Invest in Fear
"Uh... Assistant Manager Chae. Don't take what Assistant Manager Ryu said too much to heart."
Ryu had been the first to shove his chair back and storm out, and Assistant Manager Kim, left staring at me standing there alone, glanced from one side of the room to the other as he spoke.
"Still, Assistant Manager Ryu... what are we supposed to do? Shouldn't we try to talk him down one more time?"
"...If we've already tried this hard, there's nothing else for it. Let's just watch for now."
Then there really was nothing to be done. Assistant Manager Kim shook his head, and I turned over what had just happened. That pounding a moment ago was the sign of a moonshot. It was the same omen I'd felt seeing my little sister's happy smile—a sense that this would rise several times over, at the very least. A certainty that it would go up.
Not once, from that day until now, had the ability stirred. And then, all at once, it had. So it really does need a trigger to activate. Something like the catalyst for a moonshot. I nodded, chewing over the pounding in my chest. Once, at first. Then twice. And then three times.
What did the three have in common? I replayed Assistant Manager Ryu's words, and soon enough I knew.
Fear.
That was the moment.
Thump.
...This is it?
The ability that had only ever told me when to run was, for the second time, handing me the feeling of a guaranteed success. This trigger was fear.
A short while later, the office I returned to lay buried under a heavy silence.
Lee Ji-hye was sniffling as she deleted her stock app outright, and only Assistant Manager Ryu stared at the charts as if his mind had left him. He had already been in to see the department head, and still his eyes—fixed on the trading window hard enough to snap his neck—were madness itself. The others had stopped at relatively small losses, thanks to me, but they had still lost a great deal of money, and the mood in the office was dark.
And yet even I, going through the motions of work, had my mind entirely somewhere else. How... how do I make money from fear?
I had the clue in my hand. Fear. The ability had given me its certainty that if I used fear, I could make an enormous amount of money. Is it simply what Assistant Manager Ryu said—buy the bottom while everyone is afraid? That possibility was real enough. Wasn't that why he refused to give up and cut his losses, and was trying to average down instead?
But...
My ability... it hadn't even considered activating for a mere twenty percent. By my standards, twenty percent was still a plenty large return. The ability, though, was looking at something bigger. There had to be a way to take far more than that.
And then—
Beep!
The office clock announced four, and the day was over.
"All right, everyone, let's leave on time today. Good work, all of you."
The department head rose and spoke into the gloomy office, and everyone got ready to go with somewhat complicated looks on their faces.
Even on the ride home in Assistant Manager Kim's car, talking stocks with him, and even while I washed up after getting in, that single thought filled my head.
How do I make money from fear?
The moment I got home and finished washing, I typed one thing into the search bar.
I hit enter, and information poured out in a flood.
"This doesn't seem like it..."
On the off chance, I clicked a video or two, but most of them said the same thing. Buy when the price is down, wait, and it goes up. What was on the internet was obvious enough, but with only that, a far bigger moonshot didn't look easy to hope for. Something more... different... something like...
And in that moment, scrolling down, I happened across a post on some community board.
Fear index...?
I'd never seen the term before. And for the first time, it was something different from all the talk of fear so far. Seeing the title, I searched the fear index a little, and soon a single figure came up. An index that rises when the market is sick with fear and volatility blows out...?
And in that moment—
Thump. Thump. Thump.
As if to say this was the answer, my heart beat, pleasant and sure, and warmth spread through my body. I closed my eyes and clenched my fist. Somewhere along the way, a smile had caught at the corner of my mouth.
The name of the rocket I was about to board was TVIX.
Heart pounding, I set about studying the VIX.
Simple enough. So when volatility gets bigger, the price rises by that much. The deeper the market sank into chaos, the higher it climbed. That was the VIX. And the name I was going to buy was TVIX, which tracked that VIX at two times the move. Yeah. Now the puzzle snaps into place.
Wuhan pneumonia—and an American market astonishingly indifferent to it. However many times I looked, neither Korea nor the United States was treating Wuhan pneumonia as anything serious. Search the term online and all you mostly found were a handful of posts dripping with contempt for China. Not a single person was genuinely worried about Wuhan pneumonia.
Looks like they've decided, starting today, to call Wuhan pneumonia COVID-19.
