Sweet Coffee
A new morning had broken. Even while I got ready for work, my mind stayed perfectly clear. On any other day I'd have hated every minute of this. Today, though, I was so eager for what was coming that the thought of clocking in had my heart racing. Assistant Manager Ryu's face is going to be a sight.
I picked up my phone and opened the brokerage app.
Give this about five more hours... Assistant Manager Ryu's position had clawed its way back to a mere five percent loss for a moment, only to finish yesterday down ten. And today's drop is already locked in. I couldn't yet feel how far it would fall. What I did know was that it would close lower than this.
Friday and Monday alone, the underlying dropped 4.9 and then 10 percent... That was 14.9 percent on the stock itself. I was on two-times leverage, so I was up about 30. And Assistant Manager Ryu, riding three-times leverage... Call it roughly minus 45. He was up around 36 before, so he's about 9 percent in the red now.
So this was how the Heart of the Beast died. And the others in the chat who got in even later than he did are probably...
I caught a taxi and headed for the site in the expensive puffer I'd bought the day before.
"Bongdeok Hillstate, please."
"You got it."
In the back seat I checked the account one more time, and a laugh slipped out of me. Maybe I ought to buy a car with this.
The taxi pulled up. I stepped into the office, and the first thing I saw was this.
"Ryu, you son of a bitch! Give me my money back!!!"
It was, in a word, chaos.
"M-Manager Kim! What do you think you're doing! Let go of me!!"
"Manager Kim! Calm down!!!"
The moment I walked in, Assistant Manager Ryu Yeon-sang was dangling by the collar from Manager Kim of the architecture team, while Assistant Manager Kim, sweat pouring off him, was desperately trying to pry the bigger man loose.
"Calm down? You just told me to calm down?!"
Manager Kim Beom-soo roared loud enough to lift the roof, that bear of a body filling the room.
"Do you have any idea how much I've lost because of you?!"
"Manager Kim... please, don't do this..."
"Assistant Manager Kim, you look at this too!!!"
Assistant Manager Kim had been hanging off the man's arm for all he was worth. Manager Kim shoved a brokerage screen into his face anyway.
"Look at it!!!"
"Ah..."
The office went dead quiet.
Watching from a distance, I turned it over. Truth is, Assistant Manager Kim has to be sitting on an enormous gain right now. What was he thinking? I kept still and waited to see how he'd play it.
His eyes darted, and then he found me.
"Oh! Assistant Manager Chae, you're in? Hahaha!!"
He pasted on that awkward smile and slipped away from the two of them as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
"Yes. Good morning, Assistant Manager Kim."
"Ha! Good morning?"
The voice behind me was one I wasn't used to hearing in that tone.
"Ah, Chief Baek. Good morning."
"Hrgh..."
It was Chief Baek of the electrical team.
"Assistant Manager Chae... ahem. I'm no good at this sort of thing, so I'll keep it short. Thank you."
"Sorry? What for?"
I knew exactly what for. I pretended I didn't.
"Come on now, why play dumb? Friday. I'm talking about Friday."
"Ah. You mean then."
He'd been wavering over whether to sell, and I'd told him to take at least a little off the table.
"...Right. I survived because of you. Really, thank you, Assistant Manager Chae."
"Not at all. We work in the same office. We ought to look out for each other."
"...From now on, I'll make sure my people never dump facilities work on you again. I'll see to it myself. I'm truly sorry about everything until now."
Chief Baek bowed his head as he said it. I hadn't expected him to go that far, and the answer came out a little flustered.
"Ah... I understand. Please, stand up."
"Anyway, I lived because of you. Come to think of it, you probably even made money."
He had barely finished before Manager Kim came striding straight at me.
"Assistant Manager Chae..."
He bent into a deep bow.
"I'm sorry for everything until now! I kept shoving my work off on you like it was nothing!!!"
"What are you doing. Please get up."
He was quick enough to apologize once he read the room. I wasn't particularly inclined to accept it. They mocked me as Short Room, and this wasn't the first time he dumped his work and ran. Or the second.
Even so, the anxiety won. He glanced around, then came out with what he'd actually wanted.
"So... Assistant Manager Chae, I should cut my losses now, shouldn't I?"
"No!!!"
Every eye in the room swung to Assistant Manager Ryu.
"Think about it rationally. A factory paralyzed, a profitable company going bankrupt, all because of a flu? You really believe a rag like that? It wasn't this bad when MERS spread, or when swine flu hit!!!"
"Then... then what am I supposed to do?"
Manager Kim was stammering. Assistant Manager Ryu answered him without a flicker of doubt.
"You're in the underlying, Manager Kim, so you diamond-hand it. Anyone on leverage needs to average down."
"Average down? You're telling me to buy more here?"
Assistant Manager Kim, who had been listening off to the side, burst out at that, but Ryu didn't bend.
"Yes. That black-ink bankruptcy rumor gets exposed as a lie any day now, and this goes up no matter what. Wuhan pneumonia? You think the Chinese government lets its number-one domestic EV company die over something like that? It's absurd. Too big to fail!"
Too big to fail. The phrase came out of Go. These days it means a company so enormous that its collapse would wound a whole nation, and so the state will prop that giant up one way or another.
"You have to buy at this briefly depressed price! Imagine you'd bought here with no bad news at all! This is just one giant discount event!"
Assistant Manager Ryu's eyes glittered with something close to mania.
