Newly Listed Stock
09Lady.
Just as expected, they were dumping it straight into the dirt.
Figures.
Korean institutions always ran the same playbook. They lived to skin retail investors alive. And the reason it kept working? They had no shortage of variations on the theme.
Odd-lot trades. Filling one share at a time. Another pattern you saw constantly with new listings.
Happens with manipulated stocks too.
Usually it was bait for retail. Watch someone keep buying little by little and you start to get hooked.
Human psychology was simple. Even if you knew the pattern, you still wavered.
Because sometimes the fakeout actually is a fakeout.
It could be accumulation. You genuinely couldn't tell which way it cut, so caution was warranted — in theory.
He dumped every last share he was holding. Fourteen thousand shares offloaded at the open, and now another six thousand.
TRIPLE KILL!
QUADRA KILL!
The second those fills hit, program volume came pouring out. Everyone had been playing the same game of chicken the whole time.
Nobody runs a fakeout accumulation on a brand-new listing.
Current IPOs followed a proportional allocation system. Literally proportional to the money you put in. If institutions wanted the float, they could vacuum it up whenever they felt like it.
So why hadn't they?
Because the stock was garbage. If even Sora had sized it up at a glance, there was no chance the institutions hadn't.
They went through it with a fine-tooth comb.
Which meant no lock-up commitment. Dump on day one of the offering. The whole session would feel like this — dangling bait for retail while offloading inventory. Even if it bounced a little, the gains would get handed right back.
You could see it coming from a mile away. New listings that were going up went up fast. Nobody handed retail a clean entry. The way a new stock moved told you, indirectly, exactly how the market rated the company.
Even the stock communities weren't impressed. Anyone who actually knew how to read a company would never call this overvalued.
Why are they crushing it?
The closer you looked, the worse it got. Anyone who understood stocks treated new listings with caution — especially companies that went public at the tail end of a bull run. Nine times out of ten, they weren't the real deal.
Every dog and cow is going public these days, they're gonna get wrecked
Fat bitches who can only buy clothes in Itaewon
Anyone who'd been around the markets long enough knew. Unless you were a complete idiot, you didn't touch garbage like this.
And yet people bought it. Every time sell volume flooded the tape, someone was accumulating underneath.
In some manga they turn trash into trees, right?
Maybe this was a form of ESG management. At least in the stock market, even garbage had its uses.
09Lady's freefall.
Chaos was inevitable on the women's communities. It wasn't just one or two people holding the stock.
Then it started freefalling and now I'm at −30%……
If I diamond-hand it my average will go up right?
There was a connection, too. 09Lady was a familiar brand to Proud Women users. A plus-size shopping mall. There simply weren't other places that designed for their body types.
Join the 09Lady buy campaign!!!!!
I looked into it and if a stock drops they do something called delisting? and the company might go under T_T
If 09Lady dies then we have nowhere to buy plus-size clothes right?
This stock expert unnie who made like 70 billion won in the market said the free float is only around 1 million shares!! Super low!!
It's about 16,000 won a share right now so if everyone buys 1 share and the unnies who can spare it buy 10 or more we should be fine!!!
Everyone join the buy-1-share-of-09Lady campaign!!!!
A buying frenzy took hold. A handful of users manufactured consensus and the rest fell in line. It wasn't even rare on women's communities. Sometimes that solidarity produced genuinely impressive results.
But most of the time, it got them used.
"They're falling for this?"
"They're falling for this, sir."
"Wow…… there really are nothing but morons out there."
Oh Seok-hyun had been briefed in advance and he was still stunned.
I know retail can be brain-dead, but this is actually a little chilling.
He worked at an investment firm. Put bluntly, he was an illicit stock manipulator. But he wasn't some rootless hustler.
"Retail buying is starting to trickle in. Looks like the institutions have almost finished dumping — what do you want to do?"
"What do you mean, what do I want to do. Run it."
"Yes, sir."
He was a former top-five brokerage man. Ten years ago he'd been a rising elite.
Back in my day I was moving hundreds of billions. One piece of junk like this is nothing.
Back then it had been an open secret. The big-name brokerages used to do exactly what the illicit operators did now. Price manipulation. And he'd been one of its biggest beneficiaries. Seok-hyun had the game down to a science. When that kind of work got shut down, his performance started lagging behind his colleagues. Effectively, he'd been forced out.
Old habits died hard. There was only one thing he was truly good at — which was exactly why he'd taken the job with the operators. Nobody ran a scheme with more confidence than he did. When it came to trading technique, he had no equal.
You hide the chunks one at a time inside the odd-lot flow.
While the institutions bought and sold one share at a time, he ran the same single-share trades and accumulated underneath. Invisible to the naked eye — the way you'd never notice one extra frame slipped into a twenty-frame-per-second video.
"This technique is insane."
"Of course it is. Whose technique do you think it is."
"Selling pressure isn't letting up, and nobody's chasing on the buy side either. We'll keep gathering inventory nice and slow like this."
Only the programs reacted. Institutional selling was so heavy that even when the sell wall briefly thinned, it filled right back in.
We can only do this because we're running programs too.
In the world of ones and zeros that retail never saw, this was what was happening. The amateurs had no idea. But a rotten institution man was still an institution man. Drop modern trading technique into the manipulation game and easy money practically printed itself.
Brrring~!
He had a reliable partner, too. No longer a major brokerage employee, which meant options that used to be off-limits.
"Got your call, boss."
"Things are going…… smoothly, I trust?"
"You hired us knowing exactly how we handle business, didn't you? Just sit tight and hold that worry down. Oh — and the inventory."
They were in on it with the company. Even back in his brokerage days, relationship-driven investing had gone on quietly here and there.
The risk was just too high.
Get caught and it didn't end with getting fired. You made the news and became a national celebrity. This was different from the major houses. For illicit operators, collusion was practically routine.
"If we just catch everything the institutions are dumping, and then lock up the second tranche exclusively in fifteen days, price control is a cakewalk. There's only one real problem……"
"We'll keep our people under control."
"Make sure you do."
That made the whole job dramatically easier. No — it made the stock completely theirs to work.
New listings are so easy it's almost embarrassing.
Total shares outstanding: 3.3 million. Of those, only 1.1 million had been floated through the IPO. Corner that float and you were done. Today the institutions had dumped roughly 400,000 shares.
He was accumulating without leaving a fingerprint. With his skill set, it was like picking your nose without using your hands.
And if the retail crowd is this stupid on top of it.
He'd heard the stories. Public opinion was easy to manage. But honestly, he'd found it hard to believe. One look through the communities and he understood. Give them a little cheerleading and they'd hold the stock even if the company went under.
For life.