The Stock Goddess
"Senior!"
My everyday life, as always.
The immature junior barges in without even knocking.
Next time I should time it perfectly and be mid-stroke.
If I told her I couldn't finish because of her, she might actually help out of sheer surprise.
"Senior, I seriously reevaluated you this time."
"What?"
"I heard you recommended semiconductor stocks to the club kids. And not some penny trash—actual blue chips."
Her head was full of nothing but stocks.
I'd recently taken over management of the stock club, and she clearly liked what she was hearing.
Sora had a tendency to treat stocks like something sacred.
"You should've done that from the start."
"Done what."
"You can just predict the cycle and invest in large-caps without touching penny junk. Why didn't you do it before?"
Conservative investors were usually like that.
It was also the final destination for a hedge fund CEO.
Once your seed capital gets big enough, the only things that can absorb it are bonds or large-caps.
I was a hedge fund CEO in name, after all. Of course I knew how to handle large-caps. I'd simply avoided them because they were low-risk, low-return.
Sora preferred that direction. She also hated speculative assets like crypto.
"Your seed's gotten bigger now, so from now on please do stable trading that I can watch and learn from too."
"Sure."
"What are you trading right now, Senior?"
"Crypto."
"……."
Fair enough. Crypto was definitely irrational.
I'd even heard the recent chatter inside the economics department.
Crypto's not as easy as people think.
It was a lawless market from the start. Securities laws and regulations simply didn't apply. Looking at charts alone made it seem simple, but live trading was different.
But if you understood that…
"I told you not to touch penny trash!"
"It's not penny trash. It's crypto."
"You said it yourself—it's not gambling, it's a religion. Don't you even remember your own words?"
"Yeah. That's exactly why I'm doing it—because I know it's a religion."
"?"
Meaning you could also exploit it.
And right on cue, the moment I'd been waiting for arrived.
Crypto has no intrinsic value. It moves solely on investor psychology.
And that psychology right now…
Was weak. More precisely, their faith was shallow—the absolute conviction that Bitcoin would only go up.
I shook it. I engineered a situation where they had no choice but to get scared.
"You sold? See, assets like that aren't something you can trust and hold—"
"You idiot."
"Huh?"
"How long are you going to keep playing at the retail level?"
Retail investors buy and sell for price differences. Institutional investors create the flow itself on a much larger scale.
The flow I want.
That was possible here.
Crypto had one major advantage: the leverage range was far wider than stocks.
Later on, even 1,000x would become possible. Literally the power to use 500x or 1,000x Kaio-ken. But current private exchanges only went up to 200x. I used just a little of that and dumped crypto futures worth ten billion won.
This is the critical branch point.
Just now it had touched the 5-day moving average—technically a level that absolutely had to bounce. I pressed it once there. Then I forced a break of the psychological resistance line around the five-million-won level.
Over the past week I'd slowly built the chart, deliberately propping up the support line.
People learn from that, you see.
"This zone will never break!"
The moment they witnessed that there is no such thing as "never" in this world—
DOUBLE KILL!
TRIPLE KILL!
Their mental fortitude collapsed. Once when the 5-day line broke. Once more when five million won crumbled. When both hit at the same time, no one could keep their reason. The ants who'd been trembling with anxiety started dumping one after another.
"Like this."
"W-what did you just do?"
"I hit the technical resistance and the psychological resistance at the same time."
Honestly it was an obvious trick. It was so effective that the securities market never gave you this kind of opportunity. But Bitcoin? A fresh, green emerging market. The investors were all clueless rookies.
No macro capital either.
Because there was no futures market. Globally demanded commodities had futures for effective price discovery. Bitcoin hadn't reached that stage yet. Only a handful of private exchanges existed. With no official futures market—
"Whoa…"
"Shaking the market is easy."
"Just now… Senior dumped volume and the chart collapsed?"
"You understood perfectly."
Almost no institutional money had entered. The so-called big hands simply didn't exist.
Their response is slow too.
Institutions rolled macro capital. When the market shifted, they auto-responded—programs reacting in microseconds. The current crypto market had none of that.
Just me rolling a few hundred billion was enough to rock it. I scooped up the Bitcoin that had dropped in price.
"But Senior."
"Yeah?"
"If you sell and buy back like that, isn't the profit not that big? You must've taken a loss when you sold."
"You idiot."
The ultimate goal was building the chart. And keeping the retail investors participating in the market in a state of fear.
The plan was unfolding step by step. It was going so well I was starting to yawn.
"So why did you come here."
"I thought Senior had changed, but you're exactly the same as always."
"You thought I was going to change?"
"No."
