Gift
Vacation.
"You've all worked hard on the exams. Final scores will be posted on the homepage after combining them with the assignment grades, so check for yourselves."
The moment the festival ended, exam season began.
The week-long finals for Hankuk University's Economics Department left countless scars on the students and finally drew to a close.
"Aah! I totally bombed it."
"You too?"
"Me too!"
Yet mixed in with the pain was a strange sense of relief, like having a rotten tooth yanked out. Joy and sorrow sat side by side among the students.
Thwack!
One face, however, looked no different from usual. The girl who had entered as the top student of the class of '17.
"Sora must have done well."
"Obviously."
"No. I'm worried it'll come out worse than the midterms."
"Worry my ass!"
It could only look like pure showing off. Some of the other girls in their year talking behind her back was partly her own fault.
She really is worried, I guess.
Surprisingly, she's the type who doesn't overthink much.
Her face was ridiculously pretty. Her figure was enough to make even other girls jealous. But Hye-ri and Suhyun knew Sora's personality.
"Because of the stocks?"
"Ugh."
"Sora's changed a bit lately. She doesn't even say 'study, study' all the time anymore."
They weren't interested in that sort of thing. She used to be the classic nerd who thought of nothing but studying, just like she always claimed.
She really has changed a little.
Is she also... with Oppa...
Chanuk.
Ever since meeting him, she had been shifting bit by bit. Being involved themselves, the two of them couldn't possibly miss it.
"Oh, and looking at the assignment, the sectors Wook-oppa invested in did great."
"Orange juice and salmon?"
"Yeah! Yeah!"
His personality was eccentric—a character none of them had ever seen before. The kind that made you think, So people like that actually exist. But his skill was the real deal. After seeing it more than once or twice, it was hard not to acknowledge.
"Chanuk hyung-nim?"
"Ah, I knew it~!"
"He's going to be huge. We should get close starting now."
After the grand festival, his image within the department had completely flipped. He had driven the stock club to record sales. ETSD collapsing played a big part too. Internal fractures had produced a wave of dropouts, they said.
"Feeling competitive?"
"No way!"
"Denial means yes."
"Sora's steel and semiconductors did pretty well too."
The source of the nasty rumors had vanished. She no longer had to hear people talking behind her back, and her heart felt lighter for it.
Group D Team Project
Steel: +3%
Semiconductors: +8%
Orange Juice: +34%
Salmon (Short): −19%
The assignment itself had nearly become a dark history. There had been a stretch when they genuinely wondered how it would turn out. That was already three months ago. With time, even the steel sector had climbed decently.
"We all went up!"
"Salmon dropped, but... it was a short."
"We're first place for sure. Overwhelmingly."
From presentation day all the way to the last day of finals. On presentation day the prices had already fallen quite a bit.
We got lucky.
Real investment never worked that cleanly. The higher a stock climbed, the more you wanted to buy. The lower it fell, the more restless you became. Could you really hold until break-even? Right now she could answer with absolute certainty: No.
"With this, Wook-oppa's grade should be fine."
"For this class, anyway."
"Sora?"
"……."
It was nothing like a mock portfolio. The pressure was no joke. Telling yourself it would bounce back later was a fantasy only people who had never actually invested could indulge in.
It might have risen out of pure luck. Or it could just as easily have crashed straight into the basement. Back then she had known nothing and simply trembled. Now she understood a little—just a little.
"Why are you smiling?"
"No reason. Just..."
"Sora, are you maybe also with Wook-oppa..."
"?"
"Ah, never mind."
She had taken one step out of the darkness where she couldn't see an inch ahead. Pride in herself had begun to grow.
It's thanks to sunbae, though.
She had received help; that was fact. He was surprisingly decent, the kind who sometimes offered sincere advice. And that was exactly the problem. At the recent festival she had made a promise she could never keep.
"Come to think of it, where's sunbae?"
"Gone."
"He was happy saying if you just mark anything it ends fast. Not sure he can even graduate."
Her mood had been riding high. She owed that sunbae a lot. In the end nothing actually wore out, so she had closed her eyes, told herself to endure ten seconds, and gone through with it. She had expected the whole thing to slide past in a light, pleasant atmosphere.
...What is he even thinking?
Complete radio silence. Because he never brought it up, two full weeks had already passed and the anxiety was climbing. Insane anxiety. Exactly like the feeling of using credit margin. Not by choice—she had experienced it twice because of that guy.
"He's always sexually harassing people."
"Right, right!"
"But he never actually crosses the line, does he? Just talk."
"……."
Once again that man had her head in a mess. If he had just made a real move, her heart would have been simpler.
Did I take it too seriously?
With almost no experience with the opposite sex, she simply didn't know. Maybe Hye-ri or Suhyun would. Suhyun had a boyfriend. Hye-ri had probably had one. That was why they could brush things off so easily.
"Th-that might be it?"
"No comment."
"If that sunbae says something weird, how am I supposed to respond? I don't know whether to get angry or just take it."
"……."
This girl's wall is coming down soon.
Watching Sora's iron fortress crumble is going to be fun.
To Hye-ri it felt like a powerful rival had suddenly appeared, leaving her uneasy. To Suhyun, the chance to watch the campus goddess fall was something she desperately wanted to see.
Clap!
As friends they genuinely wanted to help. Better to stay on good terms than bad ones. Hye-ri clapped her hands and settled the moment.
"Just keep it moderate, right?"
"Moderate?"
