Entertainment Stocks
Entertainment stocks.
Entertainment.
Surprisingly, it was an industry that still struggled to earn real respect in Korea.
"Really?"
"Yeah."
"Nationalist TV shows keep hyping it up, though."
"You watch that crap…?"
The reason was a deep, long-standing distrust the networks themselves had cultivated. The club members simply couldn't bring themselves to believe in it.
They used it for star image-making way too often.
Did an overseas tour? Huge international fanbase? They'd show up on talk shows like Audio Star and Four Wheels and spin pure nonsense. In reality they hadn't blown up at all — they just strutted around like global superstars.
"These days they're actually doing well, though."
"Yeah, right…"
"How well is 'well,' exactly?"
"So well there's nothing left to compare them to."
"!!"
Back then, that kind of spin still worked. Plenty of Koreans still held a vague, romantic fantasy about anything overseas.
Times have changed.
The internet exploded. YouTube arrived. Not just teens and twentysomethings — even grandfathers and grandmothers were watching. Sure, some people still tuned into nationalist fluff and trashy variety, but most used it to expand their own world. They had finally seen the outside.
They gaslight everyone about how big they are overseas — a couple of Southeast Asia gigs and that's a flex? Can't even chart on Billboard. tsk tsk
The public had matured. The memories, however, remained intact. Looking back now, the whole thing was absurd.
A little like the boy who cried wolf.
A backlash was only natural. The sector still carried a whiff of undervaluation because of it.
"Our idols are just that good."
"Come on~!"
"Idols these days have no soul."
"Like they all rolled off the same factory line…"
"That's exactly what's hard."
"???"
That was the Korean eye talking — a country where high-level music, choreography, and fashion were treated as the bare minimum.
If Korea lags the global standard in some areas, it leads in others.
Popular music was the prime example.
An idol music video spilled from the TV. I'd bought the set out of my own pocket so the broke kids would at least watch something.
"They can dance, I'll give them that."
"But there's no musicality, you know…?"
"Right? FX Island and 3AM were peak."
"Ugh, oldheads."
Taste was personal. Fair enough. But one thing was certain.
Artists like this keep getting produced — every month, every year.
Not the occasional once-in-a-generation genius. A pipeline that could reliably manufacture high-caliber talent. That was the Korean agency advantage.
"From an investment angle, that means stability."
"Oh…"
"Yeah, that tracks."
"The real question is whether it actually makes money, right?"
"Sharp question."
Foreign agencies didn't have this. The systems were fundamentally different.
Overseas, band culture is already mature.
They scouted amateurs who had already made some noise. In practice, the company was just management. Korea, by contrast, raised them from zero. From a business standpoint, those two models were worlds apart.
"So the company holds all the cards!"
"More or less."
"Ahh~!"
"Then it's worth investing in."
If a foreign agency's artist flaked, the agency flaked with them — management was the entire job.
A Korean agency raised them from nothing.
They were practically the artist's mother and father. Industry eyes were watching, so artists rarely dared to walk. Building a single idol group cost tens of billions of won. Even after success, jumping ship was never easy.
LIVE — Music Net!
One or two artists couldn't shake a whole company. It was, in fact, an attractive investment.
I don't remember the exact surge window.
But later it would become one of the market's leading sectors. Its weight in the market would grow. I was handing them a honey sector on a plate. Not a promise it would moon tomorrow — just that the opportunity was real.
Which students will join Dream Girls Season 3?
And then an event arrived that made it possible. The Dream Girls Sora had entered.
"Sora went undercover as our club's representative."
"Ooooh!"
"Fuck…"
"Sora's gone completely sideways."
An idol discovery program. The final winner became a future superstar.
If you knew who that would be…
You could pour money into the related companies and print cash. That was why Sora had been planted. Inside information — the incidents and accidents only people on the inside ever saw coming.
"There's no way I'd get picked."
"You've been dropping the formal speech pretty naturally lately."
"You expect me to keep using it?"
She clearly wasn't happy about it. She'd been shoved into the show and had never wanted to be there in the first place.
Of course.
The other contestants — people like Suhyun, who joined for fun — were a tiny minority. Most were dead serious. They'd been chasing the dream since childhood. Some were already trainees under agencies.
