Value
Microeconomics class.
"Our group researched oil and coal! Global stock prices have been climbing lately, right? Nasdaq, KOSPI, the whole lot. So we figured demand might go up, hehe."
A male student in sloppy clothes stood at the podium delivering his presentation.
It was group project day.
International commodity prices have been rising recently.
Investigate the beneficiary sectors expected to see stock price increases as a result, as well as the victim sectors expected to decline, and research the reasons why.
※ If the stock prices of the relevant sectors actually rise after three months, that increase will be reflected in your first-semester evaluation.
Commodities.
The term covered everything from the basics—oil, gold, silver—to the raw materials that fed industry at large. Their price swings rippled straight into the real economy.
After listening to the student's presentation, the professor offered a kindly smile.
"Looks like you've been paying close attention in my lectures."
"Yes, Professor!"
"Exactly right. Nothing explains a price rise more cleanly than the law of supply and demand."
This was precisely the direction Professor Choi Myeong-cheol had wanted.
Economics was genuinely difficult, and connecting it to the real world was harder still. But if you used commodities as the medium, the concepts became far easier to grasp. That was why he had assigned the project in the first place.
"I'm Hye-ri, leader of Group D. Our group ended up researching a slightly... special commodity? Yes. That's how it turned out."
"Hahahaha!"
There was one group that always drew attention. Of course a professor had students he favored and students he expected great things from. The problem was that this group belonged to neither category.
"We looked into agricultural commodities. May we begin the presentation, Professor?"
"No problem at all. I was just thinking no one had covered that side."
Commodities were not limited to minerals. The rice, wheat, and soybeans that filled dinner tables counted as well. And though it was uncommon—
"There's an orange blight going around in California right now. So... yes! He says orange juice prices are going to rise."
A topic no one had seen coming. The students seated in the lecture hall began to murmur, and who could blame them?
"Orange juice? What?"
"Why is orange juice coming up!"
"Is this for real?"
"Don't tell me they just checked the supermarket juice prices?"
Hye-ri's face turned bright red. She had begged him, as earnestly as she could, to pick a normal topic.
I don't know anything about this!
The explanation had sounded plausible enough. She had accepted it at the time, but now that she actually had to present it, the words stuck in her throat. Orange juice was the easy part. The next topic already had her dreading how she was even supposed to bring it up.
"And he shorted salmon prices."
"Short?"
"What's a short?"
"Yes, shorting means betting that the price will fall. According to this group member, Norway's 2015 entry into the AIIB—basically China's version of the IMF—had been driving futures prices higher on pure expectation. But the production that exploded on that hype started shipping in 2017 and is now pulling prices down. I'll also add the group leader's personal note that she has no idea what he's talking about because salmon is too expensive to eat these days."
"Hahahaha!!"
She rattled through the prepared script at machine-gun speed and barely managed to get past it. Orange juice had at least been understandable, but salmon?
Even she, the group leader, had no idea.
Hye-ri snuck a glance at the professor's face and swallowed hard. His expression had completely hardened. Clearly the content of the presentation was not to his liking.
"We have normal ones too! About iron ore..."
She had expected that much. With an elite teammate on the roster, they at least wouldn't be getting a low score.
"Whoa... they really nailed their research."
"Didn't we do iron ore too?"
"Let's revise ours right now!"
"Maybe I should try investing in iron ore once?"
The reaction was excellent, just as predicted. Of course it was—Sora had put that section together.
Well, of course the reaction's good. Look whose material it is~.
They were looking at an A or better for sure. The murmurs rising from every corner of the lecture hall had her feeling relieved—until:
"Good work on the presentation. It was interesting material."
"Thank you, Professor!"
"Um."
"Does someone still have a question for the presenter?"
"No, I wanted to ask you, Professor. Can things like orange juice and salmon even be called commodities? Aren't they not commodities?"
Hye-ri's heart lurched. Her chest wasn't as big as Sora's, but she had never once felt she came up short anywhere.
That bitch is doing this on purpose to screw us over, right?
A female classmate she was not on particularly good terms with. Of all the points to pick at, she had to dig into the one Hye-ri had been most worried about. The presentation itself had gone well, but if the topic itself got disqualified, it was all for nothing. And the professor's face had definitely looked unhappy.
"Orange juice and salmon—I just double-checked the salmon myself—are both commodities."
"Is that so...?"
"Then is squid a commodity too, Professor!"
"Hahaha!"
"Huh? No! While we're on the subject, let me explain..."
It was limited to goods with high global consumption and predictable production volumes. In other words, wild-caught squid that could not be farmed did not qualify as a commodity.
Most of the salmon that reached dinner tables was farmed. From an industrial standpoint, salmon was practically stamped out of a factory.
It just takes two years to grow.
The difference was production time. Being a living creature, of course it took time to mature. If demand forecasting failed? Then yes, by the law of supply and demand, the price could fall.
"I'll take the special nature of salmon as a commodity, and the fact that you bet on a short, as positive factors in the grading."
"Ooooh~~!!"
It was no different from any other commodity. If anything, the originality of the idea earned high marks.
"I should've done something like that!"
"So you get more points for picking something weird..."
"Group D is killing it."
"Anything else besides salmon?"
The lecture hall was bound to get noisy. Even with the same research, you could score higher this way.
