The Ant's Weapon

An ant's weapon.

Credit.

A double-edged sword if there ever was one.

It isn't just your seed money doubling overnight.

Anything involving money never rolls that clean. Someone out there is openly trying to eat your capital — and what kind of kind-hearted main gun sits back and watches that happen? They always shake the tree. They always force a correction.

That's where the phrase "got wiped on credit" comes from.

When your seed is small, it barely matters.

When your seed is large, you move the market. And if someone is watching your account, it gets worse.

The second you buy on credit, chase money piles in. Pursuit buying. They're buying the stock because you did.

Hell, you don't even need someone watching. It shows up in the indicators.

You can check it ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠through something called the credit ratio. That's why you use credit carefully. It's basically flipping your hand face-up on the table.

But if the other side's play is obvious—

—you can feed it right back to them.

Dump every share you hold at market. And someone catches it — thanks to the idiots chasing your buys.

It's a mid-cap for a reason.

I didn't buy a multi-trillion-won company by accident instead of some penny garbage. Penny stocks have paper-thin order books. A single tick might hold a few tens of millions of won at most. Dump six hundred million at once and you're eating a four-to-five-percent haircut just to get out. A mid-cap? One or two percent, tops.

Not that there isn't fallout.

Profit-taking floods the tape. The sudden drop flips sentiment on a dime.

Scalping was always a game of chicken.

Like that sand-stealing game. You build a sandcastle, plant a flag, then take turns scooping sand away — first one to topple the flag loses. Simple. At the start, everyone's got room. First lap around, you're wondering when the damn game even ends. Then one person does something reckless, and the whole board flips.

Then — whoosh.

A freefall like a roller coaster dropping off the rails. The ones who bought thinking it was just a shakeout?

All of them got bagged.

Foreigner inventory. The foreigners had been stacking shares for days, quiet and patient. Meaning they profit at almost any exit price. The rational move is to dump the second people are willing to catch it.

A stock that had spiked as high as eleven percent. It took barely twenty seconds to settle back into the five-percent range.

Donghae Steel's market cap sat at 1.1 trillion won. In twenty seconds, over fifty billion won evaporated.

How the hell is anyone supposed to keep their head through that?

The day traders start cutting losses. The stock stops riding a roller coaster and boards the T Express instead.

The only thing left to trust is the institutions — the short-selling forces that can manufacture a technical bounce. Low-price bids start trickling in, slow and cautious. At this level, it's buyable, right?

Doesn't mean they want to push it higher, though.

Institutions want the lowest price they can get. That's exactly why I can't stand Korean institutions. They only ever trade the no-loss setups. They never move first.

No ego. Zero ego.

A predator shows its true worth when it hunts. Those razor claws, those needle fangs — they exist for that. If you can't use them, they're just decoration. A zoo animal locked in a cage, striking a handsome pose for the tourists. Korean institutions are exactly that.

They slap "securities firm" on the door and act the part, but I've never once treated them as real competition.

That's what they are. Domesticated animals.

Happy to skim commissions and call it a day. Never even dream of tearing into the real meat. If foreign institutions are wolves and wildcats, Korean ones are dogs and house cats — creatures that only scrape by in a Korean market that hands them privileges by the truckload.

They don't even register as rivals in my field of vision.

They're probably tearing their hair out about now.

Six hundred million won, you can dump at market. But the unit sizes an institutional trader is running? Nobody's catching that. Unloading is going to make them shit blood.

Fuck!

The stock he'd been targeting was rising. Donghae Steel was up — and Kim Deoksu still couldn't crack a smile.

Because he had to unload.

Retail can just cut and run the second things go sideways. Institutions don't get that luxury.

How many lifetimes is this going to take to dump…

The volume they hold is a different order of magnitude. Toss a rock in a river and you get a few splashes. Toss a boulder?

Those foreigner bastards!

It doesn't end with a few splashes. A mini-tsunami rolling in wouldn't even be surprising. For Deoksu, the tsunami was ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠right in front of his face.

He offloads ten thousand shares — and the foreigners drag the price even lower.

He has no choice but to throw in spoof bids — buying back his own inventory to tangle up the retail crowd.

Just the disposal is going to take three days minimum.