Then why act like that? Did she seriously think I wouldn't play on a 24-hour unlimited gambling table?
That was a separate matter, though. Reviving the stock club. She seemed quite impressed by that.
"I bought some too, you know."
"Bought what?"
"SQ Technics! I'm already up 7%."
"Want to eat my lips too?"
She flipped me off.
Normally she ate just fine, but she played coy at the weirdest times.
If you made money because of me, you should let me eat too.
Preferably something even tastier.
"You're perfectly good at normal stocks, so why—"
"Why do crypto?"
"Yeah. It's dangerous. Some weird thing whose identity you can't even know."
If I taught her that crypto would moon in the future, would she let me eat?
I already knew she wasn't that type, so I gave up. Besides, that wasn't why I was doing crypto anyway.
"Honestly I get those thoughts too. Like, if only I'd bought about a hundred Bitcoin back then…"
"Why?"
"Because the price went up a lot…"
"Why are you having such embarrassing delusions?"
"You fucking bastard!"
Assets that would rise tenfold in the future! Honestly there were plenty of those besides crypto. You didn't even have to look far—Tesla was one. And the SQ Technics Sora had bought had once been dirt cheap too.
SQ Technics. One of Korea's representative semiconductor companies—no, one of the major conglomerates. Together with Osung Electronics and Mirae Motors, one of the three pillars.
"Did you know it used to be 136 won?"
"What?"
"One hundred thirty-six won per share."
"I-it was that cheap?"
The company had been on the verge of bankruptcy. In the cleanup trading it had fallen all the way to 136 won. Employees holding treasury shares at the time had been in hell, they said.
So they gritted their teeth and saved the company—for their own money.
People in the know knew that backstory. Even if not hundreds or thousands of times like SQ Technics, assets that rose dozens of times were surprisingly common.
"There's only one problem."
"What is it?"
"Whether you can keep holding it."
"Ah!"
A stock's value was decided by its current price. Expensive meant good, cheap meant bad—at least that was how people perceived it.
At least with stocks you can still do analysis.
Crypto had nothing. No basis to believe and hold. Sora seemed to sense something and nodded.
"So stocks are…"
"Better to do, yeah."
"But Senior, you're doing crypto."
"Because I understand the psychology."
"?"
Crypto investor psychology. I was building the chart to exploit it. What I was doing now was only the preliminary skirmish—to guide people exactly the way I intended.
"Crypto hasn't been booming for that long yet."
"Well, true."
"Which means it's the perfect time to shake the market participants' psychology."
"?!"
The amount I could move—even including leverage—was still tiny. Dumping one bucket of water into the ocean changed nothing. But a swimming pool?
You can make waves.
Dump the right volume at the right time and shake the market. That was the true face of an institutional investor. A stage where I could fully display my ability. At the current point in time, the crypto market was the only one.
"I heard the kids who bought crypto lately are having a hard time."
"Yeah."
"Because trash like Senior keep shaking the price."
"I feel a sense of accomplishment."
There were minor side effects. No—actually, that was the correct form of the crypto market.
Their faith is just shallow.
Anxiety born from having no physical substance? Crypto overcame that with faith. And that faith was thin. The current crypto market was something even I, short on seed capital, could shake plenty.
She glared at me like she had a mountain of complaints. Then she let out a small sigh.
"Haa~ Anyway, the main point."
"What."
"Thanks to Senior, all the club kids made money, right? Looks like some of them went around bragging about it."
Something had come up. With the market so turbulent lately, investment profits weren't easy to come by.
But since they themselves made money…
The urge to brag. That was also one of the fun parts of investing, in a way. One unexpected situation had occurred regarding the fact that students had made investment profits.
"A reporter came to cover it?"
"Yes. And they asked if they could come do an on-site interview."
"Hmm…"
It wasn't that rare. Securities firms loved spotlighting ordinary people's success stories.
Because that makes the ants get hooked and buy stocks.
Especially Hankuk University—a university with name recognition. They must have calculated they could turn it into an issue.
"Not bad."
"Then Senior, you'll do the interview—"
"Absolutely not."
"Ah, why not!"
Desire for recognition. The club kids would get motivated to trade stocks. It was also a chance to increase club membership.
But I don't want to.
Getting on broadcasts for no reason was a headache. Student investor Lee Chanuk! No matter what I did, the "student" tag would stick to me. Like how even a good restaurant became unappealing once they slapped "youth" on it—student investors just didn't inspire trust. More than anything, it was simply annoying.
"You do it."
"Me?"
"Your tits are fucking huge, so you'll look great on camera."
"What the hell is this bastard saying!"
I never imagined that would become reality.