True Hunting
Something was off.
It didn't take long for her to realize it.
"For real? Then isn't this going to explode?"
At first, she was triumphant. Everything seemed to be playing out exactly as she'd predicted.
This is the kind of thing you grab right away.
All she had to do was find the courage and buy. Stocks had never felt so easy.
That sense of ease lasted all of a moment. Her usual trading patterns stopped working.
Huh?
For Seo-eun, it was pure bewilderment. She hadn't made any particular mistake.
"It just keeps dropping — what's going on? Did some new bad news drop?"
The moment she bought, a −3% loss stamped itself across her screen. It was the kind of situation that could scramble anyone's mind — but she'd seen this coming.
That's why I prepared.
Seo-eun hadn't been trading for show. She'd learned one thing: you needed a bigger seed.
The stock market was a game that favored whoever had more money. Bigger gains on the way up. Averaging down on the way down.
Maxed out every loan, baby.
Student loan: two million won. Sunshine Loan Youth: three million. She'd pumped an extra five million into her seed money and bought in, aiming for a rebound.
Once again, the prediction went wrong. The chart lifted its head for a heartbeat — then slammed straight back down.
Wh-what?
It made no sense. The stock had already taken a heavy correction. And that was only the beginning. Every trade that had been working so well for her started failing, one after another, as if the whole thing had been a lie.
Failure after failure. And because her seed had been so large, the losses snowballed just as fast.
……
She had talent. She'd been certain that stocks were the path made just for her.
"What……?"
Just a few days ago — she never could have imagined things turning out like this.
I-I'm a human indicator?
A viewer's donation snapped her wide awake. Right now, she looked like nothing more than a failed investor. Someone who simply couldn't trade. Because she was sitting on losses.
Spite took over. It wasn't that she was bad at this. She'd simply been unlucky. She traded to prove it — and the more she traded, the worse it got.
"Ah — aah."
The losses kept growing. And ironically, so did the stream's popularity.
This is insane.
None of it felt good. She felt like she'd become a clown for the crowd. This wasn't what she'd wanted. She'd wanted to become someone like Sora unnie.
Click. Snap.
Something in her head simply broke. By the time she came back to herself, she was taking out another loan.
A KameoTalk emergency fund loan. Unlike the student loan or the Sunshine Loan Youth, the interest rate was high.
What the hell did I just do.
She knew it was dangerous. She'd been driven so far out onto the cliff edge that her hands had moved without her permission.
She swallowed hard.
The thought that she could just win it back — there was no reason left in her head to push that idea away.
Just a few good trades. Win it back, refill the account, done.
That was how she'd always traded, after all. The stocks Seo-eun bought were momentum plays — the kind that swung five percent in either direction in a blink. Volatility interruptions, even limit-ups, were routine.
The idea that she could pull profits out of that chaos — she still couldn't grasp how absurd it was.
"The manipulators are just shaking it out, right……? They'll push it back up, right?"
Seo-eun was not Sora.
Momentum stocks.
For months on end, it kept climbing. And it rewired the thinking of everyone who bought it.
Just hold through it ~~ just hold through it ~~
Just buy it and hold ~~
It's going up more than 10x~
Because all they'd ever seen was the climb. They stopped questioning the company's value. And the people who did question it weren't any better. They ran their own fair-value calculations, sure —
Shorts are about to hit and we'll get a correction
I'll buy the dip lmao
Even that was in the palm of someone's hand. Pointing out they were being played with was a waste of breath.
They made you want to buy. And when the price came down, they cleaned house from below — dumping their shares onto the retail investors waiting at the bottom.
"That's roughly the situation."
"Th-that happened to me?"
"Yeah."
And the person it had happened to — Seo-eun — had been trading paper stocks. She'd made decent money at first.
When they feed you easy profits, there's always a reason.
In the end, you were always meant to get bagheld. They didn't pump a stock for free.
"So those are the manipulators."
"What?"
"I've heard about them too. That there are these people called manipulators who control stock prices……"
"What is this manipulator nonsense."
It was a common occurrence in the Korean market. Retail investors loved blaming the Illicit Stock Manipulators.
As if.
Those operators were nothing more than small-time institutions. They didn't have the power to move companies worth trillions of won. The real apex predators — foreign investors and Domestic Financial Institutions — toyed with these stocks whenever they got bored.
"Toyed with them?"
"They day-trade stocks that retail keeps propping up nicely."
"How do you even know that……"
"Because they load formulas into their systems and let them run."
Program trading, they called it. And when that machinery locked onto a well-hyped momentum stock —
You occasionally got the kind of rally that made no sense at all.
Tenfold runners. That wasn't a realm you reached just because there was good news. It was a playground for institutions and foreign capital. They bought, they sold, they scalped.
Saw the news and YouTube, jumped on the last car
Heard it was gonna be the next Samsung
Parked it long-term and forgot about it
They ran the price up and up — then cleaned house. Because they were confident they could dump the volume onto retail.
And the people who don't understand that — they assumed the stock was rising for some real reason. They piled every meaning they could invent onto a climbing chart.
"But still."
"Hm?"
"They really are developing graphene, right? Even if not now, someday……"
"Haa."
Sure, graphene was good technology. And foldable phones would eventually hit the market. That much was true.
But there's no reason it has to be that company.
If a company were actually that good, they'd swallow it private. They wouldn't kindly educate retail investors about it.
"That's why I told you. Eat and discard."
"Th-that was what you meant?"
"Yeah."
She understood none of these market mechanics. All he could see was greed, piled up to the brim.
Anyone can make mistakes.
Sora had been the same at first — all momentum, no brains, diving into runners and getting her ass handed to her.
"……"
But the process was different. Why Seo-eun had bought, and how she'd handled being underwater afterward — both were pathetic.
She loses her mind over a few bagheld positions.
Her will had broken. She'd given up researching the market and chosen to ask for help instead. That was the difference between her and Sora. She was missing the most fundamental skill an investor needed.
"Isn't that too much?"
"What is?"
"Toyed with…… then individual investors take all the damage, don't they?"
"That's how the world works. The people up in the sky don't give a damn what happens to the ones below."
She was appealing to emotion. Her personality itself didn't look compatible with investing. Drip, drip — all she knew how to do was cry. It might have been deeply tragic for her, but —
Then why should I care about you.
He felt nothing. Beyond a face that was decent enough to look at, she didn't hold much meaning.
"I get your situation, but."
"Yes……"
"You spilled the water, so you clean it up. Get a part-time job, sell your body, grind your life away and pay off the debt. Right?"
Trying to extract sympathy was useless. Investors as a species were cold-blooded.
Having massive tits doesn't make you special.
Everything he taught Sora — that was for his own benefit. He'd judged her useful. He wasn't idle enough to help people who weren't.
"Um, so."
"Something else to say?"
"I heard from Hye-ri unnie that sunbae is interested in that kind of thing……"
"Interested in what?"
"Y-your body. I mean — mine."
Unless there was a price attached, of course. That was the law of the capitalist market.
Hye-ri, you little bitch.
She'd carried out his request. And she wasn't the type to miss the point of what he'd asked.
"W-well, just once, maybe."
He decided to try buying this stuck-up girl at a discount.