Futures, Not Presents
Futures.
Squid Game.
"So the debt isn't six hundred million—it's six billion?"
"There's stuff even those bastards don't know."
"Wait, you said you worked at a securities firm. You were trading stocks?"
"Stocks weren't that big… I was doing futures."
There's a scene where they talk about futures.
The conversation between Ssangmun-dong designated driver No. 456 and Seoul National University Business major No. 218.
"Futures? You blew that money on futures? Who the hell did you buy presents for that were that expensive? You got a girlfriend or something?"
"……."
What ordinary people know as "futures" is just presents.
They can't even begin to understand how someone could lose six billion won on that.
It's more common in the market than you'd think.
About forty people a day, on average, kill themselves over futures.
Right this second, someone out there is weighing free fall.
No need to feel sorry for them.
Risk and return scale together.
Investment is always—
"Your own responsibility, right?"
"Exactly. You get it."
"You fucking bitch!"
She still couldn't accept that fact.
Sora grabbed me by the collar and shook me hard.
Purchase Amount │ 155,500,000 won
Unrealized P/L │ −837,500 won
Her first attempt at futures trading.
The result was a little unfortunate.
She hadn't invested. She'd speculated.
"That's why you should've invested instead of speculated."
"What exactly did I do wrong?"
"If you win, it's investing. If you lose, it's speculation."
"Hey."
Her seed money was only around twenty million won.
Normally that wouldn't even buy a single contract.
But leverage.
The beauty of futures is that even people with tiny deposits can still get into the market.
The risk scales right along with it, of course.
At first she only bought one contract.
The timing of the buy just happened to catch a massive red candle that dumped water all over her.
Roughly a hundred and fifty million won's worth.
As the price kept falling, the losses grew exponentially.
"Expiration's almost here. What the hell are we supposed to do?"
"Expiration… day?"
"You don't know what expiration day is? You traded futures without knowing that?"
"You told me to do it!!"
When you run a fund, you run into malignant clients like this every so often.
Nobody shoved her into it.
I just gave her a little nudge.
Futures really are an attractive market. That's a fact.
Unlike stocks, there's no securities transaction tax.
And the leverage is deliciously high.
Which means whatever you can gain, you can also lose.
"Do you even know what futures are?"
"I know the dictionary definition."
"Just for you~~~!"
"It feels like a prepared present."
"Nice singing."
"Not that!"
Futures: A contract to buy or sell an asset at a specific time in the "future," traded in advance at the "present" moment.
What we usually call stocks are "spot."
The KOSPI index, the Nasdaq—those are all classified as spot too.
The reason futures exist separately is—
For effective price discovery.
If the market swings too violently all at once, the real-world fallout is massive.
Think of it as a safety valve.
But because they move on expectations of the future, they can diverge from spot prices.
"That's why expiration day exists."
"What is expiration day?"
"March, June, September, December. Every second Thursday of the quarter, forced liquidation. Whether you like it or not, when that day comes, you have to sell."
"……."
On expiration day, volatility spikes.
Especially futures expiration—it's called the Day of the Four Witches.
The market goes completely nuts.
Options, futures, index options, index futures—all four derivatives expire on the same day.
And coincidentally, that's tomorrow.
"Don't kill yourself."
"I'm not going to do that……."
"The KOSPI will murder you for free, so just wait."
"You fucking bastard!"
There are all kinds of futures.
What Sora had blindly thrown money into was KOSPI 200 index futures—tracking the share prices of the two hundred big companies listed on the KOSPI.
The market had been good lately.
I figured nothing much would happen.
Maybe it was because it was the day before expiration, but an unexpected massive red candle had slammed down.
It might just be a correction.
I remembered the rough flow of prices from the future I knew, but—
"Hold on."
"Ah, what now!"
"Hmm…… Oppa looked at the chart."
"When does it go up?"
"I think cutting the loss would be better?"
"……."
I didn't know exactly which days the correction would run.
And with expiration tomorrow, holding through was impossible.
That bitch might have remembered, but—
There was one cursed woman who turned the Day of the Four Witches into the Day of the Five Witches.
I never claimed to have a great memory.
But feel.
Market psychology.
Reading that was my specialty.
"Ah, ah!"
"Okay."
"A h-h-hundred million just vanished, you son of a biiiiitch……!!"
"Guh!"
"Bastard!!"
Being on the receiving end of SM was not my kink.
Sora, fully worked up, was genuinely choking me out.
Pleasure or not, I was about to pass out from lack of air when—
Double kill!
Triple kill!
What I'd half-expected was starting.
A festival of slaughter.
In the futures market even more than the spot market, foreign influence was absolute.
"If you'd held, you'd be sitting on minus one-fifty by now."
