The Bear Market Is Over!

The bear market is over!

The bear market.

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Stock prices do not only go up.

Sometimes they fall — hard.

And when that fall stretches on for a very long time, the trend flips, and people say a bear market has begun.

Of course, investors aren't complete idiots.

Some of the sharper ones pull their money out early. Then they buy back in.

The ideal response to a bear market.

But if you could actually make money that easily—

Nobody would even bother saying stocks are hard.

It punched straight through every forecast on the way down. The KOSPI, which had broken past 2,600, was now in the 2,400s — and the terror that it might sink even lower was starting to take hold.

But it wasn't all bad news.

Not for investors sitting on cash, at least.

You could buy the stocks you'd been wanting at a discount. Shift your perspective and it might even look like an opportunity.

If it kept going, it would stop being an opportunity.

Reality.

A despair settled in — the kind that whispered this would never recover. The old saying about basements beneath the floor stopped being someone else's problem.

It already corrected enough! Why?!

Sora was tasting that feeling in full.

Not that she'd just sat there and taken it. Quick stop-losses. Risk diversification. Portfolio construction. She'd drawn on everything she'd learned and responded as best she could — but still.

Fuck……

The losses had been unavoidable. For the first time in her life, she'd vaporized a sum with four zeros on it.

It wasn't a catastrophic loss, of course. The entire index had dropped more than ten percent.

Wow. Fifty-K Electronics just collapsed. Helgi Chemical is down twenty percent too……

Individual stocks were falling at twice that rate. Even blue chips weren't normal, so the junk stocks were getting cut in half.

She swallowed hard.

What scared her more was the possibility that this wasn't the end. Bad news had been stacking up one after another lately.

The U.S.–China trade dispute. The Korea–U.S. interest rate inversion. And the exchange rate, thrown into chaos as a result.

Even if I put myself in a foreign investor's shoes……

The KOSPI wouldn't look attractive right now. The sudden foreign sell-off actually made sense.

But for how long? Was a drop of more than ten percent in ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠a mere ten days really justified? She couldn't accept it.

Don't tell me it's exactly like what sunbae said.

The market was drowning in bad news. Just reading the first lines of the articles made her sigh. But fearmongering articles — if what sunbae had told her was actually true…

The idea that the entire KOSPI is a coordinated operation… I don't want to believe it.

It could all be designed to force retail stop-losses. Scare them witless, then scoop everything up.

Even she was terrified. She'd done her share of buying the dip, and her head was still spinning. People who'd gotten trapped at the peak must be dying inside. Should she cut her losses even now?

No. It's fine. It'll climb back to my average cost soon enough.

Fair value of the companies. Looking at revenue and earnings, she believed they were undervalued. Short interest hadn't piled up that high either — because the current prices were already that cheap.

She couldn't take everything sunbae said at face value. More than half of it was just him messing with her.

I think this is the right call, but……

She was already underwater. The only thing Sora could do now was think.

Korea's bear markets were deeply, uniquely bizarre.

Bizarre enough to make a certain survival game look ethical by comparison.

At least that one didn't cheat its contestants.

The KOSPI was full of techniques that bordered on outright fraud.

Exhibit A: K-style short selling.

For example, they'd report ten thousand short sales for the day — then casually revise it to a hundred thousand with a little "Oops, an employee made a data entry error, hehe~☆."

It was possible because the system was still non-computerized handwriting. A person wrote it by hand, made a "mistake," and that was that. Amazingly, it was legal. In the world of finance, "no legal problem" meant it was actively being used.

On top of that: naked short selling, uptick rule violations, and more. A whole arsenal of methods existed for pulling the wool over retail eyes.

In a bull market, even the ants weren't at a massive disadvantage. In a bear market, you got a proper taste of what a tilted playing field really meant.

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The stock communities that had been in nonstop party mode through the recent bull run had, overnight, turned into funeral homes. It was a complete one-eighty from just a little while ago. The investors themselves were half out of their minds.

Some people had completely lost it. Get trapped at the peak and anyone would end up like that.

You want to chop your own finger off.

The finger that pressed the buy button. Every stock investor felt that urge at least once. You had to go through that pain and suffering. You could never become a real investor walking nothing but flower paths.

The bear market would keep going for a while. A flood of bad-news articles stoking the fear.

The U.S.–China trade dispute has been going on for over six months, and the Korea–U.S. rate inversion was telegraphed a month ago — but sure.

All of it to force retail stop-losses. Once the institutions that caught those shares finished covering their shorts, they'd push the price back up.

It was obvious.

And people still fell for it. Because the ones holding the trigger were the powerful foreign investors and the institutions.

The reason the rich always win in the stock market: no matter how rational your trades, if they can just print money and overwhelm you, you're done. The KOSPI taught that lesson well. You got to meet every single bullshit scenario the market had to offer.

If you survive it, the growth is enormous.

It wasn't easy. When prices fell, your mental game shattered. Holding a rational perspective got hard. Proper trading went out the window — you lost even the courage to look at the market.

Whether Sora could endure that hardship and adversity…

If she couldn't even manage that much, she might as well quit stocks. He wasn't free enough to babysit her through it.

It's about that time anyway.

In peacetime, humans search for equality. In crisis, they search for a hero.