The Direction of the Market
The direction of the market.
Even for the experts, calling it right is never easy.
I handled things in a rather immature way myself.
In the futures market, war breaks out every single day. Wall Street's elite clutch their heads and still get the prediction wrong. The god of stocks despises the arrogant above all else.
I know that, and yet…
Which is why an investor must always remain humble. Invest according to a systematic plan. That was Rachel's motto. Secure enough hedges, then take only the high-probability fights.
Thud!
The moment she stood in front of that man, her reason slipped its leash. Before she knew it, both hands had slammed down on the desk.
Thump!
The rebound sent her chest bouncing back into the wood a second time. She didn't even have time to register the pain.
Why am I letting some pervert get to me like this…
The place she was living in now was a Hankuk University dormitory — all so she could pass as an ordinary student. The hardship that came with it was more than double. That was why she had deliberated so carefully before choosing her destination.
I came to Korea because I thought you were a decent person.
As an investor, he had piqued her interest. The more she dug into who he was, the stronger that interest grew. Honestly, she had been looking forward to this. Immersing herself in Korean culture had even given her a few romantic notions.
Are Korean men just rotten by nature…?
The dramas had been the same way. The rude chaebol heir who treated the heroine like dirt. Everything he did was coercive. And yet there was always that little something that made a person's heart race —
Thump! Thump!
— enough to make the audience fall for him anyway. That was only in the dramas, of course.
You can't just kiss someone out of nowhere. It puts people in a very awkward position.
At first she had wondered if men this insane actually existed. Even now, the memory refused to leave her head. That first meeting had been the absolute worst. Maybe, just maybe, it would still end in a Korean-drama-style happy ending.
Thud!
Thump!
Not a chance. After that he had kept picking fights, never so much as pretending to listen to a word she said.
I'm going to crush him completely.
She was not the passive type of heroine you found in Korean dramas. What she wanted, she took for herself. She would put Chan-wook on his knees. Make him apologize for everything. And after that—
Hmph. I'll decide that when the time comes.
First, she would show him the gulf between them. She would win this wager cleanly. And that was exactly what was going to happen.
Chan-wook had already made one critical mistake.
"Osung Electronics!"
"Pardon?"
"Osung Electronics really came back. Thank you so much…"
"You don't need to thank me for that."
A week had passed, and things were unfolding exactly as expected. Kim Tak-su, the macroeconomics teaching assistant, kept bowing his head in gratitude. He had been suffering badly after getting stuck holding Osung Electronics. The moment she told him he would be able to get out soon, he started treating her like some kind of prophet.
It's only natural, really.
Where there is a fall, a rise is bound to follow. You just have to catch the signs in advance.
"But still."
"Feeling better now?"
"How did you know it would go back up? Are you actually a god? A goddess?"
"Nothing nearly that grand…"
Economic indicators. The Fed's stance. They all offered clues about where the market was headed.
The direction was already clear a week ago.
The rebound had begun. Korea was an emerging market, so the reaction could lag a little — but in the end it always moved the same way. This was a country deeply tied to the American economy, after all.
"You really know how to read macroeconomics!"
"It's nothing special."
"Our professor teaches macroeconomics and he still got it wrong."
"…"
From the back row, a professor who had been watching the room carefully cleared his throat. Yang Min-seok was another one stuck holding Osung Electronics. Unfortunately, he had yet to come seeking her counsel.
"Ahem. Ahem. Do you think it might go as high as fifty-five thousand?"
"I couldn't say for certain, Professor."
"What? Why not?!"
He swallowed his pride to ask Rachel directly — and still didn't get the answer he wanted.
I do think positively of it, but…
Whether any individual stock would rise or fall was unknowable. What she had analyzed was the direction of the market as a whole. Still, Osung Electronics was a globally renowned Korean company — even she knew that much.
"Risk appetite is increasing, so any company that can still post solid earnings at current rates should rise, in my view."
"Osung Electronics has strong earnings and plenty of cash reserves."
"Well, in that case…"
A rate hike was not necessarily a pure red flag for equities. The Korean proverb after the rain, the ground hardens fit perfectly. Survive one bear market and you came out stronger — provided you could weather the high rates.
The Korean market has relatively solid fundamentals.
You could see it in the exchange rate. It had spiked as high as 1,100 won at one point, but was holding the line around 1,080. CDS premiums, bank stress tests — every indicator pointed the same direction.
"There's stuff like that too?"
"It's common sense when you're investing overseas…"
"Ah, right. For unnie, Korea is an overseas investment!"
"Wow, she really sounds like a pro."
Even on Wall Street, no one invested in American stocks alone. Emerging markets were always on the radar.
