The Risk Team's Nightmare
When the market opens, the trading team keeps watch over dozens of stocks. The risk management team, in turn, keeps watch over the traders themselves — eyes blazing.
"Team Leader. Trader Na Gi-hwan is down five percent right now. Should we halt his account?"
Gu Kyo-dae furrowed his brow.
"No. Five percent already, in a bull run like this? Didn't he go into biotech?"
"This idiot went into steel, not biotech."
"Steel's been cold for how long, and he's still holding on to it... Cut the account."
"Yes, sir."
Sometimes things can tangle up unexpectedly, so if the market looks healthy, they'll give a trader a little leeway. But when there's no sign of a turnaround — as now — they simply snatch the account away. Sure, the protest calls come in constantly. But arguing changes nothing. At moments like this, the risk team is the god holding every trader's lifeline.
"Um... Team Leader?"
Park Gwa-jang shuffled in, hunched and hesitant.
"What is it?"
"A trader has just submitted a margin financing request."
"He wants leverage?"
Traders can request leverage from the brokerage. The risk team then receives the report and makes the call — and approval rarely comes easy. No matter how hot the market is, plenty of traders have been ruined trying to rake in big money through borrowed capital. Without airtight risk management and solid justification, no permit goes through.
"No, wait. What on earth is he planning to buy that he needs to pull leverage? What's his rationale?"
"AS Bio, sir. There's a sell wall sitting on it right now, and it seems he intends to punch through it and keep trading."
"Wh-what did you say?"
Gu Kyo-dae let out a hollow laugh. Smash through a sell wall? And what happens when the thing reverses on him and swallows him whole? Foreign funds might try it, sure — but what institutional player deliberately crashes into a wall of sell orders?
"None, sir."
"Exactly. So this lunatic who thinks like that actually works as a trader at our Daesong?"
A trader might rake in the big money, but did he not realize the risk team could freeze his account at any moment? Whoever this guy was, his gall had clearly spilled clean out of the hull.
"Who is he?"
"...That intern I mentioned before. Well — not an intern anymore. Associate Kang Suho."
"!?"
Suddenly, the whole conversation looked very different. Gu Kyo-dae knew perfectly well who Kang Suho was. A member of the Daesong Group's Royal Family, no less — the nobility personally hand-picked by Director Geum Gaho himself.
Cold sweat broke out on his brow.
"Ahem. So, uh... how much is he requesting?"
"Seven point five billion won, with 2.7x leverage."
"...Hold on. So he's going to take twenty billion won and dump it all into a single stock?"
"Yes. That appears to be the case."
"Insane."
Gu Kyo-dae felt a dull throb behind his temples. He'd clearly stepped on a landmine of a young master.
"What should we do?"
"If it were anyone else, I'd already be on the phone telling him to stop running his mouth—"
That was the problem: the other party sat at the very top.
"So... we don't really have a choice but to approve this, do we?"
"By the book, we shouldn't approve it. But then there could be retaliation."
Gu Kyo-dae's mouth felt bone-dry. His promotion was right around the corner; one wrong step now, and the career he'd spent years building could come crashing down all at once.
"You said it before, didn't you? That this Associate Kang Suho has solid backing from upstairs."
"Yes. It's certain he's in Director Geum Gaho's line, and he's sourced tips through it to land major investment wins recently. And going straight from intern to associate — you can see them actively pushing him up the ladder."
"Wait. Why were yesterday's returns like that again? Twenty-five percent?!"
"If you look at the trade logs, it's all money made on scalping. The problem is that he does zero risk management."
Naturally. When losing every last won wouldn't matter to you, you could trade exactly like that — especially with support from above being flaunted this openly.
"Tsk."
If even the higher-ups weren't stopping him, how was a mere team leader supposed to?
"Approve it."
"A-are you sure, sir? If he burns through all twenty billion won..."
"So should we refuse? Which scares you more — the fallout after he loses everything, or the retaliation for refusing an order from the Royal Family?"
"..."
Rather than answer, Park Gwa-jang gave a stiff bow and left the room.
"This is giving me a headache."
Why on earth did a bomb like that have to fall out of the sky onto the once-peaceful Daesong Securities? Anxious to his core, Gu Kyo-dae pulled up Kang Suho's account first.
"AS Bio. So that's the wall he means to break. He really is a lunatic."
Did he actually believe this would work? The strategy of forcing through a ten-billion-won sell wall with sheer volume and then pouring in another ten billion to pump the price — it existed, in theory. The so-called price explosion strategy. Shoving the short sellers' wall apart with raw money and driving the price up on top of it. When that happens, the shorts get caught in a short squeeze — a phenomenon where short sellers who borrowed and sold stock expecting a price drop are forced to buy it back in a panic when the price surges instead, to cap their potentially infinite losses. Forced liquidations cascade into panic buying, and the stock rides all the way to its daily limit.
"And how likely is that to actually happen in the real world?"
It was theory, pure and simple. If anyone could make money that easily, everyone on Yeouido would have done it. They didn't — and there was a reason. You couldn't be sure the wall was actually built by short sellers. It might just be profit-taking stacked into sell orders. In other words, the whole play could amount to fattening someone else's wallet while he incinerated twenty billion won in real time. An absolutely spine-chilling gamble.
Even if it was the shorts, if they played their hand well, smashing the wall would amount to nothing.
Beep—
Whatever. It was out of his hands now.
The moment Kang Suho's margin request was approved, ten billion won went in — all at once.
Beep—
And then, right behind it, another ten billion, poured in live before Gu Kyo-dae's eyes.
"..."