Most of the posts were busy cursing the government for watching China's mood, now that it had announced—on the WHO's recommendation—that Wuhan pneumonia would henceforth be called corona. But... that bad feeling back then...
I remembered the day I'd come back to Daegu from my family home. The news that Korea's twenty-eighth Wuhan pneumonia case had been confirmed, and the enormous sense of dread I'd felt then—something I'd never felt in my life. One thing is certain. Wuhan pneumonia... no, corona isn't going to end at just this.
Then what? If corona spread to America, what would happen to the market?
It would fall into... enormous fear.
But right now the market was astonishingly calm. Not a single person thinks corona will spread all the way to the United States. The proof was right there: TVIX was sitting at a mere forty dollars, roughly forty thousand won. Far from worrying about corona, the market was flying toward its previous high with Tesla alongside it.
Look. Even the related videos on my own YouTube were nothing but this sort of thing.
Just the titles were enough to give off a faint, bad feeling. But my ability takes one look at corona and starts screaming warnings. Even now, the moment I thought of the words patient twenty-eight or Wuhan pneumonia, a chill ran down my spine. Then if I buy this starting now... that means a jackpot, doesn't it?
I was certain. The jackpot my ability had promised me was exactly this. And just as I was about to put everything but my day-trading money into TVIX—
Click...
Flash!
Huh?
I was about to go through with the buy when a popup I'd never seen before rose on the screen, and my mouse stopped.
"Options...??"
I studied options for a long while, and then I reached a conclusion. Still, easier to understand than I expected.
I clicked the popup urging me to try them, and a warning came up calling them an ultra-high-risk derivative. I ignored it without a second thought, hit agree on everything, and skimmed the options guide that popped up after. Then I watched a five-minute core-summary video on YouTube and searched around online, and options came clear easily enough.
"Put simply, options are lottery tickets."
Boiled down, what the video explained was simple. "Roughly, you predict next month's price ahead of time, and you get the right to buy at that price."
Say Apple was two hundred and ninety dollars now, and I thought it would climb to around three hundred and twenty next month, so I bought the 310 call. If it actually rose to three hundred and twenty, I could buy the stock then at three hundred and ten. "If it doesn't rise, I just walk away. I don't have to buy at three hundred and ten."
What if I bought the call thinking it would reach three hundred and ten, and it fell to two hundred and eighty instead? Then I simply abandoned the option. All that leaves my pocket in the process is the fee they call the premium. The closer the strike sat to the current price, or the more people were predicting that price, the fatter the premium got—and if you thought of that premium as the purchase cost, the structure was that you only had to give up that money when things went wrong. Literally, the premium is nothing more than the cost of a lottery ticket.
Hit it, and it was a jackpot. Miss, and you were only disappointed. Wasn't this exactly the thing I'd been looking for?
The downside, if there is one, is that once you buy, a bust might not sell at all. Options even came with a time limit that made diamond-handing impossible. If expiration drew near and there was no way the contract would trade at that price, you could lose every cent of the principal you'd put in. Buy a hundred lottery tickets hunting a mega-jackpot and have not one of them hit, and the cost of those hundred tickets becomes zero.
But if it's a matter of calling the direction... I can do that more accurately than anyone. Yeah. Wasn't calling the rise and the fall the thing I did best?
I quickly searched the options exchange for anything tied to TVIX. What is this... cheaper than I thought? Once I actually went to buy, the premium was lower than I'd expected. And the way it collapsed the higher you went meant nobody was buying those contracts.
I thought for a moment, then moved the mouse. Today's the third week... so a call about a month out... After turning it over, the option I finally chose was this.
The right to buy TVIX, forty dollars now, at fifty dollars on the twentieth of next month. There was no particular reason I'd settled on fifty. Simply that the premium fell off a cliff starting there. It was only a dollar eighty—about two thousand won. One contract was a bundle of a hundred shares, so about two hundred and twenty thousand won apiece. Does nobody think TVIX goes to fifty dollars...? Even so, it's certain the price of TVIX is going up...
I was still turning that over when—
Thump!!!
In that moment, I stopped thinking.
And—
Click!
TVIX MAR20 50C
2,486 contracts
551,892,000 won — order filled.
I had just shoved my entire fortune into one line of lottery tickets, every single one of them the same number.