees are bigger than my entire profit!!”
It was pure, genuine admiration. Han Juhyeong looked at her in disbelief. In a way, Lee Jaseung and Chae Eunchae were competitors in the same industry.
“Doesn’t that make you nervous?”
“Me? Why?”
“You’re going to get compared to Lee Jaseung.”
She only snorted.
“Please. Listen, Han Juhyeong. Jaseung oppa and I serve completely different client bases. I’m private equity.”
Investing in unlisted companies, acquiring distressed firms and improving management—private equity produced stable returns through long-term investment. It was nothing like Lee Jaseung’s high-risk, high-return portfolio.
“Fair enough. So what are you going to do now?”
“Me? Scoop up Facenote, obviously. It fell all the way to seventeen.”
Then she dragged her chair right up against his.
“Want to invest in my fund too? Honestly, is it going any lower from here? Wait three years and it’s at least a triple. Your three hundred billion becomes nine hundred.”
“……? Isn’t that the exact same strategy as Lee Jaseung’s?”
“……? The same? What are you talking about?”
“Didn’t you read the investment report? It says the position is changing. Look. Completely identical strategy. So why would I go to you? Obviously Lee Jaseung is better.”
Chae Eunchae frantically flipped open the report. Buried after the dazzling returns she had been too dazzled to notice was an addendum.
The moment she read the first line, Chae Eunchae grabbed the back of her neck.
“This oppa is seriously—! He’s trying to steal all my clients!!!”
This work is a work of fiction. All characters, groups, place names, and events appearing in the work are entirely fictional and have no connection to any real persons or entities. Specialized knowledge described herein has also been reconstructed and adapted for the story and may differ from actual information.