Heaven's Secrets Leaked

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A securities firm.

A company that buys and sells stocks and bonds on behalf of investors.

"Division Chief."

"Ah, yes! Manager ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠Yeom!"

"I was told you had something to discuss with me, so I came."

That was the general understanding of what they did.

But in Korea, things worked a little differently.

About time it came to this, I suppose.

Yeom Yu-an.

The star analyst of Gaemi Investment Securities had recently been promoted from deputy manager to manager.

He had earned the merit to match the title.

But he had paid a price for it, too.

"How have you been lately?"

"I've been well, sir."

"I was worried your complexion might look rough, but it seems I fretted for nothing."

Osung Electronics — the stock he had so forcefully recommended.

Lately its share price had been falling to an almost embarrassing degree.

The hate comments have ticked up a bit. Thanks to that.

All of it was by design.

They manipulated retail psychology so that the ants had no choice but to buy Osung Electronics.

"When a bear market hits, some investors start pointing fingers, which is a bit of a headache."

"You'd think someone held a knife to their throats, the way they carry on. Haha!"

The ants.

They deluded themselves into thinking they could judge for themselves.

But where exactly did they get that information?

From the analysts.

Whether it was a brokerage report or a YouTube video, their own opinions were baked in.

No knife, sure — but it's still straight-up robbery.

That was an analyst's real job.

Twist the language just a little, and you could steer the ants' decisions wherever you wanted.

The broadcasters played along, too.

Broadcast networks and securities firms, both rooted in the same Yeouido soil — their partnership ran deep.

"The reason I called you in, Manager Yeom, is this."

"Yes, sir."

"How are the ants doing these days — the retail investors, I mean? Are a lot of them struggling?"

"Until recently it seemed manageable, but lately they've been gasping for air a bit."

Manipulating the information that reached individuals was trivial work.

But if you only ever cracked the whip and never offered a carrot—

Even a dog you've raised will eventually bite back.

So every now and then you handed out candy. A little chocolate, too.

That, in truth, was the real work of Korean securities firms.

"If we throw them a little defense, they'll like that, won't they?"

"Defense…?"

"Ah, right. You were only a deputy manager until recently — no wonder you wouldn't know."

He had roughly sensed where this was going.

But he never expected it to come from the mouth of an executive at the division-chief level.

The Korean market really has been uniquely bare of that sort of thing.

Institutions came in two broad flavors.

Foreign institutions, and the domestic or regional ones.

"The foreigners are shorting us into the ground like this — it feels wrong for us to just sit still, doesn't it?"

"It does, sir."

"We ought to protect the retail investors, too~."

Foreign institutions that had fattened their assets in the world's financial hubs had money to burn.

They attacked on the back of that capital.

But the local institutions were no pushovers either.

They held the home-ground advantages of connections and information — and they used them to push back.

Except that gets exhausting after a while.

Ordinarily, you couldn't just short whatever you pleased.

One wrong move and the local institutions would make you pay.

But that concern no longer applied.

To the foreigners, Korean institutions were far too soft a target.

The Korean institutions had given up on fighting back.

They had chosen a different approach instead.

"Osung Electronics shareholders will be delighted to hear that."

"Mm, but."

"Sir?"

"Osung Electronics just isn't that attractive anymore. You know — the Insurance Business Act revision, the succession issues, all of that."

They joined the attack.

When the foreigners shorted, the locals piled on with a spoon of their own.

The damage landed squarely on the ants.

The institutions scooped up the scraps right alongside the foreigners.

I can more or less tell what he's getting at.

If this ever got out, it would be extremely inconvenient.

That was why he was trailing off at the ends of his sentences.

It was a kind of test.

If you wanted to climb higher in the organization, they needed to see whether you had the loyalty and the discretion to match.

"Investment perspectives differ from person to person, after all."

"Haha!"

"There are still a great many shareholders who hold high expectations for Osung Electronics."

"You talk a good game, I'll give you that."

The institutions wanted to dump Osung Electronics.

