Investment Trip
"Why is this happening?"
Sora, her drunken haze instantly gone, looked around with a dazed expression. The sight before her defied all common sense.
Why a perfectly good mountain…
A dead mountain. An empty wasteland with nothing on it. Places like that, you could develop. But this was one of the most beautiful regions in Korea, its natural environment preserved intact.
"Why here, of all places?"
"Because the sunlight's excellent, of course. It's a classic granary region. Did you sleep through social studies class?"
"No, I know that much, but…"
She had almost certainly studied harder and done better than he ever had. Not that she knew a thing about this.
No—she's just looking the other way.
Modern society offered high access to information. Anyone who put their mind to it could dig through White House documents. The so-called institutions—professional investment firms—might get there a little later, but the qualitative gap was almost nonexistent. And yet the difference in information power remained huge. Which meant the real reason was nothing special at all.
"Why go out of your way to…"
"To dig up a perfectly good mountain?"
"Yes…"
"When you push national projects hard, a few side effects come with the territory."
Government policy. The kind of business where the biggest money got invested most aggressively. Astronomical sums poured into the market all at once.
If only it were spent exactly where it belonged…
Private companies reviewed projects over long stretches of time. Governments, though, had five-year terms and had to force results out inside that window. Where was the sunlight best? Not just here—massive solar panel arrays were going up all over the country, in Gyeongsang-do, Gangwon-do, everywhere.
"This is what happens when you ignore commercial viability and focus only on producing results."
"It's past ignoring at this point."
"Mm."
"It feels completely backwards…"
The spectacle of destroying nature for the sake of nature. The government itself probably never wanted this. The people writing the checks and the people executing the work were different parties, so of course the hands and feet never matched.
It's always been like that.
It happened every time the administration changed. This government wasn't uniquely stupid. What mattered was the investment angle—how to turn an event like this into profit.
"If you research ahead of time and invest, you can make money."
"Is that… legitimate profit?"
"Why?"
"Honestly, it's no different from scooping up tax money that got dumped on the ground."
He had known this even in the past. The only difference was that this time he had bet bigger, with real conviction.
It's a hard reality to accept, sure.
Eco-friendliness was necessary, of course—to slow global warming and preserve precious natural environments. But he still found it hard to believe they would shove it through this recklessly. He understood Sora's point, too.
"That's what an investor is. A job that thinks differently from everyone else."
"Even if it's not morally right?"
"I don't think about that."
Someone might frame it as good versus evil. Or attack it with political prejudice.
Not my problem.
That was ordinary people's thinking. Criticizing a policy for being inefficient was the same. While they burned their energy on the wrong things, the investor swept up the money. That was all.
"The important thing is the ability to look at any information objectively. Got it?"
"Yes…"
An investor's common sense. The process of making that into your own way of thinking was growth as an investor. She was still far too young.
And she suddenly made a ton of money.
She had pulled in eye-popping returns. Small success at a young age could sometimes turn poisonous. So he had forced the lesson on her. He knew it might come as something of a shock.
Trudge, trudge.
Looks like it hit her pretty hard.
She stayed silent the whole way down the mountain, head hanging in a way that didn't suit her at all. The sun was starting to set; the light was fading. The travel mood had died as well.
"Shall we head back?"
"Yeah, let's."
Not a home-run kind of day, it seemed. A shame, but they would have to wait for next time.
Well, good enough.
They had eaten plenty of good food and he had sexually harassed her plenty. He was satisfied.
Yeouido's securities district. You could call it the heart of Korean finance. But the blood flowing through this place was far from pure.
"Deputy Lee!"
"Ah… it's you."
"How's performance lately?"
"Same as always."
Lee Deok-su, trader at Gaemi Investment Securities, turned around. There was the face of his ever-slick colleague who had joined the company at the same time.
Even something like that… is better than nothing.
He was the only one left. Every other peer had been "encouraged" to resign. Traders had extremely short average careers.
"Same as always isn't good enough."
"What am I supposed to do? The market's a fucking mess."
"True enough."
"Those foreign bastards… they play the game like absolute shit, you know?"
He meant it in more than one sense. The work stress was no joke. One careless mistake and hundreds of millions evaporated.
And then you follow the colleagues who left first.
It was pressure no ordinary person could handle. No amount of resolve or experience made it easy. Cigarettes weren't optional—they were mandatory. In the rare free moment you had to drag smoke into your lungs just to feel like you could breathe.
"When have they ever not played it like shit?"
"Lately it's especially fucking bad. No direction, just whipping it up and down—if you grab the wrong position and get liquidated at options expiry, I'm off to do construction work."
"Haha!"
