Futures
Gifts.
Studying.
Tap, tap!
That was why Sora had enrolled in university.
Everyone went there to study, of course. But—
Grades and stocks don't really have anything to do with each other, do they.
It wasn't a place that taught you how to trade. One semester—short as it was—had been more than enough to drive that point home. Some of it was useful for reference: technical jargon, the basic machinery of how a market economy turned. But even that only helped if you already knew how to trade. Knowledge you couldn't use was dead knowledge.
Even the professor never claimed stocks were his specialty.
Learning sports science and memorizing the rulebook didn't make you good at sports. You had to play. She had learned there was no solution beyond that. And yet the market was not so forgiving that you could just charge in blind.
A way to learn. She turned it over in her head and came up with only one.
She was still doing it, whether she meant to or not.
Cheap meat is so damn good
Asked why it's this good and they said it was aged
Crazy good. Why does meat get better when you age it?
Oh…… so that's why the steak my senior made tasted so good.
It helped with studying stocks. The people on the community actually traded. Even lurking, you picked up knowledge without trying. Of course, pure studying would have been boring—
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I'm full
A community. A place where people with a shared interest hung out.
Hahaha!
Funny posts turned up too—humor that only worked among stock investors.
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Neighborhood soup joint T_T
The comments are even funnier, honestly.
Being able to laugh at them meant she had become an investor herself.
Crunch!
She chewed carrot sticks while she scrolled. Mixed in with the near-nonsense posts were ones that actually taught something.
Holding one name, Hanil Electronics, average cost around 5,500 won.
It's a summer stock and it still hasn't run this year?
Does this look hopeless for the year or what
Ohho?
Real tips, the kind that actually taught you how to make money in stocks. Trading methods. There were many. The most stable among them—
1. Fans — 69.5%
2. Dehumidifiers — 9.9%
3. Heating products — 2.7%
4. Other electronics — 17.9%
Cycle investing. A form of value investing.
Korea had four distinct seasons.
That tracks.
The bulk of revenue was fans and dehumidifiers—both appliances that sold hard in summer. She had checked the financials; it was solid. Economics textbooks helped with reading that kind of thing. But—
5,100 ▼155 (−3.03%)
—the way the actual stock market moved was different. One user's comment had cut straight to the bone.
Summer clothes are cheap in winter, huh……
A company that sold summer appliances. Revenue would rise in summer—so the stock ran hard starting before May. And once summer actually arrived—
Crunch!
The reason economics professors couldn't trade. Even with strong sales, the price fell. Market participants already knew that. You had to trade by reading the psychology.
At least summer stocks like this are easy to forecast.
Which made them stable. Buy in winter, sell in summer, and you at least didn't lose. But low risk meant low return. And she wasn't going to trade only once a year.
Why is it called futures
And what the hell are those guys even doing
You're not investing in a company so why does it exist?
What she really wanted to know—the path she needed to take—ran deeper than this. One of those depths:
Futures, huh……
She knew the rough idea. No—honestly, she knew nothing. Just scraps she'd overheard here and there. From her dad, even.
"Even if you end up trading stocks, never, ever touch futures!"
He almost never taught her anything about stocks, but the list of things she was forbidden to do was long.
He did sound pretty serious about futures, though.
And he wasn't alone. The wording varied, but one point was always the same.
Never do it.
It was incomparably more dangerous than stocks. If cycle investing was risk-low, futures were risk-high. Maybe higher than that.
Classic examples: futures, options
The last thing stock gamblers do
Plenty of people live happy lives without knowing coins or stocks
She had been crushed on steel stocks. The her of that time would never have dared try this. The her of now had a little confidence. She was prepared for the danger, too.
"There's no such thing as a free lunch." — Economist Milton Friedman
Any gain came with a matching cost or opportunity cost. In other words: you took on risk.
Someday.
Just not yet. She was still only starting to understand stocks. Futures she couldn't even get a feel for. No need to rush. She knew the path—she could advance along it slowly. While she was still in university.
Crunch!
The carrot sticks she was chewing. Good flavor, fun texture. One after another, and before she knew it they were gone.
Still, I want to know a little……
It would be a lie to say she wasn't impatient. If she could, she wanted to understand futures. The way learning stocks had changed her field of vision—maybe futures held something too.
