Theme Stocks
Talent acquisition.
The more famous and established a company, the more carefully it tends to this—and for good reason.
Take Oseong Electronics and Sungkyunkwan University, for instance.
POSTECH and POSCO. Chung-Ang University and the Tusan Group. Yonam Institute of Technology and Helji Electronics.
Every major conglomerate has at least one school it either runs outright or bankrolls. The point is to cultivate talent optimized for the company itself.
For me, right now, that was impossible. I had neither the capital nor the slightest inclination.
Quality over quantity.
Idiots with nothing but a shiny diploma were being mass-produced by the tens of thousands even as I sat here. This was a country whose educational fever ranked first in the world—and yet Korea remained a financial backwater. It was hardly unrelated to the way the older generation still muttered that stocks were a sure path to ruin.
"Oppa, that felt so good."
"I liked it too."
I think I'm getting addicted to sex with him♡ Oh god, what do I do.
Hye-ri's insides were solid. Aside from the way she clamped down so tight it almost hurt, the feel of her was top-tier.
This is why youth is a cheat code for women.
She dropped by my place every so often. The purpose, of course, was to roll around like a pair of monkeys. Right now she had her face buried in my chest, squealing.
That kind of fresh, unspoiled reaction was still new to me.
"Oppa."
"Yeah?"
"Stocks are trending in the department too."
"That so?"
"I fanned the flames from the side. Did good, right?"
Two birds, one stone. Hye-ri was working hard at everything I'd entrusted to her.
Stocks were something you only got better at by actually doing them.
Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration — Thomas Edison.
He'd said it to emphasize the one percent of talent, not the effort. But it was also true that without the ninety-nine percent of work, the whole thing fell apart.
Korean society's rejection of the stock market. I considered that the single biggest reason no famous investors ever came out of this country.
Well—this is Hankuk University.
Talent, at least, was already vetted. Give them experience and I could raise some decent employees.
School ties. Along with regional and blood connections, they were the stickiest kind of network there was. Played right, I could turn Hankuk University into a stable talent pipeline.
"Everyone except Sora."
"Sora's not into it?"
"Even when the kids talk stocks, she deliberately ignores them. What a bitch, right~?"
With Hye-ri's help, I planned to build it out gradually. And if possible, pull in people who actually had real ability.
She'll figure herself out.
I'd crammed too much into too short a time. It wouldn't have been strange if the so-called sage mode had kicked in.
Slurp.
Ssssuck—
I was getting hard again.
We finished one round and lazed around. The old me—the pre-regression me—would have been wiped out and dead to the world. But this was a young body. And a fresh girl. Twenty years old: the golden window that never comes twice in a lifetime.
Fuck, she tastes incredible.
I kissed her. I forced out a tongue that still didn't know how to kiss hard and played with it. Her salivary glands, pumping like something broken, were natural juice. I sucked and bit until my jaw went numb.
"That was delicious."
"For me too."
"I'll pick a stock recommendation and send it over KakaoTalk."
"Thank you. But more than that, I just want to stay with you longer♡"
Her body was flushed and warm from being taken. I ran my hand roughly through Hye-ri's bob as she made it clear she didn't want to leave.
Unfortunately, I was a busy man myself. I gave her one firm hug and saw her out the door.
That went better than I expected.
Of course it had. A university freshman. It was like dropping a fifth-job maxed-out character into a beginner hunting ground full of squirrels.
And this wasn't limited to campus life. No—my main field was stocks, obviously.
Buy order has been executed.
You only know what a planted seed becomes after time has passed. Whether it turns into porridge or rice, you find out once the results are in.
Hmm~ this ticker does look a little fishy.
I focused on my own returns. Raising people might have been the stated main goal, but without money, nothing held together.
I was trading mostly junk stocks. More precisely, I was buying names where a manipulation play looked likely to kick off.
No matter how well you read a chart, it wasn't easy. And even if you found one—would the stock actually go up?
That depends entirely on the Illicit Stock Manipulators' mood.
The window was extremely narrow. Big money was impossible. The operators would never sit still and watch someone else feast.
I had one more card. The simple fact that I knew the future.
Right. This happened.
In the stock market, future information rolled around more commonly than people thought. It was even coming out of the news I had on right now. No—the bait had been floating for years. It had been a campaign promise in the presidential election around 2012.
Everyone had known. If he became president, he would push green policy hard.
The question was whether he'd actually do it.
You never knew until you opened the box. Canceling campaign promises after the fact was routine. Or they got slashed, or rewritten into something else entirely.
And nuclear phase-out, of all things—
Honestly, if you looked at it rationally, it was a policy that should never have been implemented.