I decided to come to Korea, so I finished a certain amount of research before I arrived.
And that research was proving useful to the club members as well.
"Chan-wook never taught you any of this?"
"Did she just say Chan-wook?"
"Oh my, oh my."
"Did I say something strange?"
She was adapting to local life quite successfully. Stock club activities suited her temperament.
The students are sharp and genuinely sweet.
She almost wanted to hire them at her firm after graduation. The reason she had discovered this stock club in the first place—
"Chan-wook oppa just says you'll figure it out if you thrash around enough."
"He only drops the occasional piece of advice."
"Umm… I wouldn't exactly call that a good method."
—had been while she was looking for Chan-wook. After lectures ended, the man was nearly impossible to find.
With a place like this, of course talent has room to sprout.
No wonder the students were capable. They weren't Chan-wook, but they all knew enough.
"Unnie teaches so much better."
"Can we call you Rachel unnie?"
"Noona!"
"Yes, that's fine."
She could teach these dream-filled talents far more systematically than he ever had.
If you lose, that's exactly what I'll do.
The current flow of the market was showing a steady recovery, just as she had predicted. The Nasdaq had climbed back to two-thirds of its previous high. The KOSPI would follow soon enough.
"Rachel unnie, how did you know it was going to be a bull market?"
"There are things called market events."
"Like in a game?"
"Uh… in a way, I suppose it is a bit like a game."
For a while, at least. How high it would ultimately go was, of course, unknowable.
The FOMC is scheduled for May, and for the time being none of the indicators look likely to break significantly from trend.
There were inflection points. Investors called them market events — incidents that shifted the flow of the market. They mostly originated from the Nasdaq, the center of global finance.
"Ah, so that's why you said to watch the Nasdaq…"
"Look closely and there are any number of individual events. Synthesize them within a larger framework and you can forecast the market's direction."
"That actually works?"
"How do you even do that?"
"There's so much of it… political meetings, economic indicators, CEO interviews, and so on."
You examined all of it with care. You filtered out the noise in the market. It was what Wall Street investors did every single day.
None of the CEO interviews raised any major red flags either. Almost no companies revised their consensus.
How thoroughly and accurately you analyzed it all — that, without exaggeration, was an investor's true skill.
And yet.
"But Chan-wook oppa said it was going down, right?"
"Why would he say that?"
"Because there are people who reach different conclusions."
"But unnie's prediction is the one that's coming true!"
Chan-wook had arrived at the exact opposite conclusion. That was why he had accepted the wager in the first place.
Did I overestimate him?
Had she missed something? She had torn everything apart for a full week and found nothing. The actual results spoke for themselves. Let the remaining three weeks pass like this and the outcome would be obvious.
"Maybe unnie just knows more than he does?"
"Me?"
"Yeah, yeah!"
"Chan-wook oppa's got that hustler streak — short-term trades are more his thing."
Her victory. Even under the most pessimistic assumptions, the index would not fall far enough for her to lose.
Realistically speaking, that's how it looks.
She had been educated from the moment she was born — molded into a useful asset for the family. Of course there would be a gap between someone like her and him. She had set her expectations far too high from the start.
"Ah, short-term. You mean day trading?"
"Her English pronunciation is insane…"
"Unnie is so cool!"
"Hm? Hm?"
He had probably traded purely on instinct — seat-of-the-pants investing with nothing but gut feel. She felt a little deflated. She had thought he was a talent remarkable enough to genuinely surprise her.
In a way, this might actually be better.
That level of ability without any formal expertise. Perhaps she had found a perfectly adequate prospect after all — a rough stone that would shine once it was properly polished. She would put him to work under her.
"Why's everything going up these days?"
"Just ask Rachel unnie yourself."
"I'm on Chan-wook hyung's side, though…"
"Tell me too!"
In the stock club, more and more members were falling in behind Rachel as time went on. The reason was simple: stock prices were rising. The mood in the market improved by the day.
"Rachel unnie, the Nasdaq went up again yesterday!"
"The KOSPI ticked up a little too."
"That's a relief."
"I made money thanks to unnie — want me to order some tteokbokki?"
The atmosphere in the club room was shifting too. Members who had listened to Rachel were turning a profit, and the bonds between them grew warmer for it — warm enough to order delivery food with their stock-market winnings.
"They added a delivery fee here… I order from this place all the time."
"Ugh, delivery fees are the worst!"
"Delivery fee?"
"Until recently there wasn't one."
Being treated to a meal by students? Rachel found the feeling oddly complicated.
So Korea originally had no delivery fees. Uber Eats always charged them.
Still, she decided to eat. Building rapport was part of the process.
She had no idea that this, too, could have been a hint.