The Monster of the Trading Room
The air in the trading room had grown heavy. Like the sea just before a storm breaks, a silent, fishy tension coiled through the office.
Beeeep—!
No sooner had the market opened than alert chimes rang out from every direction.
Money was draining rapidly out of every other sector, all of it rushing toward biotech.
“……”
Team Leader Oh swallowed dryly as he watched trading volumes spike in the corner of his monitor.
The biotech sector.
The most glamorous battlefield in Yeouido right now — and the one said to be buried under the most corpses.
And that was exactly where the money had begun to flood.
“Timing an entry isn't easy.”
In a situation like this, even the most seasoned team leader would be afraid to charge in blindly.
Certain stocks could ride all the way to the 30% daily limit, but those gains were never achieved in a single climb. The price bounced up and down, shaking out the retail ants again and again before finally printing a peak.
The problem was that institutions, too, constantly mistimed their entries and got stuck at the top.
Were traders any different?
The moment you entered wrong and went down five percent, the risk team would liquidate your position on the spot. You could plead that if you just waited patiently the stock would come back, but it made no difference. Rules were rules — no one was spared, not even a team leader.
“So, carefully……”
The better the market, the more you had to guard against excitement.
Even with absolute certainty that anything you touched would rise, you had to stay calm. Plenty of men had lost their minds for a moment, thrown money around without proper risk management, and been utterly ruined. However much of a money feast today promised to be, keeping your composure was what mattered.
“Wait a minute. There are way too many short sellers in this.”
By its very nature, biotech drifts downward in ordinary times when there's no good news to lift it. The sector is hypersensitive to interest rates and trade tariffs, so without upward momentum, it sinks under its own weight. That's why the big players normally short biotech to rake in money — even going so far as to whip up public opinion claiming every company's technology is a fraud so long as there's no immediate catalyst.
“The strange hit pieces keep circulating for the same reason, I bet.”
It was happening right now, in fact. The sudden explosion of good news had lit a fire under the shorts, and they were thrashing desperately to drag the prices back down.
The problem was that their desperation was working. The charts were visibly wobbling at every fresh smear piece.
“This is exactly what you have to watch out for.”
Biotech was full of featherlight stocks — a flood of money could send them to a peak, but the moment even a little capital pulled out, they'd punch straight through the floor. In the end, it came down to a battle of timing.
Who could scalp the top and escape faster?
That was everything.
Nobody in Yeouido was investing in a biotech company based on its future. They were all playing day-trading games like gamblers at a casino, blinded by nothing more than the hope of out-earning the man beside them.
“Maybe I'll hold here for now and watch.”
Team Leader Oh set his mouse down for a moment.
Age, he supposed. His eyes were dry and gritty now, his neck stiff and aching.
[ Return: +7% ]
A perfectly satisfying return. In a market this hot, where some stocks were riding all the way to +30%, one might ask why he'd settle for a mere seven percent — but that would only reveal ignorance of how a brokerage actually worked.
Here, if you wanted to buy one unit of stock, you were obligated to buy an opposing position alongside it for risk management. Which meant that no matter how high your returns climbed, a portion was always eaten up by the hedging capital. Dramatic profit figures were hard to come by, but making money safely was the guiding principle of every securities firm.
Besides, the money a brokerage handled was on an entirely different scale from the retail ants'. Earning steadily and safely was more than enough.
“How is everyone doing?”
Nine o'clock to nine thirty.
This window was known as the hour of madness. Thirty to forty percent of the day's entire trading volume erupted in this stretch alone.
Then came ten to eleven, a correction that separated the wheat from the chaff — and from eleven thirty to one in the afternoon unfolded the hour of hell, when volume died off completely and prices tended to sag.
Once that stretch passed, a second wave arrived. Until it did, traders held their breath and observed.
For Team Leader Oh, it was also time to see how his people were performing.
“Everyone's holding steady.”
They were all turning profits without incident. None of them, of course, seemed to have matched their team leader's return yet.
Now that was the dignity of a team lead—
“Hold on. What is this?”
And then it happened.
Team Leader Oh's eyes landed on Kang Suho's return — the lone figure punching straight through the ceiling — and his jaw dropped.
“Twenty-five percent already?!”
It was true that a single stock could catch such enormous momentum that it spiked in one go. But as far as Team Leader Oh knew, not a single stock today had hit the upper limit at twenty-five percent yet.
“Which means……”
He pulled up Kang Suho's trade history.
And sure enough.
“This many trades already?”
The scroll seemed endless. Team Leader Oh clicked his tongue at the sheer number of transactions.
A prop trader's trade count varied with strategy. Someone chasing profits in seconds or minutes might execute more than a hundred trades a day; a day-trading approach would wind down around fifty. And in a market as hot as today's? You'd think they'd scalp by the second — but quite the opposite. You cut your trade count, watched the board as long as possible, and moved your positions sparingly.
“But he's already cleared a hundred and fifty trades……?”
Ultra-scalping — hundreds of trades in a single day. The problem was that in today's market, no human trader ran an ultra-scalping strategy anymore. Algorithmic programs had taken over that territory entirely.
“How on earth did he do this?”
That volume of trading in such a short window was astonishing enough — but not making a single mistake across all of it, and walking away with twenty-five percent? That was shocking.
“Is he a monster……?”
Oh prided himself on having been around this industry for a long time, but he had never seen anything like this. A human being trading with this level of focus — and actually profiting from it.
He was, quite literally…
a monster.
Run an engine too hard and it overheats, belching smoke. My nose was going through exactly that right now.
If only it would just smoke and stop there. This is outright abuse.
Clutching a nose that had gone from numb to raw, I let out a short groan.
