Re: Starting Investor Life from Zero
Stocks.
There are things you absolutely have to know if you want to invest.
"Do you know what's most important when you're evaluating a company's value?"
"I know."
"What is it?"
"Obviously the financial statements."
Sora answered with the triumphant air of a student who had nailed the teacher's question on the first try.
To cut straight to the conclusion: she was wrong.
"Why the hell are you looking at that crap? What are you, Warren Buffett?"
"So I shouldn't look at them?"
"Haa~ I really don't even want to talk stocks with you."
Financial statements were important, of course. You needed them to grasp the internal condition of any company you planned to invest in.
Nothing's more certain than seeing it for yourself.
Accounting reports. The whole point was that you could read a company's situation from nothing but the numbers and the disclosures. News articles, analysts' opinions—anything that had already been processed once—often drifted far from the truth.
"You're fussing over outdated boomer nonsense instead of staying trendy. That's why you can't make a single penny off stocks."
"……."
"Come on. Let's go. I'll teach you how real stock trading works."
Stuff like that she would figure out on her own without me spelling it out. One look at her face and you could tell she was the type who would grind away by herself.
Model-student type, through and through.
What I actually intended to teach was practical trading. And while I was at it, I planned to recruit the specialized manpower my own trades needed.
"Okay, okay! I'm a stock noob so I don't know much—happy now?"
"Nice to see you admit it."
"So what's the right answer, then?"
"The CEO's face."
"……."
I would make use of Sora's connections for that. It wasn't as if I hadn't considered other approaches.
If I demand anything lewd she'll slap me for sure.
She didn't look like she had that kind of flexibility. I had no desire to overplay my hand and tank our intimacy for nothing.
"Don't tell me you buy stocks without even looking at the boss's face? Unbelievable."
"Am I the weird one here?"
"Yeah, you're the weird one. You finally get it?"
"I don't think so……."
It was actually necessary. Sora glared at me with open suspicion, as if the whole idea were absurd.
She thinks I'm just joking around.
Physiognomy. A CEO, especially, was the head of an entire group. There was a reason face-reading stories showed up so regularly in the history books—especially in something like the Romance of the Three Kingdoms.
Tap. Tap!
I showed her. The faces of Korea's chaebol chairmen. A rough Google search was enough to make them cascade down the screen.
Korean Conglomerate Ranking
1. Osung Group − Chairman Lee Kun-×
2. Mirae Group − Chairman Chung Mong-×
3. SKY Group − Chairman Chey Tae-×
4. Helji Group − Chairman Koo Bon-×
"Don't numbers one, two, and four have pretty similar faces?"
"Uh…… they kind of do."
"That's the classic turtle face—the wealthy face. The face of someone destined to get rich."
Chung Mong-koo wasn't exactly a turtle face, but he had been born with a turtle neck. Once you reached chaebol-chairman level, even your physiognomy stopped being ordinary.
"You know Winner from Big Bang, right?"
"Of course I do. I used to like him back in the day……."
"Winner has the face of fleeting glory—no flower blooms for ten days. He grabs wealth in his early twenties and loses everything after thirty."
"Ah!"
"Creepy, right?"
Some people literally became ordinary criminals, just as the characters predicted. Physiognomy mattered that much. It was never something you could brush off lightly.
"But still."
"What."
"Isn't this even more boomer than the other stuff?"
"……."
"Yep, total boomer."
"Gaaaaaah!!!"
If you wanted to invest on Joseon soil, you had to follow Joseon rules! Dismissing the old ways as "boomer" was the kind of stupid act that only came from pure ignorance.
There's a reason people say physiognomy is a science.
It was actually recognized—and not just anywhere, but on Wall Street, the very center of global finance.
There was something called the law of small numbers. The American management scholar Jim Collins's book was a perfect example.
Good to Great — published 2001
The textbook of management.
The book analyzed the traits of successful companies and became a bestseller.
"But every single company that appeared in that book is bankrupt now. Why do you think that is?"
"If one or two failed, sure, but all of them? I don't know."
"Because they only analyzed the successful ones."
"Ahh."
The sample size had been too small—that was the mistake. People called it the law of small numbers, or survivorship bias. As a counter-example there was the Lindy effect. Even a superstition that had survived for hundreds of years had something to it.
Physiognomy has something to it too.
That was why it was still in use, and why it still hit the mark so often. If it didn't work, it would have faded away naturally the way blood-type personality theories did.
"Even so, face-reading is a bit……."
"Forget it. What am I doing explaining stocks to a gambler like you? You're probably out there buying junk stocks again just because Son H○ng-min scored a goal."
"I only bought those because of you, senior!!"
"I really wonder what you think stocks even are."
"%&#$^#!"
In truth, physiognomy could also be seen as the product of big data accumulated over a very long time. And it was knowledge born on Joseon soil, for Joseon people.
For real.
Physiognomy was statistics written on faces, built from the experiences and case studies of our ancestors. Being a single ethnic group didn't hurt its reliability either.
"At the very least, I will never buy a stock just by looking at a CEO's face. Never."
"Sigh."
"What are you going to say now? You're the gambler here, senior."
"What I'm trying to do isn't find good companies. It's filter out the bad ones."
Of course the limits were clear. Once someone became famous, people clapped even when they took a dump; already-successful faces often got graded generously.
But scammers reek of it in their faces.
The heroes might all look different, but the villains always looked the same. People who looked like they would do bad things did bad things. A face held the entire life a person had lived so far. It was never coincidence—it was inevitability.