That's not what this is.
Watching the students' reactions, Hye-ri's expression turned bitter. He was not handing out free extra points. The more specialized the sector, the scarcer the data. Grasping the market structure was harder. And above all, the idea itself.
He had taken the trigger of Norway and China's relationship recovery and flipped it on its head.
Kids these days might not even know.
The body that awarded the Nobel Peace Prize was in Norway. In 2010, Chinese democracy activist Liu Xiaobo had received the Nobel Peace Prize. Why give him the Peace Prize? The Chinese Communist Party had seized on the pretext and imposed a de facto economic retaliation by controlling Norway's salmon exports. But now they were drawing close to China again. So salmon prices should rise.
Myeong-cheol could have arrived at that much himself.
"It's true? Salmon prices are dropping these days!"
"Where'd you see that?"
"I googled salmon futures."
"That senior's not just some airhead after all."
"The sushi place in my neighborhood raised prices, though. Weird..."
Reality moved differently. For commodities, a "futures market" existed that priced in expected future values.
It was already priced in.
Everything he himself had thought of—the market already knew. And it was trying to price in the next future. It had read the future of the future.
The analytical power was enough to make him click his tongue in admiration. His earlier impression had not been wrong. Chan-wook possessed an uncommon talent. From time to time he spat out bizarre remarks that left people flustered, but—
"Senior's the best."
"Could you teach us some microeconomics?"
"What's microeconomics? Missy ajummas know all about it."
Perhaps they simply could not understand a genius. The ideas were simply too brilliant.
"It's the type of woman you see a lot in Dongtan."
"Ooooh!"
"They mostly have that kind of figure.."
"Ooooh~!"
"Senior, do you want to get hit?"
Well... yeah?
They were so brilliant they sometimes caused chaos. Right now he was already fighting with the top first-year student.
Haa...
Watching Sora and Chan-wook like that, Hye-ri let out a sigh. Presenting had been hell for her. Thankfully it had worked out. The evaluation would at least not be bad. No—if even what her senior had done worked out—
"Must be nice~."
"Hm?"
"Your whole group is good at everything~. I'm the leader and I still have to do the research myself. I'm dying over here."
"Yeah, freeloading on the bus."
The same girl who had tried to trip them up earlier. Hye-ri put on a bright smile and played along with Juha's words. That was what suited her—the department's cheerful mood-maker with the bubbly personality.
Everyone else has such strong personalities, they're all so outstanding, maybe that's why I have no presence.
She swallowed the private worry.
"How did you even think of salmon?"
On the way home from school.
Something had changed from before.
This girl has zero romance cells.
It made him reconsider physiognomy all over again. Sora was throwing stock questions at him once more.
"Salmon's relatively easy to predict."
"Even for a commodity that special?"
"What's special about it!"
There were not just one or two kinds of commodities. The whole point was that there were so many varieties.
Having specialized knowledge is important for investing, but—
Having a wide defensive range was also a skill. The ability to exploit situations in the right place at the right time.
"How long does it take salmon to grow?"
"I know how to eat it just fine."
"Two years. So if you look at production volume from two years ago, you can roughly estimate this year's harvest, right?"
2015 had been the period when the most salmon was being raised. Therefore this year would see a large salmon harvest, and more than that—
It's also tightly linked to the economy.
It was not quite a luxury item, but it was still a food ingredient with a certain price point. So it sold well only when the economy was good.
"The economy's been good since last year."
"Yes. Stocks have risen a lot too."
"Meaning production was high last year as well. And it's going to stay high for a while."
In other words, prices would stay cheap for some time. There were commodities that were good to trade in each particular period like this.
"You like flounder?"
"If I had to say, I like it."
"How's the price these days?"
"Expensive."
"In about a year it'll get cheap."
Flounder.
It needed one year plus alpha of growth time. Because it was mostly consumed only in Korea, no futures market existed for it, but since it was farmed, price prediction was still possible.
To predict it properly you'd have to buy paid information and analyze it, but—
The truth was that the commodities market was the classic playground of global big players. Information was the weapon, so for retail investors it was a tilted playing field. The swings up and down were brutal—the so-called retail shakeout. Even he had limits to what he could predict. He had only forecast the basic cycle. Since the evaluation period was two months out, looking a bit further, it was almost certain to be correct.
"I want to eat flounder."
"Right now?"
"There's no fish tastier than flounder. It only got cheap because of mass farming—back in the day it was one of the premium species. Even now it's expensive in Japan."
A loud gulp of saliva was audible. Seemed Sora liked flounder too.
Honestly flounder is all about the chojang sauce.
That firm, springy texture. There was no room for argument that it was the fish that paired best when dipped in spicy soy-vinegar sauce.
As an investor it was also a good opportunity. He had been thinking of explaining the value of flounder and maybe getting a meal out of it when—
KakaoTalk!
"Who is it?"
"Dunno, probably some fucking Kakao ad message. Huh? It's Hye-ri."
"Hye-ri? She didn't message me?"
A KakaoTalk came in. They were on friendly terms, but not close enough that she would contact him with no particular reason.
Figures.
"What'd she say?"
"You don't need to know."
"Aw, why! She's my friend."
"Well, friendship turns out to be thinner than it looks."
"?"
Not flounder, but—
He might get to eat something else.