"Wook-oppa's always been a pretty half-hearted guy. It probably doesn't mean much."
"Hmm... yeah, that makes sense."
Honestly, her pride was a little bruised. Sora was thinking about Chanuk.
Yeouido securities district.
—Buy order filled!
—Sell order filled!
The faces of the traders executing orders were bright. The market had been kind lately.
A rising market. A stretch with no clear bad news, swelling trading volume, and climbing prices. Peak season for the securities houses. Just as travel had its high season, stocks had this—the bull run.
"Long, right?"
"Definitely long, but..."
Reason and emotion were different animals.
In the smoking room a trader's hand trembled around his cigarette. The tension of the trading floor still clung to him. You had to read the market's every twitch from nothing but numbers.
"You know how it is. The foreigners are deliberately fucking around."
"Yeah..."
"They lean on the LPs, shake the board to trigger program selling, then scoop it all up. Ants and institutions are both pouring in—how do you reverse that flow?"
Simple feints. But sometimes the feint was real. They could smell ultra-high-grade information that had never hit the open market and act on pure gut.
Tok!
It was never easy. He had been so deep in thought he never noticed the ash tip of his cigarette finally drop.
"How the hell is KOSPI breaking 2400?"
"They're calling it Golden SPI these days. Shit SPI is perfect at 2000."
They're making me want to short so bad.
Unlike retail investors who only prayed for prices to rise, professionals watched both directions. That was how you milked the market dry. Long on the way up. Short on the way down. Being able to eat from both sides was intoxicating. It also came with matching risk. Shorting in a rising market meant standing alone empty-handed while everyone else feasted.
Ding-dong!
Plenty of people still rushed in the moment they saw others eating.
Right now every securities window was overflowing with people who had come to invest.
"Here to make a deposit?"
"No, I heard there's something called a fund..."
"Ah, a fund? Right this way, valued client!"
A relative said so. A friend said so. The internet said so!
If you do stocks you can definitely make money, right?
They had even done a quick search. The graph went up and to the right. Invest, forget about it, and the money would just copy itself.
"Ants flooding in again?"
"Obviously. Pure long. We need to inflate the bubble a little more, then slowly dump the volume on them."
They had no idea how the market actually worked. The weak were born to be eaten. This was the one season even fools could feast. A rising market was the only stretch when predators and prey could share the same peaceful days.
Thwack!
Even in that rising market, one man wore a twisted scowl. Lee Deoksu was walking out of the building where he used to work.
Ha, fuck.
Used to work. Past tense.
He tilted his head back and burned the entire silhouette of the building into his memory. A thirty-story high-rise. The sleek glass façade was the very emblem of a securities firm.
Haa~
A trader there. One of the people who made the most money in all of Korea. No one could argue that he handled the largest sums. It had been the pride of his life.
I always knew it wasn't a job you could do forever.
The average tenure for a trader at Gaemi Investment Securities was two years. Even that number was inflated by a handful of monsters. Most rookies got cut before six months. As a third-year he had counted as mid-level, but—
"Hey!"
"Oh. Hey."
That day came for everyone. It had simply arrived a little early for him. The sly face of his entry-year colleague appeared. The guy had already figured it out. Of course he had. The brown cardboard box in Deoksu's hands said everything.
"Dude, at least say something before you leave."
"Not like this is the first or second retirement we've seen."
"Well, true, but..."
A resignation box. Because they were the same year, he hated showing it even more—this shabby version of himself.
No face left to show.
He was the last of their cohort still standing. Leaving a colleague behind sat wrong in more ways than one.
"Even if you're going, one cigarette's fine, right?"
"I already turned in my ID."
"Whatever. Just follow me."
There was also one thing he needed to pass on. No badge, but the front desk knew their faces and waved them through.
Guess I won't get to see Miss Kim either. Damn.
That had been the starting point. His condition had simply been off. The loss hadn't even been large enough to justify firing him. The real problem was the instinct to claw it all back. There was always an easy, simple way to make money if you wanted it badly enough.
"How does a guy at your level end up..."
"You know this floor."
"What?"
"Pride. That's the problem."
Click! He lit the cigarette with a lighter. He had lived with the habit just to shake off the pressure of moving that much capital.
Guess I can quit for a while.
They called it herd trading. Rationally you knew you shouldn't. You knew it was wrong. And you still did it every single time. Newbie or veteran—same disease. Even someone in the latter group like him sometimes felt that stubborn refusal to lose.
"That fire ant."
"The one I pointed out...?"
"Yeah. I followed him and got wrecked. Not an ordinary bastard."
He had tried to win. The harder he tried, the tighter the noose around his own neck. The feeling of dancing on someone else's palm.
Retired insider? At minimum he knows this side's information.
Just one single ant. The rage boiling over, the competitive fire igniting—half of it had been inevitable.
"You should've just taken a moderate bite and walked away."
"Pride."
"Well, it's not like you fucked up because you didn't know better."
Dump the volume. Diamond hands. Dump the volume. Diamond hands. The little body used its size with vicious agility. The mouse that had been chasing the cat suddenly found itself cornered in a dead-end alley.
No.
In the wilderness of the stock market there were not only cats and mice. Far larger predators prowled everywhere. The moment he showed a gap, he had been torn apart. He might have been fooled by an ant, but what ultimately finished him was this enormous world itself.
Institutional capital.
He had swaggered around calling himself a trader, yet to someone else he had been nothing more than one more piece of prey.