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I pulled the jeonse deposit for this, what do I do;;
But posts about futures were even harder to find than ones about stocks. Just "I bought this," "I lost money"—that level. She had no idea where to start learning.
Then something surfaced in Sora's mind.
Ah—right!
Her first-semester grades had come out recently, and they were excellent. That much was expected. The one unexpected detail—
Assignment scores. Hers had been so outstanding that even her senior had landed an A.
What we researched back then was orange juice and salmon.
She hadn't thought much of it at the time. He was someone she had been at odds with from the start. Looking back now, it made sense. Futures—and in a sector no one had even heard of.
He had the eye to pick that while we were still sniping at each other.
No wonder he was good at stocks. He might know futures too. No—almost certainly. The idea that he didn't know was harder to imagine.
Well…… maybe I'll go see him. I'm a little worried about what he's doing alone over break anyway.
There was no one else who would hang out with him. Sora finished rationalizing it to herself.
"Futures are dangerous?"
It was something you heard from ordinary people all the time. Sora was laboring under the same ridiculous misunderstanding.
"Yes, that's what I heard……"
"What you heard. How long are you going to get jerked around by rumors with no source?"
"Then they're not?"
Futures. A type of derivative. Most people knew stocks, at least.
But they don't really know futures.
At best they knew they were dangerous—without knowing what futures even were.
"They're not dangerous?"
"Then stocks aren't dangerous?"
"Well, stocks are dangerous too, but……"
You were scared because you didn't know, because someone said they lost money. But actual futures trading—
—wasn't something to tremble over. Public rumor had a way of exaggerating.
"Watch. I'll show you how fun futures really are."
"Is it okay to just jump in like this? Isn't it dangerous?"
"No. The opposite."
"?"
"It's such free money they lie so only they can keep doing it."
People always tried to hog the good stuff. There was no investment simpler or easier for making money than futures.
He filled one contract. The KOSPI 200 was at 311, priced at 250,000 won per point.
So one contract is 77.75 million won.
It moved in increments of 0.05. Every tick was 12,500 won of profit or loss. Relative to the whole index, 0.02%. An ant's eye-crust was bigger than that—but in futures, it was plenty of volatility.
Purchase Amount │ 77,750,000 won
Unrealized P&L │ ＋54,576 won
He sold after the ant's eye-crust had moved five ticks.
"See? Simple, right?"
"Huh……? Did you just make fifty thousand?"
"Yeah. Futures make money just like that."
Because there was no securities transaction tax. On stocks, even selling at cost ate 0.25%. Futures had none of that. You only paid a thin commission to the brokerage.
You could do what was called "tick scalping"—taking tiny profits without getting greedy.
"It's this good, so of course they don't teach it. They want it for themselves."
"Oh…… So as long as I don't get greedy?"
"Exactly! Sora's sharp."
She got it in one. How huge an edge no transaction tax really was.
She's past the stage of not knowing that.
And that wasn't all. Margin rates were lower than stocks. You could run nearly ten times leverage. He walked her through it piece by piece. Interest sparking, she listened with her eyes bright and shining.
If I had to put futures in one line—
The most entertaining gamble in the world.
Yeouido's securities district.
"W-what did you just say?!"
Mr. Choi, who had parked investment capital with a private equity fund, could not hide his panic. He had heard the explanation beforehand, but—
"The product you invested in carries the highest risk level even among Grade 1 products, so……"
"I know that. I took on that much risk when I invested."
High returns came with matching risk. Mr. Choi—one of the more notable high-net-worth individuals north of the river—understood that. Even so, this was absurd. He was starting to wonder if they were faking a loss to run a scam.
Even if it dropped thirty percent……
He should still recover seventy percent of principal. That was why he had rushed over the moment he heard the news. And yet—zero percent. They said it had all evaporated. The amount invested wasn't pocket change.
"We have no face left to show you."
"Does that even make sense?"
"Yes. It's structured that way as a product……"
"Don't give me that nonsense! How do you lose six billion overnight?!"
Investors who had set foot in the futures market even once all said the same thing about the stock market they had traded before.
That place had been paradise.