Clash of the Named

A bear market.

The KOSPI had been falling day after day.

The bull market that had once been stuffed full of dreams and hope was gone.

Once it was over, the investors completely lost their minds.

Their account profits were shrinking. Timing a re-entry was nearly impossible.

The Illicit Stock Manipulators were shaking the price around to unload their own positions.

They rattled the stock price without mercy.

No matter how skilled an investor you were, this was a period when making money was brutally hard. Just get the direction right, right? Real trading never handed out profits that easily.

It wasn't a question of right or wrong.

They deliberately crushed whichever side the retail crowd piled into. Even a correct choice got twisted into a wrong one. Put money down, take money up.

Ah, is this actually hard?

But where there were losers, there were always winners too.

Yong-su smirked as he scrolled through the community he always hung around.

Click, clack!

And he posted. The same kind of garbage post as always. Though every so often, he threw in a little bragging too.

Yong-su was a full-time trader.

No regular job — a man who made money through nothing but investing.

This is the level you need to be at to go full-time.

And among full-timers, he considered himself pretty damn skilled. Respectably skilled, even. After all, he was printing money in the middle of this bear market.

And then there were the followers.

It hadn't always been this many. After three years of grinding, he'd built up dozens of them.

How long have I been proving myself in this hellscape of a KOSPI.

Immediate profits? Those mattered, of course. But a truly skilled person made money consistently. That was why Warren Buffett was called the greatest investor in the world. Plenty of people had posted bigger returns than him — but nobody had survived longer.

And that was exactly why it grated on him.

Sonik-jwa.

A user who'd been posting profit proofs for the past few months.

If it's true he turned 500,000 into over 200 million, that's genuinely impressive. If it's true.

An unbelievable return rate. No wonder the community was losing its mind. But the world was wide and freaks were everywhere. Explosive short-term investment gains — most of those people got flushed out of the market once enough time passed.

Every investment carried risk. And the size of that risk scaled with the size of your seed.

Blow up a million on margin and you can write it off as a dead year and go get a job.

But blow up a hundred million? Unless you landed some high-paying career, it would take years to claw back. And for a full-time trader? You lost your job that same day. You'd be down at the day-labor office swinging a pickaxe.

Click, clack!

That kind of pressure. The community users begging for his Leading picks had no idea.

He fanned the flames. Logged out. Posted while hiding that it was him.

See? Everyone agrees with me.

The community. A virtual space. Being recognized here was Yong-su's entire identity.

Full-time trading was an extremely peculiar profession. No coworkers. No office you had to show up to every day. For someone like Yong-su, this little community made up seventy percent of his life.

Same went for the comrades who stuck with him in the Leading Room.

That was why a rolling stone like Sonik-jwa was a thorn in his eye. At the very least, he wanted that guy's bubble to pop.

I made thirty million this month. That's the kind of person I am.

Sonik-jwa was sitting around twenty million. Going forward, Yong-su would maintain this profit gap — and widen it even further.

He had the ability to do it. His own trading method. Well — it was something everyone could see, technically.

It's about time to launch a flood stock.

He read charts like a virtuoso. The man they called the Nowon-dong Chartist — that was him. And catalysts. Drawing on years of investment experience, he could read which sector was about to run next.

Monsoon season.

Once a year, South Korea got hit with a massive rainy season.

Back in the day cities would flood, disaster victims everywhere, total chaos.

In recent years there hadn't been any major damage on record. But the fear remained. And when monsoon season arrived, certain stocks started moving. Yong-su remembered exactly which ones.

Flood stocks. There wasn't just one or two related companies. Strictly speaking, there were better stocks out there.

Special Reconstruction ran last year too.

Probably because the manipulators were playing games with it. But those petty truths didn't matter. What mattered was that it had a high probability of going up — and that he himself would absolutely not take a loss.

He'd already bought in advance.

Front-running. Exactly what it sounded like — buying the stock ahead of time.

One: Pick a stock that's going to rise.

Two: Accumulate a position over several days.

Three: Tell the Leading Room members to buy.

It was already a stock primed to go up. Then pile a bunch of additional buyers on top of it, and there was no way it wouldn't rise.

And once the other buyers start chasing in.

The stock price inflated. From that point on, it was a game of chicken. Only the ones who took profit first made money.

Obviously, it was illegal. Front-running was prohibited under financial law. So what? Did the manipulators wait for government permission? Institutions and pension funds fleecing retail was even legal.

Click! Click!

As long as he made money, that was all that mattered. And it wasn't like he was the only one making money. As long as they didn't get too greedy, the Leading Room members could eat too.

I just find the stocks worth buying and take a little extra advantage for myself.

All of this was thanks to him discovering a stock that was going to rise. A pioneer was entitled to a little extra profit. No problem there.

He checked the chart. Looking at the volume, he could see two big accumulation waves from the manipulators. Crucially, the price action was converging with his own trading method.

Once the 20-day line starts catching up to the 5-day line……

Based on past experience, he'd built a guaranteed winning formula. Special Reconstruction was locked in — both on the chart and on the catalyst that was about to hit.