“Kang Suho~! I'm planning to demolish some budaejjigae tonight — thought you'd want to join and ea… whoa? T-Team Leader Kang!”
Deputy Yoo was shaking me where I lay slumped over my desk.
“No! Team Leader Kang! You can't leave us like this…!”
“Why are you trying to kill a perfectly healthy man?”
“Pretty convincing, right? I was in my university's drama club, you know.”
“……”
“But why are you collapsed like this? Don't tell me you lost money? Hey, a day like today — even a monkey could make money in a market this hot.”
Deputy Yoo's face was positively puffed up with pride.
“I made a little today. Three and a half percent, was it? Hehe. If it weren't for the risk management allocations, I'd have earned even more — a shame, really. Still, if I push hard in the second wave after lunch, I think five percent is doable. That'd max out my numbers for the month.”
“Congratulations on your hard work.”
“Hard work, my foot. The market's just that good today. Look around — everyone's wearing smiles. It's been a while since we had a rally like this. But Team Leader Kang, your face looks awful. Did you lose a lot?”
“Well, it's…”
“Here, let me take a look. Just how much did you lose to look like somebody fresh out of a forced-labor camp… gasp!”
Deputy Yoo's eyes darted between me and my monitor in a panic.
“T-Team Leader Kang. Wh-what is this? Twenty-five percent?! And you didn't even pile into one stock — you made all of this on scalping this time? In this little time?!”
“I got a bit lucky, I suppose.”
“How is this luck?! Look at the number of trades! No — you're not some algorithm, so how did you execute this many trades?!”
At Deputy Yoo's rising voice, the traders at the other desks began to drift over one by one.
“What's going on over here?”
“Did he lose big or something?”
“No, the exact opposite, actually!”
“How much could he possibly have made to cause this much fuss— wait. Hold on. Is this number even possible?”
“No way. Twenty-five percent?! In just three hours?!”
The crowd was gathering at an alarming rate.
“What? Twenty-five percent?! Who?!”
“Your neighborhood folks. Right here — here it is!”
“Deputy Yoo, please, that's enough…”
Just as my desk was on the verge of turning into a public marketplace—
“What is all this?”
Team Leader Oh appeared like a savior.
“Even if it's lunch break, isn't this a bit much? On a day when every minute away from the screen counts, do you know how the market's about to move? The institutions are thrashing around desperately trying to push prices down right now. Do any of you have time to be standing around like this?”
At the team leader's rebuke, everyone tucked their tails and scattered.
“I saw it too, by the way. Your return today is monstrous. Honestly, pulling those numbers in that window is remarkable. A complete genius. A genius, I say. Haha.”
“Thank you.”
“No, no — the thanks should come from us. By the way, I noticed you sold off your entire position. Planning to rest and re-enter later?”
“That's…”
I gingerly touched my nose.
…No sensation at all.
“I think I need to rest for a while.”
“Well, normally, once a trader banks five percent in a day, he just shuts his computer off and goes home. There's no reason to take on extra risk.”
That was the beauty of being a trader.
As long as there was no urgent meeting or critical task on your plate, you could leave whenever you liked. In other words, hit your assigned return for the day and nobody would touch you.
“Traders don't have fixed hours. You stay in if you want to; you rest if you don't. If you've done everything you set out to do, heading home early is perfectly fine.”
“Yes, sir. Then I'll keep watching for a while longer.”
“Good. Greed can cost you everything you fought to earn, so think it through. Alright, get some rest~.”
“Yes, sir.”
It was lunch hour now, a brief lull — but come the afternoon, the rally would surely reignite.
“……”
The trouble was, my nose was in terrible shape. Given that I couldn't even feel it right now, I must have scorched it white.
I couldn't invest without my sense of smell. Instead, I massaged my nose and stared at the monitor.
[ Return to Date: +25% ]
A record that made me laugh all on its own.
Truly an astonishing ability, wasn't it? Honestly, I'd never dreamed I could scalp by the second and come out ahead with it. The process had been agony, but looking back on it now, I couldn't have been prouder.
“I think a little sensation is coming back……”
The nose I'd been kneading gave a sharp sting, and the pain was steadily getting worse.
Well, fair enough. It was the first time I'd ever abused my olfactory ability that hard in such a short span.
“This won't do.”
I'd planned to grab a sandwich at the office and rest, but it looked like I'd better stop by a pharmacy first and pick up something good for my nose.
“Welcome.”
“Do you have anything good for the nasal mucosa?”
“The mucosa? Is it dry and stinging?”
“Yes.”
“Ah, then dexpanthenol-based products would be your best bet.”
“Then I'll take that, along with any supplements that are good for the nose.”
“One moment, please.”
The pharmacist recommended zinc, vitamin A, vitamin B, propolis, and more — all touted as nose-friendly. I paid for the whole lot in one go, right there on the spot.
The old me would have trembled at the price. Now I could buy all of it without so much as blinking.
After the pharmacy, both hands full of bags, I stopped into a café to grab a light bite.
“……Did I buy too much?”
Not that it felt like a waste. Above all, for my future life in securities, my nose was the single most important asset I had. This much maintenance was only proper.
Maybe I should have left when Deputy Yoo offered to grab lunch together earlier.
Coffee and a single piece of bread at a café left my stomach hollow. I wanted a steaming hot stew with rice.
“Oh? Team Leader Kang. So this is where you were.”
And apparently, our Deputy Yoo was incapable of leaving a man in peace.
“What's with all these pharmacy bags?”
“Ah — my nose's been acting up. By the way, have you had lunch, Deputy Yoo?”
“Yep. That's why I'm here now — coffee for dessert.”
“……Would you care for a second round?”
At those words, Deputy Yoo flinched and stumbled backward a step.