"Just watch. One week! Close your eyes, delete the app, and give it one week. You'll come back to tens of times your money!!!"
And then Junior Associate Lee Ji-hye walked over and took her place at his side.
"I'm buying."
"Associate Lee..."
Her eyes were steady.
"I trust Assistant Manager Ryu. This morning's paycheck—I already exchanged everything except the rent. The second the market opens, I'm buying more."
"Yes! That's it, Associate Lee! Buy the limit-down now and I'll feed you tens of times over! This is when you average down and drag your cost basis lower!!!"
The two of them closed ranks. The rest of the office was ice. I looked away from the wavering Manager Kim, went to my desk, and got ready to work.
"Well now, Assistant Manager Chae. New puffer? Looks good on you. Step out for a smoke?"
"Ah, Assistant Manager Kim. Sure."
We slipped outside, not toward the smoking area but into the boiler room only the facilities team could enter, and locked the door behind us.
"Haaaaah... I really thought I was dead!"
"Assistant Manager Kim, that was some professional-grade acting."
I said it with a crooked little smile. He had to be up around thirty percent himself, same as me, and yet in front of everyone he'd worn the face of a man grateful he'd never bought in. A born performer.
"Heh. You know I can put on a show. Honestly, give me a face like yours and I'd have been an actor."
"Oh, come on. That's embarrassing."
"Hahaha!!!"
We laughed for a moment, then got to it.
"Assistant Manager Chae, where do you think this goes?"
"It drops further today. No question. We'll have to read the trend day by day, but today closes red too."
"...Yeah? So I don't have to sell yet?"
I grinned as I answered.
"You should still be out before next week is over."
"Ah...!! So just like Assistant Manager Ryu said... it bounces?"
I shook my head.
"No. If it falls far enough to get delisted, you're better off rotating into something else."
"You mean...!!!"
"Yes. Buy that stock thinking you've found the floor, and it'll punch through the basement and keep going."
Assistant Manager Kim was so stunned he sat straight down on the floor.
"Th-then..."
"Well, time it right and something close to two hundred percent is possible. Waiting all the way out there takes too long, though. You'd do better, return-wise, to sell at a reasonable point and buy something else."
His entire fortune, a hundred and twenty million won, would come back as three hundred and sixty million. Below a certain level, buying other names in the meantime is the better trade. It might go all the way to a delisting, but actually getting delisted would be pretty hard.
Assistant Manager Kim blinked at that, thought for a moment, then sprang up and pulled me into a hard embrace.
"Assistant Manager Chae. Thank you!"
Don't mention it. If anyone should be grateful, it was me. He was the one who'd gotten me into stocks in the first place.
"That's for the kkanpunggi, Assistant Manager Kim."
"Kkan... kkanpunggi? What are you talking about?"
"...It's a thing."
Nothing moved through the office but a cold silence. Assistant Manager Ryu and the people from the group chat, who were usually laughing and talking over one another, had gone quiet, and the gloom rolling off them dimmed the whole room.
Tak. Tak-tak-tak.
Not a word. Only the keyboards, ticking through the office like hearts burning down to ash.
Assistant Manager Ryu already looked like a man who'd come undone. What little order he'd managed that morning had been wrecked in the scuffle with Manager Kim, and his hair was a mess, as if he'd torn at it alone. He wasn't even pretending to work. He sat there refreshing stock forums and news articles like a man possessed, and with the department head out on site, no one stopped him.
They couldn't have. Pretend all they liked: it was no exaggeration to say half this office was already in the same boat as Assistant Manager Ryu. They had blasted through the morning's work at a frantic pace so they could react the instant ten-thirty arrived, and now every one of them was staring at the clock in the corner of the monitor.
"Just watch... this is... a retail shakeout... if I just average down..."
Muttering to himself, he was impossible to read. Did he truly believe it, or did he only need to?
I was watching him sidelong, picking through the small tasks on my desk, when someone tapped my shoulder. Manager Kim, from architecture.
"Yes, Manager Kim? What is it?"
"Um... hey... you aren't thirsty, are you, Assistant Manager Chae? Have this while you work."
It was a Starbucks coffee. Steam still curling off it. How does he know I like lattes? I do like my coffee sweet. At the office, all I ever get is those yellow sticks of instant mix. Starbucks is a forty-minute round trip by car. So that was where he'd vanished to.
"Ah... thank you."
The sweet smell pulled the cup into my hand before I thought about it. Manager Kim suddenly thrust his face in close.
"So... Assistant Manager Chae, mind talking for a minute while you drink that?"
"...All right."
I took the coffee with no enthusiasm, pulled on my short puffer, and stepped outside.
"Uh, I need the restroom too..."
"I'll just check the site..."
"Me too..."
A few of them spilled out after us. I pretended not to notice.
Manager Kim kept stealing glances at his watch. He knew there were eyes on us from behind. He bowed anyway, a full ninety degrees.
"Assistant Manager Chae... no. Seong-ho. I'm really sorry. Yeah? Hyung must've lost his mind for a minute."
"You know, don't you? What am I supposed to do with this? Do I sell even now? Huh? Please, save your hyung. I was wrong. I'm really sorry for everything up to now."
Still bent at the waist, he seized the hand that wasn't holding the coffee and clamped it in both of his. His palm was soaked through.
I looked at him and said nothing. I lifted the coffee to my mouth.
I took a sip.
The coffee was very sweet.