A Korean Is Poking Around
At that very same moment—New York, Wall Street.
Towers stood along the avenues like a forest, and men and women in tailored suits hurried through the streets below them. This was where all the money in the world gathered and scattered again, and the pavement was immaculate, laid out as if with a ruler, without so much as a scrap of trash.
Lift your eyes a little higher, and what came into view was the office of Credit Suisse, one of Wall Street's illustrious banks. No—more precisely, the trading room, where the business of trading was managed as a profession.
Jack Hamilton, director of derivatives, and Emily, an associate who had only just scraped off her junior's badge and been promoted, were staring at their monitors and enduring the boredom.
"Ugh. Stare at this all day, and does anything actually move? Liquidity's dried up from the root..."
"Keep watching anyway. Opportunity always finds its way into the market."
Their book was the options written on TVIX. The chart ground steadily down and to the right, and the desk was what people called an exile posting.
What's the point of watching this?
Emily, only just made an associate, let out a sigh. Her peers were posting insane numbers under directors in other groups, and actually learning something, while she—the one with the best record of any of them—had been buried in this tedious product.
Stuck here just because I'm Asian...
She was second-generation, born in the United States, and Wall Street had shoved her into this room over nothing more than a faintly sallow cast to her skin. She'd only climbed this high because she took after her mother—blonde hair, blue eyes. If she'd taken after her father in her hair as well, if that hair had been black, getting even this far would have been flatly impossible.
Boring...
There wasn't much to manage on a TVIX options book. The algorithms handled everything, and all the more so now, when the market wasn't merely calm but brimming with optimism. Day after day it wasn't fear driving the tape. It was mania.
I should've skipped Wall Street and just bought Tesla.
The thought wasn't much of an exaggeration. Tesla, and the market with it, was launching like a rocket. Even so, out of habit, she worked the window where offers sat packed from thirty-five dollars to forty-five, adjusting how many contracts the desk would issue.
Then, all at once, a chime.
A window demanding that a large order be reviewed. Not once, since she'd become an associate, had Emily seen those words.
"Uh...? What is this? Jack! Look!"
She called her boss at once. Across the room, Jack Hamilton had been about to take a bite of his sandwich; he came at a scramble.
"Hm? This is..."
Punching in buy orders by hand, one at a time, was a practice from the distant past—unless a ticket fell outside what the algorithm could clear on its own. Jack's eyes narrowed as he read it.
The market had nothing to offer, and a fresh issue was waiting on a manager's approval. Jack doubted his own eyes.
"What is this? Did some idiot send the wrong order?"
He wasn't wrong. Emily, watching beside him, was thinking the same thing.
A fifty-dollar call?
TVIX was at forty dollars, and expiration was March 20—barely a month out. The structure only paid if this piece of garbage exploded more than twenty-five percent inside a month. Set against the market in front of them, the number was impossible.
Four hundred and fifty thousand dollars, torched on a product that's already down fifteen percent this month?
Options were lottery tickets, fine. This was still an absurd ticket, and Jack looked as if he'd reached the identical conclusion.
"Emily, pull the orderer's information. Odds are this is a fund putting on a hedge."
There was something to that—the kind of read that came with a director's years. And if the order really was a hedge, the information alone would be enormous.
It would mean some whale is bracing for a serious crash, right now.
Emily's gaze sharpened. This was an opportunity. File a report with it, and the higher-ups would see what she could do. They'd move her to another desk.
But the information she opened with that hope burning—
"What?"
"Korea? Retail?"
Retail. An individual investor. In Korea, they had a name for that: an ant.
Emily's face soured. Jack burst out laughing.
"Hahahahaha! This guy's a completely insane Asian!"
He meant it literally. The man was nothing but a gambler—a pathetic one, who'd spun up a delusion somewhere about a chance to turn his life around and bet everything he had. Jack tossed Emily a racist joke, asking what she made of it as a fellow Asian. She laughed, awkward, and all the while the screen kept flashing.
The two of them were laughing, but in both their heads the arithmetic had been finished long ago.
