Salty Returns
Futures.
Salty returns.
Sora’s eyes, fixed on the screen, looked ready to burst from their sockets.
“Th-th-this is a hundred million…?”
“I can see it too.”
“In just a few minutes, the m-money…”
“So what.”
The futures market. More precisely, this kind of thing happened all the time in derivatives.
You hear about it now and then. So-and-so hit a few hundred times their stake.
That was all because of options.
Originally they were insurance products. Take an investor who’d bet a hundred million on a rise. The possibility of a sudden crash still scared them, so they bought three million won’s worth of options. That way, even if the market tanked, they could hedge.
“Use them aggressively like this and you can pull in huge profits.”
“And when you lose…”
“There’s no answer.”
Hedge. A way to protect your own assets. The funds run by famous financiers like Warren Buffett and Cathie Wood were hedge funds, after all.
In modern society prices only ever climbed. The value of money had no choice but to keep falling. A chicken that once cost ten thousand won now cost twenty; later it would be fifty. Some people hated that. They wanted the value of their assets to hold steady. Hedge funds existed for them.
“It’s dangerous, so don’t copy me.”
“I won’t…”
“It’s just one way of building a portfolio… hm?”
That kind of asset management. But investors always wanted the big score. Chase returns that large and, sooner or later, the reverse happened.
The order book’s movement looked ominous.
Purchase Amount │ 507,562,500 won
Unrealized P/L │ ＋13,957,968 won
Return Rate │ ＋2.75%
A sudden plunge. The profits that had just rocketed upward started sliding right back down.
“Oh.”
“Uh, uh, uh, it’s dropping like crazy?!”
“Yeah.”
“That’s all you have to say…?”
While he’d been chatting with Sora, no less. Nothing to be done about it.
The futures market is this big, after all.
Especially the KOSPI. The cash market and the futures market differed in size by nearly a factor of ten. To move the futures side they would dump a hundred thousand, a million shares of Osung Electronics at a time. That was how hard they worked to shift the market. If a retail trader tried to hitch a free ride, they would shake the tree just to knock him off out of sheer spite.
“Retail gets screwed even when they know it’s coming. What else is new.”
“Even if later on… it ends up going the way you thought, sunbae?”
“Yeah.”
Seed size. Just as the side with more troops and weapons could run more strategies in a war, in a capitalist market the one with the money held the options. The one with little money had none. If the position recovered, fine—but if they really meant to reverse the direction?
Then I’m simply ejected from the market.
It happened in real life. They calculated the other side’s average cost and seed, and if they were sure they could win, they picked the fight. Force a short covering. When some futures contract rocketed or cratered by tens or hundreds of percent, one side of the long-short war had lost.
“I’m sorry…”
“Hm?”
“If I hadn’t talked to you, you could have taken the profit. I got in the way.”
What is she talking about?
That world. Sora, still nothing more than an ordinary person, was thinking strange thoughts. No—she’d gone off the rails again. Ordinary people and investors simply did not think the same way.
“You’re not mad?”
“Why would I be?”
“It’s a hundred million…”
“You dumbass.”
“Huh?”
“If it had been a long red candle instead of a long green one and the profit had ballooned to three hundred million, would I have given you a hundred and fifty?”
Opportunity cost. Whatever appeared after time passed was nothing more than a result.
Hell, if I’d really wanted to close it no matter what, I’d have shoved her aside and sold.
Hey, get lost! I’ve got a trade to make! It wasn’t even a profit he was that attached to. For Sora it was different. At twenty years old, a hundred million was a sum of money she could barely imagine.
“Sunbae.”
“Y-yeah?”
“Sorry I got angry earlier. From now on I won’t blame you either.”
Sora demurely took his hand. She cupped it in both of hers and kneaded it gently. An expression of asking forgiveness. To him it was nothing, but if that was how she felt—
“Alright. Sora needs to build experience slowly too.”
“Yes.”
“If you’re short, borrow from oppa. If you lose it, pay with your body.”
“If you say shit like that again, do you want to die?”
“Haha.”
“Hahaha.”
The atmosphere turned warm. He rested a hand on her head. When he stroked it she leaned into the touch.
When she listens this well, like a puppy, it’s almost too good.
He wanted to put a collar on her too. Dragging this bitch around on a leash would feel damn refreshing.
“The way you trade is so cool, sunbae.”
“I-is it?”
“Can you show me a little more? Just don’t go as hard as before.”
Someday he would make her that way. For now he would play the reliable sunbae.
It’s not something you see every day, true.
Earlier had been a bit extreme. The claim that futures trading was stable was sincere, without a shred of exaggeration.
