The Operation
Operation?
Yeouido's securities district.
The beating heart of South Korea's financial world.
Most of the people here dealt in legitimate business.
"Oh, for fuck's sake!!"
And then there were the ones who didn't.
Crown Capital's main line was moneylending. But money only grows when you put it to work. Kim Min-gu handled the "investment" side of things — which was really just another name for stock manipulation.
And just now, an alarm had gone off.
Min-gu knew exactly what it meant. He was already sprinting back to the office.
"Deputy Manager, did you enjoy your mea—"
"Move! Move, move, move, move!"
He blew past his subordinates without so much as a glance and barreled straight into the office. The situation was that urgent.
Son of a bitch… How the hell did it drop this far?
The stock he was managing had fallen below his average cost basis. The price had broken free of the plan.
That much could happen. When chase-buyers piled in, you dumped volume to shake the retail investors loose. You deliberately kept the price from rising and ran them in circles for a few days. Some stubborn ants would hang on — but that was just stupidity. Their opponent was a program. No emotions, no hesitation. It shook the price exactly as configured, and the retail investors drowned in bottomless fear.
But even shaking has limits, you piece of junk!
This time it had gone too far. It had openly taken a loss. To make matters worse, their holdings had thinned out. The price had dropped so hard that institutional buyers had stepped in.
Three months of work were about to go up in smoke. He had to make a call.
—Buy order filled!
He killed the program and took manual control, clawing back the volume they'd lost.
The price snapped back hard. He'd recovered today's dumped volume — but there was a cost.
Fuck. This is going to trash the chart.
Until now the program had been managing the stock with a natural touch. The chart had been shaping up beautifully. Now that was all coming apart.
You flash a buy signal this obvious and the hyenas come running.
The sharp ones. If they piled in before the accumulation was finished, it would be a real problem. But the milk was already spilled. If the best option was gone, you took the next best thing.
"Yeah, it's me."
"Deputy Manager Kim, have you eaten?"
"I ate, but it's not sitting right. I need you to prep an article on a stock I'm about to give you. I'll send the material."
Short-term pump. Then dump the whole position and recover the principal.
Fuck. I was looking at five times minimum on this one, and now I'm talking about getting my money back.
Whether he'd re-enter would depend on how things looked. And if things looked bad, so what? He had plenty of other manipulated stocks under management. Take the recovered capital and pour it somewhere else.
"Want me to put it up right now?"
"No. After the market closes, around five. Gotta hit the upper limit once so the retail flow gets tangled the next day."
"That's Deputy Manager Kim for you~ I'll handle it exactly as ordered!"
It wasn't the option he'd wanted. Omega Information & Communication had genuinely solid material behind it. Min-gu had been eyeing it from the moment they'd started the operation. No matter how he looked at it, he'd made a serious mistake.
Programs are great — until they occasionally lose their goddamn minds.
He managed a lot of stocks. That much volume meant surveillance on any single one inevitably got sloppy. Looking at the chart, it had been falling for three straight days. Something had clearly gone wrong with the program.
No… the other stocks are running fine.
If there had been a real malfunction, the other names should have been affected too. They weren't. Only Omega Information & Communication was broken.
Min-gu furrowed his brow and turned it over, but nothing came to him.
Five o'clock on the dot, as promised. A journalist on Crown Capital's payroll floated the tip sheet. First you push the price up. Then you drop the article to invent a reason.
If I'd floated this when the sector was getting more attention, I could've ridden five consecutive limit-ups.
Back in the old days — when the movie The Operation hit theaters — they'd jacked prices up by pure brute force. Retail investors had been stupid then. Tell them a stock was going up and they'd dump their life savings into it like idiots. People were smarter now. You had to manufacture both a rationale and the right conditions for a rise.
The rationale was solid enough. The conditions were still flat. The price action would reflect that.
Alright, hit the upper limit… give it two days of gap-ups, then start easing off on day three and dump the position.
The thrill never lasted long. You had to unload the moment volume started to break. Plan B. For all the time he'd sunk into this, he was looking at almost nothing in return.
Stock manipulation wasn't nearly as glamorous as people thought. Success was rare. Generously, maybe two out of ten. The rest of the time you recovered your principal like this and waited for the next shot.
I had real expectations for Omega Information & Communication.
That was how things worked since the programs came in. You diversified across a long timeline. Much more stable — and the returns were correspondingly smaller. Even on names that looked like they had real potential.
Omega Information & Communication had that potential. Good material, and above all a tiny market cap. The company's value was only thirty billion won. Small meant light — it would fly on the slightest spark of news. Especially something in information and communications.
What did the company even do, exactly?
The ones with no clear substance got valued on pure "dream."
Look at Tesla or whatever — a company that doesn't make a single won of profit, but the CEO flaps his mouth a little and the market cap hits tens of trillions.
Once the fire caught, everyone saw only the upside. They paid a premium for a vision of the company's future. Omega Information & Communication could have been that. Hell, five times would have been plenty. And now that flow had been cut off.
This is going to hit my incentive too…
A life where a casual lunch meant a full course at an A-list restaurant. Even in Yeouido, not many people lived like that. Top ten percent. Zero-point-one percent of the entire Korean population. That was Kim Min-gu, the broker who was doing just fine.
