Goddess of Victory
Yeouido.
In the place they called Korea's Wall Street, a peculiar phenomenon had been observed of late.
Thud!
A cigarette butt hit the ground.
Careless people committing petty crimes existed everywhere, of course.
"Fuck."
"Fuck."
"Fuck."
But there were a lot of them here.
Crowds of people with the word permanently glued to their mouths were stubbing out fully smoked cigarettes and tossing them aside. The area around the benches was turning into a garbage dump.
At a glance they might have looked like a pack of brainless thugs.
"Motherfucker, seriously."
"I can't tell if I'm trading stocks or just gambling at this point."
"I'm not even joking—spinning the slots at Kangwon Land would give you better odds of winning."
They were office workers.
They worked here in Yeouido.
And Yeouido was the heart of Korean finance.
Hooo~
What was really burning down wasn't the cigarettes—it was the insides of the securities firm people.
They were taking the recent market plunge with their entire bodies.
"Just stick to macro and milk it, I keep saying."
"Easy to say."
"This is genuinely not the time for stocks. If I were a retail investor I'd have parked everything in deposits for a full year."
They had no choice.
Institutional investors.
Like it or not, they had to keep the money moving.
They were running the most conservative trading they could manage.
Volatility, fucking hell.
Even that wasn't working in this market.
It was thrashing around like a roller coaster; nothing was predictable. When volatility got this extreme, even hedges stopped working. It could spike up or crash down at any moment.
On fundamentals the market was undervalued.
Yet the downward pressure was so fierce it created a bizarre flow.
"Can't even trust the fundamentals."
"Yeah……."
"If rate hikes keep going like this, something in the economic system is going to blow."
Fair enough.
The U.S. rate hikes.
Every investor carried at least one scar from them.
It's not going to be another bank collapsing somewhere, right?
Black Monday in 1987.
The dot-com bubble in 2000.
The subprime mortgage crisis in 2008.
Major events that shook not only America but the entire global economy.
The common thread among all three:
"Yeah, it does feel ominous."
"They haven't raised them that much yet……."
"It's different from back then. The base rate still hasn't even hit 3%!"
America's excessive tightening had been the starting point.
When the U.S. jacked rates like maniacs, one piece of the economic system always broke.
That's why the conspiracy theories exist.
They're doing this on purpose, right?
Deliberately collapsing the economy to reinforce dollar hegemony and scoop up overseas assets at fire-sale prices.
Hooo~
Korean finance people couldn't treat that as a joke.
They were one of the countries that had actually been burned.
The 1997 foreign exchange crisis.
The story that America detonated it to devour emerging markets still got casually retold even now.
"It'll either blow or not once we hit 5%."
"Just imagining 5% is terrifying!"
"With national debt and leverage this high, 5% would be an end-of-the-world-level crisis and then some."
It wasn't that severe yet.
Even so, the Yeouido finance crowd couldn't help trembling with anxiety.
Conditioned reflex.
Only people who already knew the taste of lemon started drooling the moment they saw one.
"Banks' loan-loss provisions are climbing in a way that doesn't look good either."
"ERP is still below the ten-year average."
"You mean the equity risk premium?"
They knew a lot.
They had lived through a lot.
And that was exactly what made them hesitate when judgment mattered most.
Could be another 2011-style U.S. credit downgrade for all we know.
The risk factors weren't just one or two.
That was why being an expert and being able to predict stock prices were completely separate things.
"Yeah, this is not the time to buy stocks."
"Screw it up and you could end up going puff like popcorn."
"Puff?"
"There were those assholes strutting around talking about Nasdaq. I had them figured out the second they started acting superior. Tsk tsk."
Ugly rumors were circulating too.
With prices crashing this hard, failed investors showing up was only natural.
Those U.S. equity funds really were too hot for a while.
The American stock market had climbed nonstop for the past year.
Even while the Korean market was completely dead.
Funds running U.S. equities had posted massive gains.
Industry people had envied them, but—
The peak always arrived right around then.
The article had phrased it gently; the reality was that suicides wouldn't have been surprising.
"Looks like they levered up hard."
"Christ, those lunatics……."
"We're in no position to talk. We need to be careful too."
Fear was spreading.
It hadn't reached the investment banks yet, but caution never hurt.
Thwack!
Seven-year prop trader Kim Ik-soo finished talking with his friends and headed back up to the office.
They all belonged to different securities firms.
But their views were the same.
Lately the market was impossible to read even an inch ahead.
They had planned to just catch their breath until a trend solidified.
