I Am the Force
Scalping.
A trading method where you jump into a surging stock, take a quick bite, and get out. It was classified as far more dangerous than ordinary day trading.
I used to scalpe back in the day, you know.
Yong-su had done it before. Full-time traders tended to favor scalping quite a bit. You could trade every single day. The higher the risk, the fatter the profits. When investing was your livelihood, that was an attractive proposition. He'd moved away from it as his seed capital grew—
—strictly for the sake of stability. But if he put his mind to it, there was nothing stopping him even now.
Okay. Five million won, nice and clean.
A stock with exploding volume. A catalyst with room left to run. Those were the only two things he looked at before going in. After that, it was a pure game of nerve. Whoever controlled the tape better won.
And then—balls of steel.
Catching a falling knife was amateur hour.
A pro jumps in when it's shooting straight up.
He dove into the fire. Became the firewood himself.
The more he bought, the higher the price climbed. The Force rowed hard when the tide came in. A surging stock. The moment the watching ants all piled in on top of each other—
That's when you sell and walk. Seven million. Ohh, feeling good today.
Booking the profit—that was the real skill. Two scalps had netted him twelve million won. Having a big seed helped. He was throwing in anywhere from a hundred million to three hundred million at a time, then yanking it back out.
Thump. Thump.
The risk was correspondingly enormous. Honestly, he was shitting himself. Back when his seed was small, a loss meant cutting a few hundred thousand and calling it a day.
No. It's fine. Today's feeling is good.
Anxiety needled at the back of his skull. Yong-su shook his head, forcing it down. Yes, it was dangerous. But he had a reason he had to do this.
No telling how much that bastard Sonik-jwa raked in again.
Yesterday the guy had posted insane gains—because he was riding surge stocks every single day. If that asshole was doing it, Yong-su had to do it too. And today, his condition was sharp.
Scalping prioritized execution skill over analysis. Buy before everyone else. Sell before everyone else.
Wouldn't mind a little luck on my side, either.
He cracked his knuckles, bleeding off the tension. His eyes were locked on the order book, drilling holes through the screen.
Whether the price went up or not was ultimately the Force's call. And you never knew when the ants would jump in. Some days, no matter how good you were, nothing worked. That was why scalping was hard.
But today—
INSTITUTION'S ANT MASSACRE!
—was a good day. The broken stock didn't just recover—it punched through the ceiling.
Foreigners piled in too? Game over, then!
Foreign buying was read as a bullish signal. Sure, it could be a black-haired foreigner—a domestic player wearing a foreign mask—but that didn't matter.
What mattered was that the price was going up. Sensing the moment, Yong-su threw in more capital.
All-in. He dumped his entire three-hundred-million-won seed into the fire. Gasoline on a burning house.
The reaction was violent. Far hotter than expected. The price was ripping so hard his hands came off the keyboard.
When it moves like this, the ants get too scared to buy.
He wouldn't have been any different. One difference, though—
—he'd already bought. Yong-su successfully booked a massive +19% gain.
Fifty-seven million won. Am I actually cracked today?
In five minutes flat. A grin spread across his face whether he wanted it or not. Days of staring holes through charts. Days of nibbling buys to build a position. Work that used to take a week—done in five minutes.
Or, for some people—
Money you couldn't make in a year of grinding your soul out at a company job.
He tipped his chair back. You couldn't even sit like this at a desk job. That was why he was a full-time trader. The money you earned scaled to your ability—and this freedom.
.
.
.
He could end his workday whenever he felt like it. He'd made enough for today.
Obviously I'm winning. That bastard burned through a lifetime of luck yesterday.
He killed time browsing the community. Sure enough, the topic was already on fire before the market even closed. The rivalry. He'd lost yesterday, but today was different. He'd keep the upper hand going forward, too. He'd already decided to stop playing it safe.
I can carry a little risk too, yeah?
Safe trading methods for the Leading Room members. But the real hundred-percent Yong-su wasn't that guy. He jumped into scalps like the one just now. He was trying to show some dignity as a hunter who called himself a full-time trader—
A peculiar topic. No need to think about it—pure reporter error.
Twenty-six trillion? If a company like that actually existed, this wouldn't be the Republic of Korea—it'd be the Kingdom of Korea.
The entire population could quit working and still eat. A typo-born non-event. They cropped up in the stock market now and then. Sometimes that spark even created a surge stock.
Should I take a swing? It could actually run…
Delusion breeding delusion—buying pressure might flood in. Another fat profit waiting.
Thump. Thump.
Or it might not. He could jump in for nothing and cough up everything he'd made today.
Even so, this is straight-up gambling.
A quick check—the price hadn't moved. Meaning the market hadn't reacted at all. Anyone could see it was a typo. Besides, he'd already made enough for the day. Nothing felt worse than FOMO-buying your way into a bag-hold.
Click. Click.
Yong-su snickered to himself as he scrolled the community.
An article. A piece of writing in a newspaper or magazine that informs the public of some fact. In the stock market, the meaning was interpreted a little differently.
A tool for floating the share price.
The Force used them constantly. Because he already knew the whole playbook, a bit of good news wasn't enough to shake him—but even he had moments that made him blink.
Apparently some company had hauled in twenty-six trillion won in a single quarter.
I don't remember a second Oseong Electronics being born.
Operating profit that even Oseong Electronics—Korea's number-one company—had never achieved. Pulled off by some outfit nobody had ever heard of? Obviously impossible. The reporter had clearly slapped on three extra zeros.
That part's obvious enough.
The reason he'd actually been startled was something else. If the Force had floated this article—
Tap. Click.
A search showed zero price movement. Meaning this wasn't intentional. Just a plain mistake.
In which case, I can use it.
If time simply passed, the curtain would fall on a harmless non-event. But it was only one in the afternoon. Plenty of market hours left before the close. First, some basic intel.
Yuseong Heavy Industries. One of those so-called boomer stocks—a traditional heavy-industry firm. It made decent money. But it had no growth story and did nothing to support its share price.
Which is why nobody cares about it.
Volume was abysmal. You could safely say nobody day-traded this thing. Didn't look like an operation, either. Operated stocks had accumulation phases where volume got deliberately juiced.
No accumulation means this is a clean stock.
A sudden catalyst. A stock the Force hadn't touched. Given those two premises, this was doable.
He would become the operation himself.
An "operation" might sound like some grand conspiracy, but—
—it was just buying stock to push the price up. Institutions and foreigners did the exact same thing.
I used to be one of those institutions.
He knew the method cold. He market-swept all nine levels of the order book at the open. The book was so thin that a hundred million won was enough. At the same time, he restocked the empty asks and—
—sold a portion. Twenty thousand shares traded in an instant. Price lifted, volume inflated.
Repeat that, and—
—the ants would take the bait. How? Day traders ran screeners: tools that flagged stocks matching specific conditions. Instant volume spikes, for instance.
And then the catalyst. An operating profit of twenty-six trillion won—a number big enough to make anyone's eyes spin.
Before they figure out it's pure bullshit—
—dump everything and exit. That was the core. Use the incoming buy flow as a springboard to lift the price higher.
No—scoop it all up. When a stock surges, ants feel the urgency. That panicky sense that if they don't buy right now, they'll miss it. He'd vary the tempo and milk their FOMO for all it was worth.
This only works because there's a catalyst, though.
In the stock market, opportunities were always rolling around on the ground. But picking them up took skill. If there was no Force—he would drag the price up in its place.
He would become the house.