Stock Community
The stock community.
Three months of returns.
Balance: ₩200,006,974
The number of digits had changed — a lot.
The days when five hundred thousand won was everything now belonged to the past.
Still, risk has to be managed.
Gains beyond this? If he really wanted them, nothing was impossible. All it would take was cranking the risk a little higher. In the derivatives markets — futures, options — that kind of thing was ordinary. Fortunes multiplied tens of thousands of times in five minutes flat. For someone whose living expenses still ran tight, it simply wasn't an option. No — he had never intended to go there in the first place.
No need to bother.
Making a killing and retiring was not the goal of his life. He was going to try again. Wall Street. The center of global finance. That was where he belonged. And for that, certain things were indispensable. He meant to build a legend of investing, step by careful step.
Hit by the enemy.
His recent trades had not been producing particularly good results. Investing was never a guarantee of constant success, of course — but this felt different.
So it finally came.
It wasn't that his judgment had been wrong, or that Illicit Stock Manipulators were shaking out the retail crowd. There was a third party. Someone was sabotaging the stocks he entered.
There's an urban legend about that.
Among stock investors, the story was famous: every individual account was under surveillance.
I set a stop-loss and the damn thing hits my exact stop like a ghost and then bounces. Not once or twice either. I'm seriously starting to suspect something.
And the story was true. Where there's smoke, there's fire.
Not exactly a secret, either.
It had even been published in a book. It appeared in Jack Schwager's Market Wizards — an episode where a brokerage watched a private trader's account, went damn, this guy is insane, and ended up scouting him. That happened on Wall Street. If it weren't happening in Korea, that would be the strange part.
One difference, though.
These bastards abuse it.
In the original story, surveillance was all it was — nothing beyond that. Anything more would be a legal catastrophe. But Korea had far too many people sitting above the law. Domestic Financial Institutions, pension funds, the Financial Services Commission — all one big club.
Double kill!
It was like a casino. When one customer started winning too hard, they assigned a high-ranking dealer — specifically to make him lose. A similar custom thrived in the Korean stock market.
That's why even talent doesn't make money easy.
There was a reason the self-proclaimed Super Retail traders weren't actually making money from stocks — why they lived off YouTube revenue and book sales instead. Things they couldn't say out loud. A tilted playing field. Structurally, retail investors could not win. And even the ones who threaded the needle had their winnings stripped away.
Being good at stocks in Korea was not purely a blessing. Knowing that fact was a mercy in itself.
Push through on pride alone and—
Why isn't this working? Like a gambler already down, you kept playing until you won it back. Eggs against a boulder. The seed capital differed by at least two orders of magnitude. Retail beating Domestic Financial Institutions was impossible. People with real skill still went broke. The stock market was littered with them.
Clack. Click.
And precisely because it was that kind of market, opportunity existed. Countless retail investors drowning in despair wanted an idol.
If all-in margin on trash penny stocks isn't working—
Then use a different strategy. Time to put his real specialty to work.
Bright sunlight poured through the window, shattering into fragments against long, glossy black hair. The scene could have been a painting. Its subject, however, was paying it no mind at all.
Haa…
Immediate worries took priority. Sora had a firm goal: become a trader. That was why she had enrolled in the economics department at Hankuk University. Study hard, and the dream would follow.
Get into a good university and graduate with good grades!
Her father had said that too. An executive director at a securities firm, he was Sora's pride.
Does it actually work that way, though?
She had already tasted a reality that said otherwise. A world that common sense could not explain had opened up before her. The vague expectation that school would teach her what she needed was gone completely. So what was she supposed to do?
I did everything they told me to…
The person Sora had leaned on was a senior from school. A strange senior. A lunatic. A complete freak. At first he had been an object of pure disgust. The more she learned, though, the more other thoughts crept in.
What exactly am I supposed to be learning here?
The reason her senior had ignored her was that she genuinely hadn't known anything. Paper trading had filled her with nothing but confidence. Real stocks had taught her the truth. The world was wide, and there was a great deal left to learn. That was why she had swallowed her pride and asked for advice.
Her senior had told her: the anonymous boards. That was where she would find the answers she wanted.
She had found plenty of psychopaths. By any measure, this was not a normal community.
The market's crashing — why is everyone laughing?
She had heard the rumors. A bizarre site you were absolutely never supposed to visit. It matched her prejudice one hundred percent. Nothing here looked like it had been written by a functional human being.
Somebody save me lmaoooooooo
Her head was spinning. The language was crude, and she couldn't relate to a single conversation.
It's called the Korea Stock Gallery, and they're telling people not to buy Korean stocks?
The place was packed with people just like her senior. No matter how she looked at it, there was nothing to learn here.
Clack. Click.
Having reached that conclusion, Sora looked for another approach. A place she checked from time to time.
And the stock she had traded herself. Naver ran a discussion board for every individual stock, and because the talk stayed on that one name, it was a decent place to pick up information. She checked it occasionally.
Everyone's miserable, of course.
The mood was nothing like before. The share price had been falling without end — a plunge of over thirty percent, with no hint of a rebound — and the shareholders looked wrecked.
You picked the stock. What do you want me to say?
Grit your teeth and diamond-hand it.
Hyung will be over here shutting his mouth at the 8th floor.
Good luck.
There were bottom-feeders everywhere. Sora frowned at the troll's posts.
Who looks at people suffering underwater and wants to do that to them?
She knew from trading herself. The feeling of being trapped in a position was almost impossible to put into words. Mocking people who were already struggling — she wanted to get angry on their behalf.
She swallowed hard. If it hadn't been for Chan-uk, she might have ended up in the exact same boat. Sora pressed a hand to her chest.
Right. Nothing I can do about it.
Stock investing. Lately it was a common topic of conversation. Plenty of her friends were doing it. But people who actually knew anything were surprisingly rare. Sora, who had thought she knew, had learned that the hard way through recent experience after experience. A frog in a well. Stocks were not in any textbook. Knowledge from school would not take you further.
Ding-dong~♪
She went to Chan-uk's place once more. Her father only ever said no, so there was no one else to ask.
Not coming out?
The door didn't open. But this was not her first time in the situation. On a hunch, she tried the handle.
Click.
It was unlocked. Sora slipped carefully inside. She had already confirmed Chan-uk was home.
Clack. Clack-clack-clack!
He was hammering the keyboard without the slightest awareness that she had come in. Judging by the unbroken rattle of keys—
Is he writing something?
He was locked in. She didn't want to interrupt. But she did want to know what he was doing. Sora crept up behind him and peered over his shoulder at the monitor.
Told y'all to dump Dong-crap and you didn't lmaoooooo
Hyung said it was going to the 8th floor — any suckers still bagholding or nah?
"Rather than suffer with trash stock like this, if it were me, I'd—"
"What are you doing right now?!"
"Ah—you scared the hell out of me!!"
He was writing hate comments. She checked the username. It was the same person whose posts had made her so angry earlier.
"Are you leaving hate comments right now? On the stock discussion board?"
"The hell are you? When did you get here."
"That's— never mind that."
Unauthorized entry. Technically that was what this was, but it didn't matter right now. Chan-uk's behavior was beyond absurd. He was mocking shareholders who were already suffering underwater.
I always figured he was a total degenerate…
The only thing she had ever acknowledged was his skill. Even so, running around committing this kind of malice was a completely separate issue.
"Can't you tell by looking? I'm investing."
"In…vesting?"
"Yeah. The work of driving iron nails, one by one, into the hearts of every Donghae Steel investor."
"What?"
It was not the way a normal person thought.