Dump It All and Run
Out in front of the site cafeteria, already gearing up to open at eleven, nothing moved but a vicious silence. Then came the slurp of coffee—slrrp—and in Manager Kim's ears the sound of Assistant Manager Chae drinking was deafening.
Please... just tell me already. There's no time left.
A moment ago the minute hand had been on twenty-three. What was it now? Twenty-four? Twenty-five? It might already have been twenty-seven.
If I can't make the call before the half hour...
Up or down, from here on he and the position would live or die as one. He had bought the underlying shares, so unlike the others riding leverage—who could at least try to hang a sell order—he could trade only while the Chinese market was open. Not that the leveraged crowd had it much better. Once China was closed, volume on those products collapsed toward zero, and they couldn't get out either.
No one, at this moment, could say whether this was the last chance to cut a loss or just another shakeout of the retail herd.
No one except that Assistant Manager Chae, probably.
Manager Kim hadn't looked into a thing when he bought. He had purchased on nothing but Assistant Manager Ryu's say-so from the tip room, and he had no judgment of his own for whether to hold or to sell. The one small mercy was that he knew that about himself perfectly well.
That's why I asked Assistant Manager Ryu. And Ryu's stuck in it too—all he said was diamond-hand it.
And Chae? When everyone else had been jeering that he'd gone short, the odds were very high that he had read the market on his own and shorted it anyway.
Otherwise there's no way it would have fallen in a straight line from that exact day.
A drop without so much as a bounce. Manager Kim hadn't even known what NIHEO did until the stock bagged him, and only then had he started studying the company. All weekend, and through every hour of Monday—the day he hadn't come in—he had clutched his head over articles and news, and the conclusion he came to was this.
Assistant Manager Chae knows something.
He had to. Before Chae went short, every piece of bad news had been locked away tight. The moment after, it began detonating one blast after another, as if on a promise.
If this is the end of the bad news, then Ryu's right and we hold. But if it isn't...
He had settled on that much long before. So he had timed a quarrel with Assistant Manager Ryu for the exact moment Chae was due in, then scrambled to apologize and pry the opening wider—and none of it had done a bit of good.
Damn it. Damn it. What do I do? I feel like I should just sell. Do I dump it?
The market-sell button was already up. His mouse hovered over it. He still couldn't press.
...And what if, after I do, it claws back everything it lost?
Inside his skull, the hunger to diamond-hand his way back to even and the terror of another leg down were locked in a dead heat.
I wish somebody would just decide for me.
Unable to go either way, he had flailed until the only move left was currying favor—so he had driven out to Starbucks and come back with coffee. The shame of Assistant Manager Chae looking down on him made Manager Kim squeeze his eyes shut. What rose in his head first, though, wasn't the shame. It was his shattered account.
Profit / Loss: −₩14,030,000
Total Valuation: ₩215,970,000
Still... at most I've lost a little more than two months' pay.
For now he could still declare a private victory. Call it savings spent on a handbag for Hye-ji, and make it up to her by treating her better. But if it slipped even a little further? If it crashed ten percent the way it had on Friday—or, God forbid, the way it had on Monday?
Sixteen percent.
Just picturing it put sweat in his palms and a chill down his spine.
How long had passed? His lower back was just beginning to ache when Assistant Manager Chae, finished with the coffee, let out exactly one line.
"Manager Kim..."
Gulp.
Crash!
The words were barely out of Chae's mouth before the noise came—not from Manager Kim, but from the stairwell. Kim himself never even found a second to look up at him. His eyes went straight to the watch on his wrist.
"Thank you—thank you, Assistant Manager Chae!!!"
"Th-the reason—"
That thanks was all Manager Kim managed to leave behind. He never stayed to hear why he was supposed to sell. He tore up the stairs, blew past the other members of the same tip room, dropped into his chair, and slammed the sell button he had left waiting on the screen.
Click.
And the Chinese market began.
Thud-thud-crash!
Manager Kim came barreling in first, and a whole knot of people piled into the office right behind him, gasping. Making this kind of scene over stocks in the workplace was, honestly, absurd—but what were they supposed to do? The work had been finished long ago, and the department head who might have shut it down still hadn't come back from the site. So they forgot it was an office at all. Pale-faced, they rushed in and hammered their mice.
Click-click-click-click!
Some threw themselves into their chairs. Some never managed to sit, standing there white as paper with a brokerage app blown up on the monitor, mashing the sell button like madmen.
"The—the profit..."