Crunch!
First, the small stuff. What they called “tick skimming.” Nibble a few ticks off the order book and get out.
“Trade little by little like this.”
“Are you buying options again like before?”
“No, no need to go that far.”
He watched the big flow. No matter how he looked at it, today felt short. Or it had fallen so much a bounce was due.
That’s when you size up a little.
It didn’t have the insane volatility of options, but simply increasing the seed made the profits larger.
Five contracts. Roughly three hundred eighty million won’s worth. As expected it rose smoothly and profit appeared.
“Already a million in profit…”
“I’ll take this much and get out.”
If tick skimming was the jab, this was the hook. Relative to the purchase amount it wasn’t an enormous return, but—
Absolutely speaking it isn’t small either.
If you could make a million won a day, salarymen would line up to quit their jobs. Of course it couldn’t be easy.
Crunch!
Every return came with risk. Keep repeating low-risk trades like this and—
“You’re underwater.”
“When that happens you average down.”
“…”
“Don’t worry. I won’t do it the way you do.”
This kind of thing was bound to happen. Predicting the future was impossible.
Even if you could see the future.
The people with money could twist that future. The predators of the capitalist market.
He averaged down once. To lower the cost basis. He’d meant to escape on the bounce, but—
Double kill! Triple kill! Sometimes it simply refused to move the way you thought. That was the moment that revealed a futures trader’s true skill.
Averaging down. He filled four contracts in total. This time he was sure the bounce would come, but—
“You’re underwater again.”
“When that happens—”
“What do you do?”
“Well, you cut.”
“…”
−770,000 won. Net profit for the day: 250,000 won. That was the basic method of futures trading.
“It’s going back up now.”
“No. That was a good cut.”
“If you’d just held, it looks like you could have gotten back to even.”
“…”
In futures the most important thing was neither foresight nor airtight analysis. It was mentality. What if that had been the last chance to cut? You would blame yourself for missing it and your mentality would shatter.
“Isn’t that a bit too results-oriented?”
“You still don’t get it.”
“Hmm…”
“Someday you’ll understand.”
A tiny crack. That was what affected the next trade, and the one after that.
People who don’t trade futures might not get it, but—
The future was not fixed. The big players could change it whenever they wanted. Retail just cut? Better pump it again to lure more retail in, lol. Everyday life in the futures market. You could not let yourself be hypnotized by the immediate move.
“If I’m wrong two times in a row, I cut mechanically. That’s my trading rule.”
“Even you get it wrong sometimes.”
“What matters is raising the probability.”
And maintaining it. Accumulating small edges like this was the ideal form of futures investing.
Then one big loss hits and you start touching options trying to make it back.
That was the life-is-fucked route. Which was why mentality mattered. You had to escape before the big damage. In practice, right or wrong aside, you mechanically obeyed your own trading rules. It looked easy at a glance, but it had real difficulty.
“Winning and losing this much money back and forth… it must mess with your head.”
“Exactly. That’s why futures guys end up with mental illnesses.”
“Ah! I know someone like that.”
“When you face the cruelty of the world in real time, the heart breaks.”
Real rally? Fake rally? Judging that required more than an ordinary person’s way of thinking. In short, you had to go a little insane. Look at futures traders and you would see a screw loose in every one of them.
Derivatives including futures
Especially options among them
If you don’t know this you can’t call yourself a real high school girl T_T T_T
That was no coincidence. Fight on the front lines as an investor and you tended to lose something important.
“Getting a rough feel for what futures are?”
“Yes, thank you. But—”
“What.”
“What have you been eating this whole time?”
“…”
He hadn’t escaped it either. His futures skill ranked among the best in the industry, but—
Mental processing speed is critical, so—
He had to take in sugar in real time. Specifically candy, chocolate, that sort of thing. The pre-regression him. Lack of exercise on top of that was why his weight had ballooned somewhat.
“Eating too much of that is bad for you.”
“Look who’s talking like she never eats any.”
“I only eat it sometimes!”
Sora watched him with a worried look. Since she had been the one who asked for the lesson, she couldn’t help fretting.
“Then you give me something tasty.”
“I didn’t bring anything today…”
“I can see it right there.”
“?”
Plump and glossy, shining with a wet sheen. If he sucked on those marshmallow lips—
Sweet juice would come out from inside.
Just thinking about it made him swallow hard. The matching pair of flesh hanging as a set made his hands itch too.
“If you’re holding something that delicious, you should give your oppa a bite.”
“You’re not serious.”
“Yeah. The milk cartons too.”
“$%&#@^@&#!”
“Kids these days really only think about themselves.”