It was a different world from the one the ants saw. The more you understood the stock market, the more it looked like a den of demons.
Those ant bastards probably think their own stocks are the whole universe.
Futures, options, exchange rates. There was no end to the things you had to watch. And in those derivatives markets, the foreigners' thuggery was enormous. Not just Korea—they twisted the markets of the US, Japan, China, Australia, all of them. They threw every kind of fake they could invent.
"You worry too much."
"I'm just pissed off."
"If it's really that rough, just shake down the ants."
"That so?"
You couldn't help losing money. Against the advanced financial nations, Korea always came up short in both experience and capital, so the foreigners always took their cut. But there was a way to make it back. Just as a middle-schooler shaken down by high-schoolers turned around and shook down elementary kids, the institutions that lost money to foreigners went after the ants' pockets.
When your condition's bad, you've got no choice. Follow the fire ants around and shake them down.
A tilted playing field. Unilaterally favorable to the securities firms. Even setting short-selling aside, there was more than one or two advantages.
"Got anything good lately? Share if you do."
"For free?"
"Not free. There's professional courtesy."
"Fine then. I was actually going to use this myself, but my futures feel has been solid lately."
There were illegal angles too. What the ants were doing—which stocks they bought at what price, sold at what price—was logged in real time. They were the firm's clients, after all. In principle you weren't supposed to leak it, but the fact that it got used under the table was a secret only the ants didn't know.
If this guy's talking like that, is this a real fire ant who actually knows what he's doing?
The programs came with basic settings. In a rising market you snatched the ants' volume; in a falling market you dumped onto them. And that wasn't all. Every once in a long while you found a "real one"—ants who were terrifyingly good at stocks—and you tracked them.
"This one's seed was originally five hundred thousand won."
"Five hundred thousand? You joking?"
"Listen to the end of a Korean sentence, will you. You know how much he ran it up to?"
Just as there were card sharks among gamblers, the stock world had similar types. Insane feel. Or connections—cases that used insider information to generate massive short-term profits.
Even so, if the seed was only five hundred thousand…
If you focused on following those types, making money was easy. You bought first and sold first. So he had expectations. If it was a real good one, he would treat the guy to a big meal. But no matter how well you did, if the seed was that pathetic—
"Two hundred million."
"What?!"
"Two hundred million. So four hundred times."
"Over how many years?"
"How many years? Three months, you bastard."
Three fingers. Deok-su's thoughts stopped for a moment. It simply would not fit inside common sense.
Even if I went full-time, doubling in a month would be a stretch!
Even granting the doubles, there was a problem. 2 × 2 × 2 = 8. Three straight months of doubling, compounded, still only got you to eight times. In live trading you had a chance of losing. Going bust instead of doubling wouldn't be strange at all. That was only a theoretical number.
"Is this another ELW-style loophole play?"
"That got patched ages ago."
"Yeah, but nothing says something similar can't blow up again."
It was hard to accept. Someone with that kind of ability. In a job where ability was salary, it meant someone better than him. No way a mere retail ant could be like that.
Did he exploit a program-trading loophole?
There were places you could guess. Modern stocks split into what humans did and what programs did. Problems sometimes cropped up on the latter side—because they only moved according to fixed settings.
"If something like that blew again it'd be chaos. At least director-level heads would roll."
"There are some sneaky ant bastards out there, I'm telling you."
Sometimes the same pattern produced periodic mistakes. There had been an incident where people targeted that and pocketed the arbitrage. The ELW LP loophole trades. Plenty of ants had sat on money piles after that 2012 case.
If it was something like that, sure, possible.
Four hundred times on pure skill? In five years as a trader and ten years in finance, he had never heard of a multiple like that.
"Thinking that way isn't unreasonable, but…"
"It's not?"
"It's stock trading, first of all. He rotated through names, so it doesn't look like insider info either. Nothing to lose—want to take a look?"
Of course the world was wide. There were lottery winners and people who hit 777 at the casino; four hundred times in stocks wasn't that strange. Maybe there was one person with extremely, extremely, extremely good luck. Every stock he bought went up several times, or something.
Click, click!
Deok-su examined the ant's trading records. The more he looked, the more he had to click his tongue.
They did go up several times each, but…
The important part was the detail. The skill at catching bottoms was no ordinary thing. He tracked the movements of the Illicit Stock Manipulators and nailed the timing to fire. Good thing they were checking the records—if he had watched it live, he wouldn't even have known what the guy was doing.
Gulp.
Defeat. And at the same time, cheers. If you could use a fire ant like this, you could haul in serious profits.
No matter how high you fly or how hard you crawl, you're still just an ant.