"……."
"Oh, it's still dropping. The selling pressure is no joke."
The hands around my throat went slack.
She herself sank to the floor and stared blankly at the chart.
In the end I'd been right.
But the puffed-out cheeks and sharp glare stayed exactly the same.
"Take responsibility."
"For what, all of a sudden?"
"Ah, ah, no!! Not that~~!"
Either hole, I was confident.
But that way she'd learn nothing, which was the problem.
Futures is something you just have to roll with.
There are basic tips.
Kids who can learn just by hearing them can figure it out on their own.
Bluntly speaking, it's talent.
In investing—especially futures—there's no other explanation but talent.
"Want Oppa to go uwu-uwu on you again?"
"I'm not a kid, okay?"
"True, those tits are fucking huge."
"$^#$^#@$!"
Her other kind of talent was solid.
If her personality had just been a little softer, I'd have already flipped her and wrecked her.
No matter how I look at it, she feels like a virgin.
Tear the wrapping wrong and the cleanup gets messy.
Unlike Suhyun, there wasn't someone else ready to take her.
"I can take care of myself just fine."
"Just fine, and then what?"
"……Can't you show me?"
"Oppa’s?!"
I was pretty confident in that department, for the record.
No—I held a full highway-opening license.
Yeah, if she just opens the national road by herself—
I can cruise through comfortably.
I was just starting to undo the button at my waist when—
"What are you doing?"
"Huh?"
"I said show me the futures! Futures!"
"Ah. Futures."
Right. That was the conversation.
She seemed seriously interested in futures trading.
Not something you get to see just anywhere, true.
Essential for anyone aiming to be a trader.
It's no exaggeration to say there's no trader who doesn't do futures.
I felt a little bad about the three hundred thousand I'd made her lose, so I showed her.
How a real trader actually trades.
The method was the same as last time.
But that had only been the pretty side, shown to reel her in.
"You know why a boxer throws jabs?"
"No."
"To measure distance."
Live trading is completely different.
The reason I keep making these tiny scalps.
To see the bigger picture.
Two ticks.
A tiny little profit.
Enough for a bowl of jajangmyeon at lunch.
But more important than that—
"Selling pressure is pretty strong."
"Is it?"
"You don't see the secondary monitor up there?"
"Oh… now that you mention it……."
I'd recently hung a secondary monitor with some of the money I'd made.
It helped when trading.
Honestly, for regular stock trading it doesn't matter much.
For futures, it's essential.
I check other countries' futures markets in real time.
Those three are the main ones.
A futures investor has to look at the charts and predict the future.
"Nasdaq doesn't look like a big problem?"
"You dense little idiot."
"Huh?"
"Right now it's moving with the Hang Seng."
Most of the trading is handled by programs.
What humans do is set the trading ratios, more or less.
For example, if they dump ten billion on the Hang Seng—
Nikkei gets three billion, Nasdaq two billion, KOSPI eight billion.
They throw size at all of them at once and move the market.
That's called basket trading.
The general term for packing everything into one basket and trading it in a single go.
In reality they hedge with options, FX, and so on, so it's far more complicated.
But what I was doing was—
Just reading the rough flow.
Whether the KOSPI would go down or up.
"Sh-shouldn't we sell? It's dropping hard……."
"I already shorted it."
"Ah."
"Another advantage of futures. You can take the opposite position."
Unlike the Korean stock market, where individual short-selling is blocked.
You just have to get the direction right.
Repeat.
In the small flows, I check what the big players want.
And when conviction hits, I bet big.
That's why futures is a bit rough.
Moments you can call "opportunities" come at most twice a day.
And they arrive completely out of nowhere.
Crunch!
You have to stare holes through several monitors for hours.
It eats concentration like nothing else.
They don't always come, either.
You can get faked out.
Stress is inevitable.
But the payoff is just as real.
When the call you made lands exactly.
"It looks like it's going back up……."
"Why?"
"Hang Seng and Nikkei are rising too. Look!"
"No. Look at the FX."
The market that had been drifting lower.
It reversed and lifted its head a little.
Nasdaq, Hang Seng, Nikkei, KOSPI—all of them.
But FX wasn't moving at all.
They were loading up for one big shot.
It might not be, but my gut and experience said it was.
Trend reversal.
If this were the section turning into a real correction, the range wouldn't be this tiny.
Double kill!
Triple kill!
Quadra kill!
Penta kill……!
It arrived all at once.
And I was already long put options.
"W-w-w-world……."
"This is exactly why people do derivatives."
Purchase Amount │ 507,562,500 won
Unrealized P/L │ ＋146,951,423 won
Return │ ＋28.95%
One shot at life.