Is the Order Bom?
Is the order Bom?
Bom.
.
.
.
She was one of Korea's most popular YouTubers.
She was also one of the longest-running streamers in the country.
The Bom I knew had been a high schooler.
It felt like only yesterday she'd been going hawawa…
She'd started all the way back in middle school.
An acquaintance who'd spotted her talent had forced her into it.
That was the bloom.
She'd begun with personal broadcasts, slid smoothly into YouTube, and even appeared on terrestrial TV.
Until the day she put on see-through clothes and danced sexy.
For the fans, it was a swelling of the chest.
Watching her grow had welded their fandom into something unbreakable.
And it would stay that way.
They'd been looking forward to her growing as a college girl the same way she had as a middle schooler and a high schooler.
Then the shocking news arrived.
A third career path no one had imagined had begun.
Stocks.
There wasn't a person alive who didn't know what they were.
But the people who actually did them — who properly understood them — were rare.
Their reputation was that bad.
Adults drilled it into your ears until they went numb: the express lane to total life ruin.
The reviews from actual survivors weren't great either.
Still, some people ordered from restaurants with terrible reviews.
Oddballs like that existed now and then.
Especially if someone had been gaslighting them hard.
She'd made up her mind properly.
Wherever she'd seen it, she'd even installed an HTS terminal on her desktop.
The viewers were panicking.
But Bom hadn't started completely unprepared either.
Ding-dong~♪
She had something resembling a plan.
Right on cue, the doorbell rang, and the person she'd arranged to meet arrived.
There was someone she'd arranged to take advice from.
A common enough thing in internet broadcasting.
A collab, in other words.
Inviting a celebrity to juice up the stream energy happened all the time.
A nobody.
Someone no one had ever heard of.
The viewers' confusion was only natural.
This wasn't some random mid-tier stream.
She was a massive influencer with over three million YouTube subscribers alone.
"I was just trading before I came over."
"I lost a hundred million."
Of course they were worried.
They couldn't understand why she wanted to learn stocks from this guy.
Was she getting scammed?
The suspicion sprouting among the viewers was a perfectly natural reaction.
Stocks.
It was a fact that public opinion of them was poor.
Especially in Korea.
They were ranked the same as gambling.
Notorious as something you should absolutely never touch.
"You lose sometimes when you do this long enough."
The market had been rough lately, too.
People who'd lost money on stocks showed up on the news all the time.
Crypto was the same story.
Losers everywhere.
If you'd seen people like that around you, of course you'd be more scared.
.
.
.
I'd expected the viewers' violent reaction.
I'd also known I wouldn't be getting a warm welcome.
The only idiot here was Bom.
Gaslighting the entire chat was, frankly, impossible.
"You lost a hundred million."
"You lose sometimes when you do this."
"Then Oppa isn't smart, is he?"
"……."
People got carried by the atmosphere.
Even the little fool right in front of me had a flicker of doubt.
Fair enough.
Stocks really were dangerous.
Not something you did with half-hearted resolve.
And just as everyone was shouting No—
—saying Yes was my job.
Seeing once beats hearing a hundred times.
Nothing was more convincing than showing them directly.
Losing a hundred million meant—
I could make that much again.
I'd already mapped out today's market flow.
Not long ago, foreigners had jacked the index with massive buying.
And water always flows from high to low.
Sector rotation, they call it.
A phenomenon that hits when capital floods in at scale.
At first, the big conglomerates' stocks rise.
Because they're easy to steer the index with.
But since the buying wasn't based on actual company value—
"Until recently, pharma stocks were getting all the attention. BaekjeGen, specifically."
"Did Oppa invest too?"
"I made, what, maybe ten billion off it?"
"Whoa!"
You sell again.
And with that money, you buy other stocks.
Concentrated in one sector, no less.
Because the market wasn't exactly swimming in liquidity.
The stock market was fundamentally put money down, take money home.
There was a reason it got compared to gambling.
When the pot was small?
You reduced the number of hands and tried to pile more money onto each one.
Pharma stocks had caught momentum that way.
They floated every kind of news to get people investing.
And the next sector being floated was construction.
Two conditions came with that.
One: a solid catalyst.
Two: an element of surprise.
"It could get better going forward."
"Bom likes Minecraft too."
Most stocks were fairly valued already.
Meaning even if they rose, there was a ceiling.
But there were stocks that weren't like that.
Pharma was the classic example.
If a new drug succeeded, it could sweep Nobel Prizes.
And even short of that, they existed.
Stocks that could be valued above their current worth.
It was starting to move.
In the morning session, the shakeout designed to scare retail had dragged on for hours.
The reason I'd lost a hundred million.
Just as the Manhwa God's famous line went, it had been nothing more than preparation.
Come the afternoon session, it reversed.
After crushing retail buying psychology, they were staging a sharp rebound.
The terrified retail investors dumped everything.
Without ever realizing that what they'd felt was fear.
I ate that and pushed it higher.
Rolling the price up in an instant, driving a sharp surge.
The loss that had crossed a hundred million.
Before long it was as if it had never happened — and then it smoothly printed ＋two hundred million.
"This is how it works."
"Whoaaa~."
Tomorrow it would climb even higher.
From the opening auction, deliberately, so retail couldn't keep up.
I'd gap it up.
The sector I'd been watching for the past few weeks.
The timing locked in perfectly, and the mood flipped.
The chat, too.
It rewrote the thoughts of viewers who'd done nothing but doubt.
.
.
.
I'd shoved undeniable proof in their faces, after all.
Out of more than twenty thousand viewers—
There had to be people who knew.
The masses followed the prevailing wind.
Whatever doubts had lingered evaporated in no time.
"Making money in this world was so easy."
"Right."
"Bom didn't know something this good existed!"
"Knowing now is good enough."
Bom was getting serious, too.
Show anyone real-time profits in the hundreds of millions and their eyes would spin.
It looked fun, too.
Like the Monopoly she'd played as a kid.
From where I stood, that was about her mental age.
The dangers of stocks.
If you didn't explain them, getting her hooked was simple.
"If Bom loses, Bom would be really sad…"
"Oppa will watch over you, so it's fine."
"Hehe. Bom only trusts Oppa."
I pulled her into the world of stocks.