Green policy. It sounded nice. Nobody hated the idea of being eco-friendly. The problem was feasibility. Technically and practically, the gap was enormous.
The reason we could use electricity cheaply was nuclear power. Korea in particular was heavily dependent on it.
We're basically an island nation.
The nuclear phase-out current wasn't unique to Korea. Europe, too, was shutting down reactors and replacing them with renewables. But Korea was not Europe. Hydro and wind were scarce, and natural gas had to be imported at punishing prices—liquefied, shipped by sea, then re-gasified. Compared to Europe, which took it straight through pipelines, the price difference was night and day.
So they'd cobbled together solar and offshore wind as the answer. Even that, most experts agreed, was a stopgap.
One: Korea's low solar irradiance.
Two: Korea's low and inconsistent wind speeds.
Three: Uncertainty from typhoons and other natural disasters.
Four: The inefficiency born of points one and two.
Five: Overcoming one and two required destroying nature itself.
There was no natural environment suited to the job. You had to force development, and in the process nature got wrecked. Money spent, nature sickened—poison first, medicine later. Experts had reasons to oppose it.
Green policy is a long-term goal for humanity, something to pursue slowly over time.
It was not a short-term "campaign promise" you could actually deliver. The science and technology simply weren't there yet. On top of that, Korea's nuclear tech was top-tier—meaning the odds of a nuclear side-effect blowing up were near zero. Safety, money, environment: the answer was crystal clear.
And yet—nuclear phase-out? For real?
Who the hell actually imagined they'd go through with it?
It wasn't a few bucks—it was tens of trillions of won. Nuclear tech would stagnate, creating latent damage on top of that. At the review stage, the policy would be scaled back or scrapped. That was the rational, reasonable conclusion.
What makes the impossible possible is the power of politics.
National policy sometimes steamrolled efficiency and reason. And that wasn't always a bad thing. Two classic precedents: President Park's eight-lane expressways, and President Kim's nationwide high-speed internet backbone.
Eight-lane highways in a developing country? Right after the IMF crisis, with no money? By the common sense of the time, it looked insane. It met ferocious opposition. But every Korean knows how history scored those calls later.
It would have been nice if the current administration's green policy had turned out the same way. I already knew the answer key from the future.
Buy order has been executed.
I pushed in. Success or failure aside, the tens of trillions poured into the policy would flow into the stock market. I would eat that blind money. And the environment for doing so was already in place.
Account No. 02120−10−697482
Balance: ₩6,103,892
Ammo.
I'd left behind the days of fretting over next week's living expenses. Spare capital was ample. If I went full leverage with margin and unsettled trades, even more so.
And I've already found a stock that looks suspicious.
Korea had more junk stocks than any other country on earth. Remembering which ticker had been shot when, twenty years in the past, was impossible one by one. But I had my edge.
Catalysts. And charts. Work the reverse calculation and the rough flow came into view. I found the best manipulation play on the board.
Crown Capital.
About time I blew something up.
Deputy Manager Kim Min-gu's mood had been foul lately. His incentives had taken a serious hit. They scaled with the profits from pump-and-dump plays—and one operation he'd been eyeing had completely collapsed.
If I'd shot the telecom names now, it would've been perfect. But the accumulation window already passed. Nothing I can do.
Omega Information & Communications. He'd planned to bundle it as a 5G-related play and give it a launch. On the back of a beautiful catalyst called policy. When the government ran a project, the scale was huge. Attention followed. At minimum, a five-bagger had been fully on the table.
Ah, whatever. It's fine.
Policy wasn't a one-shot deal. No point mourning a fish already off the hook.
Next play: something tied to the green policy that had been all over TV lately. The president himself was pushing it. The sector hadn't drawn real attention in years.
Was it around Fukushima? Climbed for the dumbest reasons imaginable.
The 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake. An accident at a nuclear plant had released radiation. People started asking whether nuclear power was fundamentally broken. For a while, solar got the spotlight as an alternative. But the business case was empty. Solar's power-generation capacity had been far too weak.
Honestly, not much different even now.
He was still a securities broker, for what that was worth. You didn't run these plays just because you felt like it. He knew the expert consensus at half-depth. A little technical progress, sure—but unit costs were still high, and Korean land in particular had terrible generation efficiency. Not the kind of thing you built a national-scale megaproject around.
Even accounting for that, it was worth a run.
Suck it dry once, dump the inventory on someone else. That's the whole game.
Stocks moved on expectation. Plenty of retail idiots would convince themselves the tech had actually advanced. A business this stupid didn't need to be real. You just milked the issue to a reasonable point. The media would hype it for free.
Kim Min-gu began accumulating solar-related names.