Of everyone from Assistant Manager Ryu's tip room who was in the office, only two had not hit sell: Ryu himself, and Associate Lee Ji-hye.
"Have you all lost your minds? Chae's playing you, and you're going to eat the loss! What you're doing is panic trading! You believed something he said with zero evidence, and now you're going to miss the whole move up!!!"
Assistant Manager Ryu shouted it at them. Not one of them so much as turned an ear his way. The only thing they cared about was the fill.
Sell. Please, God, sell at my price.
Manager Kim had thrown his shares at the market the instant the bell rang. Others, unable to let go of the last scrap of hope, had left limit orders resting. Those people poured their entire minds into the order book on the monitor and stared a hole through it.
How long went by? A minute? Maybe two?
"Look! The chart's just sitting there sideways! If it were real, it would've face-planted the second we opened! You've all been had!"
For all of Manager Kim's shoving and sprinting, the chart went nowhere in the first stretch after the open. It simply held flat. A little light came back into Assistant Manager Ryu's face.
"See? What did I tell you!!! If this were really a bankruptcy in the black, the institutions would've dumped everything and run the moment the bell rang! You see this volume? Retail's the one throwing shares, and the institutions are swallowing every last one of them! You've been played!!!"
With that he looked at the chart again, and Associate Lee Ji-hye came scurrying up beside him.
"Assistant Manager Ryu, is it going to rise now? Or should we wait a little longer??"
"Associate Lee..."
"Assistant Manager Ryu! Please just decide!!! What if it takes off while we're standing here!"
Ryu was watching the chart. He had drawn support after support into it, rebound line after rebound line. His account was printed in the red, but he still believed there was plenty of room for a bounce.
He knew the situation was genuinely dangerous. A bankruptcy in the black was a frightening thing; even as nothing but a gutter rumor, its power to destroy was enormous. But what if the rumor was a lie? What if the factories were running just fine?
His thoughts tangled and spun.
He knew that everything would be decided at the Chinese government's emergency briefing, the one about to be announced. He knew NIHEO was the crown of China's electric-vehicle industry—that if NIHEO were shoved aside, Tesla would steal the influence of every Chinese EV maker, and Beijing would not simply stand by and watch. He knew how dangerous the Wuhan pneumonia was. He had been the first to hear there might truly be a bankruptcy in the black.
And yet, paradoxically, he knew too much to cut his losses on that alone. He knew this company could not possibly go under. Hadn't the Chinese government already been forcing the market higher with its own hands?
Assistant Manager Ryu knew. He knew. He knew.
What met his eyes, though, was none of that knowledge. It was only a one-minute candle that had poked higher for an instant, burning red the way a rising bar does on a Korean screen. The moment that red candle caught his eye, none of the studying he had done so hard could serve as a reason for the stock to rise. The only reason for the bet he placed in that instant was a feeling.
It looked like it would go up. A hunch.
"Buy..."
"What? You want me to buy?"
"Sweep your whole paycheck into it. Right now!!!"
Unfortunately, today was payday, and Assistant Manager Ryu had cash in hand. In the end he dumped every won of that paycheck into averaging down.
And then—
Beep!
The small red candle that had barely shown itself began, in an instant, to stretch.
"Yes! This is it!"
Assistant Manager Ryu clenched his fist hard. The tip-room members who had already sold everything went blank with despair.
"What did I tell you! I said a rebound was coming!!!"
His voice rang through the office. Associate Lee Ji-hye yanked out her phone and, in a scramble, averaged down on two-times leverage.
The chart climbed and climbed. At one point it was up a full 1.3 percent. The tip-room members who had dumped everything on Assistant Manager Chae's word alone started glancing around, and a few of them fidgeted toward the buy button again. Manager Kim tore at his hair.
Damn it. So I never should have trusted Chae—he shorted on nothing but a feeling, didn't he?
He had sold without even hearing why he was supposed to sell, and only now did the regret arrive.
What do I do... buy back in right now? Or...
He was still flailing between the two when Assistant Manager Chae came up into the office.
"Assistant Manager Chae! What the hell is this?! You told us to sell everything because it was going to drop—so when is it actually dropping?!"
Manager Kim's voice came out loud. From behind him, watching, Assistant Manager Ryu let the corner of his mouth lift.
I was right. The bankruptcy in the black was nothing but a rag rumor.
That was what Ryu was thinking. Assistant Manager Chae, hearing Kim out, didn't answer at all. He took out his phone, looked at the chart, and let fall a single word.