Gu Kyo-dae squeezed his eyes shut. Our young master, certainly living large. Right. If you were blue-blooded Daesong Group royalty, maybe losing twenty billion won was just pocket change?
"He's not actually going to make me write an incident report over this and tank my promotion, is he?"
Still, the man was Daesong Group through and through. Surely his own family would cover whatever mess he made. As Gu Kyo-dae sat there worrying himself sick—
Beeeeep—
An abnormal alarm tone snapped his eyes open.
"Huh?"
The ten-billion-won sell wall vanished in a single instant, and the chart — which had faltered for a breath — began rocketing skyward. At the sight of it, Gu Kyo-dae shouted without meaning to.
"It — it's exploding!"
The one thing short sellers fear above all else. The short squeeze had just detonated.
"It's climbing. Hey, it's climbing!!"
"I told you! I told you it'd climb! So it was the short sellers!"
Cheers erupted from every corner of the trading floor.
"Wahaha! The shorts deserve to have their necks wrung, every last one of them. Parasites that do nothing for this market but bleed it."
"Now that's justice!"
"Ah... I actually got played? No, wait — who was it that shorted this? The wall broke and they triggered the squeeze on them?"
"You should've gone long, my friend, not short."
"But who the hell wiped out the sell wall in one shot? Twenty billion won on a single all-in play?"
"Seriously. It's like we got bitten by a certifiably insane dog."
"..."
I kept quiet. Because that insane dog my seniors were talking about was, as it happened, me.
Wow. What a filthy hit of dopamine.
My scalp tingled and burned. Once when I'd charged into the ten-billion-won wall like a rampaging boar. Once more when I'd injected the next ten billion to pump the price. In each of those moments, tension and thrill and dopamine detonating all at once, electricity had run from my head to the soles of my feet.
"Hoo. My head."
Now that it was over, the aftermath crashed in like a hangover.
Think about it. I'd gone all-in on a single stock with a full twenty billion won. The terror that one slip could ruin everything, coexisting with the dopamine spraying off every tick of the rising chart — it was enough to blur my vision at moments. Had I ever, in my entire life, felt this much dopamine at once? Probably only a handful of people on Earth ever had.
"Everyone, take five."
Between watching this unfold, I'd missed lunch and the bathroom. My nose ached from all that scent-picking, too. I staggered up out of my chair.
"Wow. But seriously, what is this? Who just got devoured here?"
"Incredible every time I look. It's been ages since I saw shorts get eaten alive like this."
"First time I've seen anything at this scale, honestly."
The trading floor was still trapped in a cauldron of pure euphoria. I slipped out of the office as fast as I could. My bladder was about to burst.
"Haha..."
A jolt several times more intense than the dopamine that erupts when your team scores a dramatic go-ahead goal in the dying seconds of a match slammed into Team Leader Oh and kept going. He should have been cheering — instead, absurdity got the better of him, and a hollow laugh was spilling out of him instead.
"What do I even call this? Heart of a beast? Certified lunatic?"
The audacity to pull twenty billion won on leverage. And then the nerve to use it to demolish a ten-billion-won sell wall and pour in another ten billion to light the fuse. Team Leader Oh had ground around this industry long enough to consider himself fairly strong-willed, but this was a madness his toes couldn't even dream of reaching.
"Team Leader. Did you see AS Bio?"
"Of course I did."
"I haven't been here as long as you, but I've never once seen short sellers get wrapped up and swallowed whole like this."
The team members were flushed crimson with excitement. It made sense. Seeing a short-selling outfit that had thrown up a ten-billion-won wall get steamrolled through sheer brute force and devoured was a spectacle you could count on one hand. In the Korean market, seventy to eighty percent of short selling was foreign capital. Brokerages shorted too, of course, but they usually held long positions, so they had no love for the shorts. Watching that entire faction get swept away by a single surprise airstrike in real time had everyone's dopamine firing on all cylinders. And having money on the table beforehand was just the cherry on top.
"How long do you think they planned this operation? Pulling off a surprise like that — the preparation must have been airtight."
"The shorts' fault for getting their position sniffed out. Still, even getting caught, who'd have guessed they'd slam twenty billion down in one go..."
"Whoever pulled this off is getting one hell of a performance bonus party. But seriously, who was it?"
At his team members' chatter, Team Leader Oh felt laughter rise up uncontrollably.
"I know who it is."
"Sir?"
"You know?!"
"Where? Tell us where!"
And yet — no Kang Suho anywhere among them.
"Where's Associate Kang? Still trading?"
"Ah. Now that you mention it, his desk is empty."
"Wh-what? He's gone?"
His work was finished, so I suppose he had no further business looking at it. This trading floor was, for lack of a better word, a place of chronic self-promotion. How many percent did I make today, wasn't my prediction dead-on, and on and on. On good market days, they spent the entire day too busy bragging to one another about their returns to do anything else. A man who'd just posted returns unprecedented in the history of the brokerage — no, unprecedented in the history of Yeouido itself — should have been itching to open his mouth and crow about it on the spot.
But our young master had walked away without a single boast, as if all of it were nothing more than pocket change. A bone-chilling, almost glacial coolness.
But is he really the young master?
Team Leader Oh could no longer make heads or tails of what Kang Suho actually was. At first he'd assumed the man was simply a young master on an endless drip of support. Now, watching him, it felt more like looking at a monster who had achieved total mastery of the art of investment.
"So, Team Leader. Where is he? Tell us!"
"Just a little hint, please!"
His team members' eyes had gone bright and sharp, fixed on him alone.
"You lot — be good to Associate Kang."
"Sorry? Out of nowhere?"
"I'm saying it for your own futures. Heh heh."
At this incomprehensible pronouncement, all they could do was tilt their heads.