"And this also comes from a special characteristic of the Korean stock market. That's the important part."
"What is it?"
"Follow me. I'll tell you on the way."
I was leading a Pokémon trainer along. Destination: Hankuk University. More precisely, the student union building. The student council and a whole cluster of clubs were housed there.
Creeeak~!
I pushed open the thick glass door and stepped inside. There had been too many restrictions for me to come alone.
"You've got a lot of friends, right?"
"Not really that many…… but I know at least one senior in every department."
"That's a lot."
Popular people never realized how good their social circles actually were. To them it was just normal.
That's why they're weak.
They didn't know how to survive alone. A true strong person didn't need friends.
"I think the technical term for that is 'outcast.'"
"There is no such word as 'outcast' in my dictionary."
"Talking like Napoleon doesn't make you look cool, you know?"
Employees, however, were necessary. Lately I had been suffering from a serious lack of information while trading stocks.
Back when I was a CEO myself…
Information had poured in like a mountain. The underlings organized it and reported it to me. All I had to do was pay money—convenient as hell. It wasn't even strange; that was how funds normally operated. There were entire companies that did nothing but handle information. You paid them and bought the intel.
"Anyway, you go sweet-talk them yourself."
"They might be complete strangers……."
"Just shove those big tits of yours at them and something will work out."
"Do you want to get hit, senior?"
That was also why institutions always stayed one step ahead of retail. But to do the same thing myself—
I still don't have enough capital to hire a professional firm.
The cost was enormous. In modern society, information was power. That was not the slightest exaggeration. Say oil prices looked about to drop. If you received that news just five minutes earlier, you could short it and make a killing.
"So you're not going to do it? Were you the kind of trash who can't even keep a promise she made?"
"Shii……."
"I can't hear you~."
"I'll do it, okay? I'll do it!"
Starting with physiognomy, I planned to expand my talent pool one by one. Fortunately, Hankuk University was the place.
Talent is rotting on the vine here.
The problem was the negotiation method. Sora would be able to handle it. No—she absolutely had to pull it off.
Knock. Knock!
I rapped on the door. The Physiognomy & Four-Pillars Club. The atmosphere was as heavy as the name suggested.
Creeeak~!
The inside was even worse. The freaks gathered there exceeded anything I had imagined.
"Who is it?"
"Whoa, a girl!"
"What brings you to a shabby place like this……."
"Hello. I'm Yoon Sora, first-year Economics……."
The people who popped out looked like you could call them monkeys and people would believe it. Randomly grown beards, hair that hadn't been properly combed. "Otaku" was too mild— "wild hermit" fit better. They looked exactly like the type who would sit on a street corner reading fortunes for a living.
"Holy crap, a first-year?! Class of '17?"
"Yes, that's right."
""Wooooaaah~~!!!""
"……."
"How many years apart are we? Five?"
"Six. You took a year off, remember."
"Are you interested in the four pillars by any chance? No, I mean it in a pure sense, nothing weird……."
"Ah, yes."
Even without any extra explanation, her face was the kind that wouldn't invite misunderstandings. Physiognomy really was a science.
"Just a moment, please."
Whether she lacked the spirit of adventure toward the unknown or not, her expression was thoroughly unenthusiastic. She shut the door right there and came running back toward me.
"What am I supposed to do about this!!"
"You really have no manners toward your senior, do you?"
"That's not the issue here!"
Kids these days—what was going to become of them? The old generation would have gotten high on spiritual energy and started a full shaman ritual by now.
They do give off a pretty mystical vibe, though.
At the very least, this didn't look like a casual hobby. You could feel the resolute will of people who had staked a huge part of their lives on it. Their ability was beyond doubt. As professionals, they could be trusted. Which meant the real question was how to sweet-talk people that picky.
"Just put on a coquettish voice and act cute a little, okay? Like, 'Aahng~ Senior, please do it for me!' That kind of thing."
"I can't do that kind of thing!"
"There's no such thing as 'can't.' You're just not doing it."
"Ah, ah!"
I wasn't worried about that part. I shoved the list into the hand of the thrashing, ranting Sora and gave her shoulder a light push.
"We thought you weren't coming back."
"Make yourself comfortable. We're all nice oppas here."
"Ah, yes. Um……."
"Got something to ask? Want us to check compatibility or something?"
"We're good at love fortunes too!"
"It's not compatibility, it's…… I'd like you to read some faces."
They had clearly been waiting with high expectations; the entire club membership was lined up right at the door. Not that there were many of them.
More than enough to tear apart the faces of junk-stock CEOs, though.
The special characteristic of the Korean stock market. It was simply that there were an insane number of companies. Five to ten times more than markets of similar size like Germany or Switzerland. The so-called "junk stocks," in other words. Most retail investors who had made money in Korea had made it by investing in those junk stocks. The one problem was—
There are a terrifying number of scammers.
Company presidents sometimes absconded overnight. Delistings, business suspensions, sudden share dumps—abnormal behavior ran rampant. This was to reduce that risk. Just by tearing into a president's face you could filter out whether he was a scammer. For me right now, that was necessary work.
"Who is this? Your father?"
"A bit many for a father. The numbers."
"Th-that's……."
"Hm?"
"Could you just do it for me, aahng~ oppa?"
The junkier the stock, the higher the expected return. They needed to work for my profits.
She's terrible at sweet-talking, that brat.
This is the beginning of Re: Starting Investor Life from Zero.