There were simply too many tangled problems attached to it.

If you're going to buy the semiconductor sector, you'd be better off just buying SQ Technics.

The Insurance Business Act revision.

The Osung family's inheritance tax.

Friction with the current administration, and more.

Holding it did them no favors.

The ideal play was to lure the ants in and offload the inventory onto them.

"Even without you saying it, I've already—"

"Hold on."

"Sir?"

"A problem cropped up recently. Something the intel team sent over — take a look."

It was already underway.

Countless ants had been trapped at the top.

The price would thrash up and down, piling up more corpses along the way.

A YouTube video?

Something unexpected had happened.

Division Chief Lee Tae-ho spun his monitor around and played a clip.

Two men on the screen.

Yeom Yu-an had a rough idea of what they did for a living.

Stock YouTubers, aren't they.

Wannabes playacting as analysts.

In the broad strokes, their work was no different from his own.

Fleecing the ants.

Lately the trend seemed to have shifted — some of them just farmed views and nothing else.

"Types like these shouldn't have much influence."

"Keep watching."

Some of them racked up hundreds of thousands of subscribers.

A YouTuber of that caliber would have reach, sure.

But amateurs are still amateurs.

They couldn't compare to a real analyst.

Not in view counts on broadcast, and not in the credibility of what they said.

A handful of ants kicking up a fuss was nothing new.

It hardly seemed like something a division chief needed to step in for.

The content of the video.

In truth, there was nothing particularly special about it.

It wasn't the kind of professional analysis an analyst would deliver.

No way.

But it cut straight to the core.

If Osung Electronics was structurally destined to fall under the ownership hierarchy, then the reverse was also true — there had to be a stock destined to rise.

"Trouble, isn't it?"

"It is. So that's why the Division Chief is paying attention to some random YouTuber."

"He's not just some random YouTuber."

"Sir?"

That stock was Osung Biologics.

Among people in the know, the story had been circulating quietly for some time.

So it was true after all.

Judging by the Division Chief's reaction, it was the real thing.

For all he knew, even Gaemi Investment Securities itself might already be accumulating shares.

"Apparently he's a Super Retail who made seven billion won."

"That much is nothing special… You can find ants sitting on ten billion if you look."

"In a single year."

"?!!"

It had gotten out.

Through the mouth of someone who simply could not be ignored.

Turned five hundred thousand into seven billion? In just one year?!

The analyst profession.

You met all kinds of people in the stock market.

Even in Yeom Yu-an's data, there was no one like this.

No one who had ballooned their assets at that kind of speed.

"There will certainly be ants who take the bait. But it's fine."

"Oh~ Think you can handle it?"

"Of course. Leave it to me."

An unexpected development.

But if he couldn't clean up even this much, the name of the firm's star analyst would be a joke.

I'm not the only one on this, either.

He would show them that this was not a market any individual could move on their own.

The Truman Show.

I often got the feeling that the Korean stock market was exactly like that.

The analyst on screen.

Supposedly the most popular expert among the countless ants out there.

So they say.

The view count proved it well enough.

The chat and the comments were on fire, too.

It was hard not to find the whole thing ironic.

These people had probably lost everything listening to that man.

Watching them, you'd think they were in a cult.

And he was far from the only one.

Some of the ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠channels run by analysts had over a million subscribers.

The experts who require the least expertise of any profession on earth.

What separates a real expert from a fraud, in my view, is that their words carry responsibility.

In the stock market, that rule did not apply.

They could be wrong day after day and people would still believe them and follow along.

.

.

.

At this point you started to wonder whether the problem wasn't the people on screen — it was the ants themselves.

They got scammed because they lined up like suckers to take it.

Nah. Both sides are the problem.

It takes two hands to clap.

Watching this, you finally understood why that old comedy show went under.

The ones who kept getting played.

The ones who kept running their mouths even after they were wrong.

Both were funny — but the funniest part of all was this:

Of all those experts — not a single one of them was trading their own money.