In the old days they'd called him a street thug of the securities world — a stock manipulator, a crook. But the world belonged to whoever had the money. Money bought power and honor both. These days it was almost legal.
Gonna have to tighten the belt for a while. Bad luck's stuck to me.
A program glitch had just shrunk his profits. If he was honest, it was his own fault. He'd gotten complacent. The program usually ran so well that he'd let his guard down. Brokerages barely paid attention to junk stocks like this. Retail investors could thrash around all they wanted — they were still ants.
No way the ants caused this… and I don't see any other operators moving in either… so it has to be a glitch, right?
They were the predators. Anteaters, coaxing the ants out and vacuuming them up in one long sweep. A manipulated stock was an ant hell — it reeked of delicious bait and dropped countless ants into a pit they couldn't escape.
And he was the one getting played?
Impossible.
Min-gu forced the nagging doubt out of his head.
"Buuuurp~!"
Lunch. A stock investor didn't strictly need to eat.
When the profits alone filled you up. And he wasn't joking — that was genuinely how it felt.
"Whoa……!!"
"Get your head out of the way. Wait, no — leave it. Smells nice."
"Holy crap. You made four million won in three days?"
Sora was glued to the monitor, refusing to peel herself away. Apparently this was the first time she'd ever watched someone actually make money in the market.
God, she's fresh. So damn fresh.
This was the college life he'd wanted. Unfortunately, the girl herself had eyes for nothing but the stocks.
"You used margin, right? I remember your seed money wasn't that big, sunbae."
"Obviously. I'm a man."
"With mine you went all the way to margin and unsettled credit. Why only margin this time?"
"……."
She noticed the useless details too. This was exactly why he couldn't stand sharp little brats.
Should I rip her dick off?
Not that it was anything like that. There was a clear reason he hadn't used unsettled credit this time, unlike before.
"This is my own life on the line."
"Hey."
"Kidding. I just don't know when they'll dump."
Margin and unsettled credit. The ultimate special move of retail investors riding the last train of their lives. In Dragon Ball terms, it was like Kaioken times eight.
But strictly speaking…
Margin and unsettled credit weren't the same thing. With unsettled credit, once the plus-two-day window passed, the brokerage could force-liquidate you at will. The risk of holding long was massive.
"A manipulated stock ultimately moves however the operators want."
"So you don't know the timing of the rise?"
"Whether you catch it or not, the approach has to be different from scalping, where you settle the whole fight inside a single day."
Margin maxed out at Kaioken times 2.5. For anything longer-term, that was the rational choice.
Also, it's my own money.
He'd always had that instinct. Brokerages ran low-risk when it was their own capital and set everything on fire with high-risk trades when it was the clients' money. Not information a client needed to know.
Sora studied Omega Information & Communication's chart with genuine fascination.
"So this is why people keep saying 'manipulated stock, manipulated stock.'"
"Pretty much."
"I should've bought some. If the price drops, should I put money in too?"
"Hey. You idiot."
An insane return. A climb that left your jaw hanging open. In barely three days it had more than doubled off the bottom.
Get seduced by this and you won't live out your natural lifespan.
This was why people fantasized about stocks. Look, money just copies itself! It was also why they ended up broke.
"The second someone like you jumps in, you get stuck doing the dishes."
"The dishes?"
"Yeah. You're gonna be doing dishes eventually anyway."
"?"
Jumping into a stock that's already run as far as it can go and catching the dumped volume. It also had a whole other meaning when it came to marriage.
Either way.
Getting stuck was dangerous no matter which definition you used. Sora was pretty enough that doing the dishes might not be the worst fate — but as a matter of principle, you stayed out.
Which is exactly why they call the dish-washing the flower of the operation, wouldn't you say?
Just like Dr. Woo's famous line from the movie The Operation. Plant a fantasy in the ants' heads, then crash the price at a speed they can't believe. Especially with junk stocks. Get stuck once and recovery is impossible. The fundamentals are garbage, so unless another operation comes along, the thing never goes back up.
"So when I got into Woori Hand Food, that was me getting stuck with the dishes?"
"Yeah, you little shit."
"Ugh! I'd never seen a limit-up before, okay? I got excited!"
"Not your first time."
"Yes it was?"
"Last time you got stuck in that steel stock and threw a whole funeral."
"……."
Can't even take a joke.
It was the kind of talk stock investors always threw around. When in Rome, do as the Romans do. She looked genuinely miserable — the trauma still sitting heavy enough that her whole face had gone gloomy.
"Don't tease me."
"Why are you taking it so seriously?"
"I… it was really hard, okay?"
"Of course it was hard. Who loses money in stocks and feels fine about it?"
"I'm really grateful you helped me, sunbae. I still am."
Ahem!
Nothing but lip balm on them, and yet those lips were so plump and alive. The light caught them just slightly and they looked almost unbearably tempting.
Was that a green light? Was this the turning point of his life?
Ka-tok!
Right as he was drowning in the romance of the moment—
"Oh. It's Hye-ri."
"……."
"Sunbae, you got a KakaoTalk from Hye-ri."
"Why the hell is she messaging all of a sudden?!"
"You don't know? Tomorrow's the project presentation day."
Students still had to go to school.