"A rebound?"
"There's someone who sees it that way."
"Who. Which analyst."
The new kid on the trading team was spouting nonsense.
Even multi-year veterans were keeping quiet right now.
Well, among regular traders…
There were always a few who did crazy shit.
It was client money, so the downside was basically free.
But prop traders.
They ran the company's own capital.
The absolute rule was never to lose it.
"It's, uh……."
"So who is it?"
"Not an analyst."
"Trader? Or economist?"
"A YouTuber."
"……."
He still didn't get it.
The old regular-trader instincts were still hanging around.
Whoever the agitator is, doesn't matter.
It happened often enough.
The stock market was hypersensitive to trends.
A celebrity's comment could spark buying sentiment overnight.
But for a moment—
A prop trader was supposed to look at the market with a conservative eye, yet—
Up! Down up up down♪
Up! Down up up down♪
—his thinking seemed ready to shift a little.
There was a difference in how assets were managed.
"Ohh!"
"Once volatility this extreme ends, a trend change makes sense."
"Yeah……, it does."
The trading team staff.
They were all fired up as one.
This wasn't something you could just laugh off as a joke.
A topic that had come up while talking with his friends.
This stream already knew about it.
Puff?
No—it wasn't just knowing.
The CEO of that very asset management firm had watched the stream.
He had even given advice.
Right now was the perfect time to buy stocks, he said.
"I started watching after I heard that story too."
"You weren't watching before?"
"Ah, well, it's not that I wasn't watching…… hehe."
Long.
It had gone completely wrong, and everything after that was exactly as the public already knew.
When an asset management firm CEO talks, it's worth listening to.
Despite the cam-girl exterior, her convictions were sharp.
She had her own view.
One more reason.
People were starting to get curious about who that "oppa" giving the opposite advice actually was.
"Trend reversal?"
"That's how that person sees it, apparently."
"Seems way too early……."
"That's exactly why it's blowing up."
Lately the market was impossible to read even an inch ahead.
It felt like walking through thick fog.
Anyone who could cut through that—
As a fellow investor, you couldn't help feeling respect.
Well, only if they turn out to be right.
Still, it was impossible not to pay attention.
The recent market.
"If our company's foreign-exchange losses get any bigger, the price negotiations on the raw materials we import could hit serious snags……."
Investors weren't the only ones suffering.
Corporations were in full emergency mode too.
Especially for a country like ours.
America ranked second in Korea's export share.
No—actually it was overwhelming.
Most of what got exported to China was intermediate goods.
They got processed and then went to the U.S.
"If I may ask, what's your securities team's view?"
"Ah, it's conservative. They say the recent international situation is more unstable than expected."
"Then costs are going to pile up."
"That's how it'll go……."
If the U.S. economy turned sour?
Korea would take a direct, brutal hit.
Surviving these recessions over and over is basically the Korean economy.
Make a killing in the boom years, then hang on through the bust.
The big conglomerates handled it fine.
They had adapted.
That was why Osung Electronics sat on two hundred trillion in cash equivalents.
"It's definitely a situation that warrants a conservative view, but."
"Ah, yes……."
"I see it a little differently. I wonder if we really need to overreact this much."
"I-is that so?"
Companies below that level were different.
They couldn't just sit on piles of cash forever.
You have to find the right line.
Too much and you fall behind in the market.
Too little and you can't survive the downturn.
Judging that line was my job.
Using the reputation and network I had built.
"The U.S. bond market has frozen up recently."
"The bond market?"
"Yes. When they hike rates this aggressively, the bonds the U.S. government issues stop selling."
I was providing investment advisory to corporations.
A deal that benefited both sides.
The company saves money it would have wasted.
I took a cut of the difference as incentive.
At the same time I walked away with internal information.
"So you're saying the exchange rate will fall?"
"I can't give a definitive answer that far."
"Ah……."
"If the Fed's stance softens even a little, global speculative forces won't be able to keep betting on dollar strength. In other words, the exchange rate stabilizes."
"Ah!"
The man sitting across from me—
the company's CFO—his face lit up with sudden relief.
He had heard exactly what he wanted to hear.
For me it had been a pretty productive stretch of time as well.
This is how it works.
I collected internal information from each company one by one.
That was the real reason I posed as an investment advisor.
The true face of the Korean market.
To grasp it you had to build from the inside, not the surface.
Wiiiing~
Another job successfully closed today.
I was expanding both my internal network and my results, when—
Rachel?
Looks like her asshole is itching.