Named Battle
Recent trades.
✓ Buy order executed.
The truth was, things weren't going well.
And of course they weren't.
Trading methods change with every market phase.
There is no "guaranteed winning formula" in the stock market. Even a strategy that once printed money stops working the moment the season shifts.
A contract award. It amounted to 37.2% of total revenue. Given the scale, a limit-up was more than justified.
✓ Sell order executed!
I dumped it without a second thought. A mere 2% profit. I'd hopped on a spiking stock, taken a tiny bite, and gotten out.
On a normal day, that would have been a coward's call.
But this was a correction. No — the public was already calling it a bear market.
Sure enough, profit-taking volume poured out. A stock that had blasted through VI and spiked as high as 14.35%...
A massive bearish candle slammed down. Retail investors, thinking it was a bargain-bin opportunity, piled in — and got dragged straight down with it.
Straight into the basement. The old guys on the discussion board had every right to turn into keyboard warriors over this.
In a bull market, this would have closed as a full-bodied bullish candle.
Plus 30%. It might even have hit the upper limit. But in a bear market, the laws of the stock market rewrite themselves.
Even the Illicit Stock Manipulators fear a bear market. They dump the inventory they've been carefully accumulating the moment an opportunity presents itself.
If this were just a correction and not a real bear market, it'd be a shame to sell.
But if it is a bear market? No matter how much the Manipulators look like some evil syndicate, in reality they're just a gang of thugs with a bit of money. One failed operation and they eat astronomical losses. Better to at least break even.
That whole sector was getting crushed too. In a bear market, the first things to take the hit are cyclical stocks — construction names.
When program selling is pouring in, trying to push a stock higher is just too much of a burden.
In a climate like this, even riding momentum spikes wasn't easy. Nibbling a little and getting out was the best I could do. That was how you handled a bear market. It might still have been a correction — but the market's mood right now was ice cold.
Creak—!
So was Sora, who'd shown up at my studio apartment. Ever since summer break started, she'd been coming and going like she lived here.
"How much did you lose to be making that face?"
I didn't lose anything!
She still had the energy to yell, apparently. Then the fight drained right out of her and she wilted like overdressed spinach.
Looks like she came over after going at it pretty hard.
This girl was usually all fire — I had no idea what had gotten into her.
"Senior, are things going well for you lately?"
"Me? I always stand tall."
"?"
"?"
"You absolute psycho!!"
Hey, it was important. Before the regression, my health hadn't been great.
Old-man ED is not a joke, okay?
There was a reason middle-aged guys scarfed down anything supposedly good for male vitality.
"I meant stocks! Stocks!"
"Then say that from the start."
"From the start, you absolute— never mind. Talking to you makes me want to lose my mind."
"What a weird kid."
She pressed her forehead like her head was throbbing. Then her mood flipped again, and she looked at me with the expression of a dog that urgently needed to go.
I will never figure this girl out.
I knew kids these days were hard to understand, but when someone's mood changed three times in a row, keeping up was impossible. Make that four.
"I've been coming over to your place a lot lately, right?"
"And?"
"I was worried I might be getting in the way of your trading... that's why I brought it up."
An apologetic look. She couldn't meet my eyes, fidgeting with her waistband instead.
Damn, that hip line is lethal.
I'd felt it myself — the curves were no joke. And it wasn't like she'd gotten any work done.
"Hey."
"Yeah?"
"Pure curiosity."
"What is it?"
"Do you take a lot of dumps?"
"?????"
Women who looked like they'd stepped out of a one-piece anime did exist in real life. Specifically, a lot of them were from South America.
Fine once or twice, but...
The body odor just never got familiar. I'd thought about why, and realized she spent a long time in the bathroom.
"What kind of insane thing is that to say!!"
"No, I mean, the storage tank is pretty big. I was just checking."
"Ugh, you absolute son of a—!!"
High metabolism, that was all. Race, diet, and a dozen other factors played into it too.
Sora's is actually nice, though.
Sweet, with some indescribably hot scent underneath. Korean women generally had good body chemistry. But I hadn't properly confirmed it yet. Staring at that storage tank, a question had just popped into my head.
"Why are you overreacting so hard? You don't take dumps? You don't masturbate?"
"I-I don't do that kind of thing..."
"You don't take dumps? Are you an alien?"