"Do you have any idea how mortifying it was?"
"Still, being on TV must've been fun."
"Did you meet any celebrities?"
"Kyaa, celebrities~!"
No chance she'd get picked. Thinking that way was only natural. But from an investor's perspective—
This show is an investment too.
Literally a show. A show program. It had never been built out of pure love for discovering K-pop stars. Networks wanted ratings. Agencies wanted nationwide promotion for their artists.
Contestant No. 74!
What they needed for that was kindling — content hot enough to set viewers and netizens on fire.
"So what did you do there?"
"Spoilers! Spoilers!"
"Must've been nerve-wracking."
"I wasn't nervous. I just did whatever they told me. Whatever they told me…"
Whether she wanted it or not. Sora had zero drive.
She'd rather get eliminated.
She hadn't signed up by choice. But as the old saying goes—
"You may have walked in of your own free will, but leaving is another matter entirely."
— from The Child Who Discovered Their Gender Identity
Her own wishes were irrelevant. Once the cameras rolled, the network called the shots.
And if you run the numbers from the network's side…
The conclusion was clean and obvious. I'd simply projected it rationally.
"Music is meant to be enjoyed, after all."
"Once it becomes a job, people tend to forget that."
"There's a moment when you realize that those who try can never beat those who enjoy."
"That's insanely high praise?!"
"Whoa — Shim Aram is famous for being brutal."
"I had no idea Sora had that kind of musical talent."
"Neither did I."
The judges' reactions. Only an investor's eye could see the capitalist coloring mixed into them.
It's always like that.
Money sat above everything in this world — the same way Gordon Ramsay ended up shooting a coffee commercial.
Same principle. No matter how big the judges were, they still had to watch the network's face.
"Doesn't look like she's had professional training."
"That voice is incredible."
"I want to bring her to our company and teach her everything from scratch!"
"Fuck."
"Sora."
"Sounds like she passed."
"They barely ever give compliments — this is huge!"
Talent like Sora was rare. From the network's perspective, they absolutely wanted her through.
Vocal ability can always be trained later.
And Korean agencies were built exactly for that. It was the whole premise of the program. The contestants who passed would live together and receive systematic training from K-pop specialists.
"Suhyun passed too?"
"Who's Suhyun?"
"We've got a ghost member."
"Heh heh."
She had claimed that glory as well. Suhyun, who had entered alongside Sora, had sailed through with flying colors. She flashed a V-sign with her fingers, preening. She'd overheard the result on her way out of the audition.
With two of them inside, it's doable.
Investment intel. Information that hadn't been filtered through network editing or audience interpretation — and available before the broadcast even aired.
"Before the show even airs."
"Ooooh!"
"But still."
"Can that actually turn into money?"
It was extremely valuable. Depending on how you used it, it could be worth tens or even hundreds of billions.
A top-tier celebrity doesn't generate pocket change.
A premium attached itself to the company's valuation. What people called "the future" got priced in.
It was already happening. The Big Three agencies — the three major entertainment houses listed on KOSDAQ — had already seen their stock prices explode.
"We're late."
"We're gonna get stuck holding the bag."
"Plop."
An idol program was airing? The institutions that heard the news had front-run the trade. What happened after the live broadcast — the club members already understood that much.
That's the standard institutional playbook.
They were drowning in money. Drowning in time. They could afford multi-year horizons and diversified portfolios for safety. But the smaller, scrappier shops—
"At that pace, when the hell do you ever grow the money?"
"Well…"
"We're not even in a position to care about that."
"I can't even protect my own account right now."
"We've got to try."
"??!"
—took far more aggressive bets. It was time for the club kids to get their hands dirty in live trading.
The fund I run…
Its core strategy was harvesting volatility. Bluntly: day-trading garbage stocks. Everything we'd been doing so far. Do it as a group, and that was an "institution."
"I'm putting up ten billion won of my own money as seed capital. Incentives will be paid based on performance."
"For real?!"
"Whoa, ten billion…"
"No take-backs later, right?"
A small institution. Investment experience had to be built from a young age. And as college students right now—
It's not early at all.
I began teaching them the investment philosophy of the CW Fund.