All because of that fire ant. Right in the middle of a clean climb, the bastard had torched it. Fifty-six thousand shares of net selling. A boulder that size can redirect an entire river — if you drop it in exactly the right spot.

Wham!

Deoksu's right hand clenched before he knew it. A fist slammed into the desk. He only realized he'd done it when every pair of eyes in the room locked onto him.

"What the hell was that?!"

"Ah— no, I just… sorry."

"Even if the trades aren't going your way. Tsk. You of all people should know better."

They all knew what it meant. This was the asset management desk — trading was the job. Which only made it more humiliating.

Goddamn it.

That guy just got wrecked. He'd just publicly certified that his losses were bad enough to blow his emotional control. Performance is everything. That's the job. Your pay scales with your results. Degrees? Connections? Worthless. Have the skill and you can print money.

How the hell did some ant do this to me…

That skill was how he'd climbed into this seat. As a trader, his pride in his own ability ran deep. And now it felt like someone had smashed it to pieces.

But the target was different — the feeling itself wasn't new.

Gah!

It was the same feeling that had started this whole mess. Every so often, you run into them. Traders who are absurdly, insanely good. They lock you into a directional conviction so hard you can't see any other way — then yank the wheel at a moment you couldn't have predicted, couldn't even have imagined. Divine handling. You only understand it after you've been on the receiving end. The world is wide, and in this market, you are small.

Those kinds of monsters live overseas…

They're rare. In a market classified as emerging — Korea — and on a KOSPI that runs on the opposite clock from the rest of the world, that caliber of talent has no reason to work here. They're out on Wall Street, the center of global finance, drawing blood.

And yet some mere ant—

You think I'm going to take this from a fucking ant?

Traders have a name for retail. Liquidity providers. Retail probably thinks that's the market maker's job. In the true sense, though, the LPs are them — the grateful ones who keep losing money into the market.

Someone has to lose for someone else to win. Even now, they were catching his inventory for him.

Yeah. That's an ant for you.

Bump the price a little and they snap it up. All he'd really done was buy back his own shares. He ran the same fishing routine over and over. Do it right and you can unload without taking a serious hit.

Hoo…

But it takes time. And for an institutional trader, the opportunity cost alone is a real loss.

That irritating bastard was already buying something else — as if everything up to this point had been a minor incident.

Just wait. The second I free up cash…

Pride. Rationally, he knew. Treat it like stepping in shit and move on. But he was a trader. An institutional trader sitting on top of the ants, no less. Predators don't get jerked around by their prey. If he didn't patch the scratch on his pride, something was going to break.

Defeat.

He got pushed around by foreign traders, sure — but in Korea, he ate. That was the pride he carried. Feeling the same way over a mere ant? He could not accept that humiliation.

Even if this month goes to absolute shit, I am destroying you. One of you. ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠Guaranteed.

Fighting an institution.

Honestly, you're at a structural disadvantage. That's just the truth.

I can land one clean shot, sure.

But the base durability gap is real. David beats Goliath. Run it like Tekken, though — round one, two, three, on and on — and Goliath wins every time. Same principle.

The new stock I was buying. Watching the order book move, it looked like he was back in again.

Why is there a wave on a still lake?

I'm not the type to miss that kind of dissonance. Someone was deliberately shaking the market. Probably that guy. The difference from before: he was coming in aggressive.

Spoof bids, spoof offers, short selling — every institutional privilege thrown into the mix. A way to hedge his own losses while driving the price down.

Even knowing the full intent—

Well. What exactly can I do about it?

An ant's arsenal is extremely limited. One rock from a slingshot. That's the whole kit. When they lean this hard into durability and weapons, there's no counter. Literally nothing you can do.

If this were even the US market…

You couldn't pull this on the Nasdaq. Retail can short. Other institutions won't sit there with their eyes open. Too many participants. Force the price down and the low-bid scavengers eat you alive.

Korea has few market participants. The laws, the systems — equity is completely broken.

Even knowing an institution is throwing a full-blown tantrum, you're helpless. A tilted playing field from the start.

But there's one thing that puts ants ahead. One strategy only retail can use.

Diamond hands it is, then~~~~~~?

I activated the ant's ultimate.