"#$^#$^%#$%!"
From her perspective, she was having a full-blown seizure. She stared at me with her clenched fists trembling.
Well, it's because her body is so sexy.
Twenty years old. Still a baby-faced age. If it had been Hye-ri or Suhyun, I wouldn't have said it. I just wanted to throw sex jokes at a woman with that kind of allure, and I'd overdone it. I was about to apologize before she sulked for real.
"Okay, so—"
"What is wrong with you! I came over feeling bad about bothering you!"
"Huh?"
Sora was having another fit. This time, one that worked in my favor.
What is this, bipolar disorder?
She was apologizing. I'd been giving her a hard time lately. She seemed to think she'd been interrupting my trades.
"You really don't have a generous personality, do you."
"You're the one with zero delicacy, Senior."
"In stocks, making money matters — but not losing it matters more."
"?"
A Warren Buffett classic. People who'd just started investing looked it up full of hope, but—
"Rule number one: never lose money." — Warren Buffett
"Rule number two: never forget rule number one." — Warren Buffett
—they had no idea what it actually meant. Some old man who made a ton of money just messing with people, right?
But the weird thing is...
The more you learn about stocks, the more interpretations start to surface. Take the recent market, for instance.
"If I'd stuck with the same investment style, I'd have gotten bagheld."
"That... could have happened, yeah."
"When the trend changes, adapting to the new trend is also an investor's virtue."
I made a certain amount every month! Approach investing with that salaryman mindset and you'd end up holding an empty can.
When it's time to buy, you buy.
That was the real meaning of Buffett's quote. To hit the ball, you have to be able to see it cleanly. That was the first-generation investor's way. As a second-generation investor, I took it one step further.
"In a bear market, there's a trading method that fits a bear market."
"Oh, and what's that?"
"Junk stocks."
"..."
I changed my trading style. More precisely, I adapted it to the bear market. Instead of waiting for the ball to come to me—
I go find it myself.
Growth stocks in a bull market. Sector rotation in a sideways market. And a bear market had its own methods too.
"That's just the same gambling you always do!"
"No, it's different."
"How the fuck is it different."
"Those weren't junk stocks — they were small-caps."
Small-caps had been my main focus. But even then, I'd only gone in on clear catalysts — policy news, contract wins, that kind of thing. In a bear market, catalysts don't move the needle. Just like Hwasung CNS a moment ago, they climb and then fall right back down. Because there's no expectation of company growth. Because it's a bear market. Stock prices price in the future. Even if a catalyst drops today, people figure the next one won't come.
"So companies that make money the normal way and grow the normal way don't see their stock prices rise."
"Then there's nothing to buy?"
"When are you going to start growing?"
"Oh, the sexual harassment repertoire again."
Sora flipped me off. She was getting pretty polished at it. As the one who'd taught her sexual harassment, I felt a sense of pride.
No — about stocks.
Even in a bear market, some stocks go up. If the companies making money the normal way aren't rising—
"Then only the abnormal companies go up, is that it?"
"Now you're starting to get it."
"Ah, fuck."
An unpredictable future. Stocks so absurd you couldn't make sense of them — those were the ones that selectively rose.
Like that Son ○-min related stock I bought before.
Son ○-min scores a goal — limit up! Ridiculous events like that actually happened. If it had been posted on a humor site, people would have laughed themselves sick. But for an investor—
"You want me to buy that kind of crap?"
"Yeah."
"Even so, that's a bit..."
"Then you haven't adapted to the bear market."
You had to know how to invest. Junk stocks rising in a bear market wasn't a coincidence.
In a bear market, buying pressure is weak.
Because nobody expects prices to go up. But there are still people who want to buy stocks. Break-even psychology. Investors who've lost money. They want to recover somehow, any way they can.
"When people have no hope, they buy lottery tickets and fall into religion."
"Well, you'd want something to lean on, I guess."
"Stocks are the same thing."
"?"
The reason didn't matter. If a stock was spiking, they threw themselves at it like moths to a flame.
The news is just an excuse.
Think of it as a tacit agreement. In a bear market, they pump junk stocks and play money games with them.
"I'm starting to feel disillusioned about investing in the Korean market."
"Don't look away. You have to face reality."
"What kind of reality is this garbage!"
The absolute end of the line for pure put-your-money-down-and-take-it gambling.