The odds TVIX clears fifty dollars in a month? Zero.
Wuhan pneumonia? A few days earlier the WHO had warned of the danger and corrected the name to COVID-19, but that was only a flu that would burn itself out in China. Wall Street had already settled the question. Not that the stupid little ant knew it.
The moment someone approved the order flashing on the screen, the four hundred and sixty thousand dollars that idiot Korean had sent would drop straight into Jack's department as operating profit. Afraid the fool might cancel, Jack moved to approve it at once.
"Thanks, Korean. Because of you, this quarter's bonus is as good as in the bag."
His cursor was on its way to Accept when—
"Wait!"
He froze. Silence dropped over the trading room. Emily had dared to snatch the mouse out of his hand.
"...Hey, Emily. What do you think you're doing? What if that Korean comes to his senses and kills the order? Hit the button!"
"What if..."
"What?"
"What if he figured something out, and that's why he sent it? People have been saying the moves out of Asia look wrong lately. If we watched the market a little longer..."
Jack's face went hard. So did the faces of the new analysts still rushing around the floor.
"Listen, Emily. I can see you want to save that idiot because you're the same kind of Asian, but this is Wall Street. You want to play it that way, get out of my trading room. Now."
He said it while looking at her skin—a shade more yellow than a typical white person's—with open contempt.
"No, that's not it. I just want to check, even once..."
Even as she answered, Emily knew. She knew perfectly well the order was nothing but a stupid Korean's bravado. She was only staging a kind of show, manufacturing a pretext for the report that would carry her upward.
If—just if—that order hits...
Then what she'd done today would be weighed again, and differently.
Jack had already seen through a calculation that small. He sighed and set about talking her down.
"Hey, Emily. I know what you're worried about, but there's nothing to worry about. He's not even just some Asian. He's Korean."
"...And what's wrong with him being Korean?"
Jack smirked.
Emily said nothing.
Jack took the mouse back and pressed accept.
Click.
A chime. I was in my chair, sipping canned coffee and scalping, when an alert rose on my screen.
"Oh. Took a while, but it filled."
A bet that might torch five hundred and fifty million won. I wasn't worried in the slightest.
I don't know how high it goes. I do know TVIX is going up, no matter what.
I crumpled the empty can and turned the thought over.
...Should I buy more?
I'd sold off the entire NIHEO short except a single share, freeing the capital for scalping. The return printed just before I got out had been absurd.
A hundred million won, just for sitting on it!
Encouraging, of course. Still.
If I'm the one watching the chart, scalping makes far more.
NIHEO would probably fall another five to ten percent tomorrow, and that plunge wasn't going to end cleanly. If I'd left the position until then and assumed the maximum drop, it would have printed something like this.
Somewhere around there.
But the money I'd made scalping with that same capital was this.
Principal recovered.
Measured against the two hundred million won I'd originally put into the NIHEO short, a number like this would have needed something close to a hundred and ninety percent return. Scalp with a fatter seed, though, and the money compounded faster. The U.S. indices were pushing toward their highs today, and even so plenty of stocks were falling.
Volume was strangely thin, so the scalps were hard to find... and I still made about two hundred million won in a day.
The single NIHEO share I'd kept was only there so I could time when Deputy Manager Kim got out.
Head's starting to ache... Call it a night?
By now I could say it with certainty. Scalp too much, and your head starts to hurt.
I can't make money forever just by scalping runners. The headache is the smaller problem. Volume is a hard wall. And the blue chips that actually have volume mostly swing less than the runners, so pulling a return like this off them is difficult...
I closed the momentum chart and went back into the options. Numbly, without feeling it, I took four hundred and fifty million of the five hundred and eighty million won I'd made today and bought the same option again.
...Huh. The size dropped a little.
At that moment, on the far side of the planet, another bank—not the Swiss one—was laughing at this stupid Korean in exactly the same way. I had no idea. I pressed a hand to my spinning head and dropped onto the bed.
...Starting tomorrow, I should look at other names.
Setting a billion won on fire in a single day, on one line of a lottery ticket, was enough to leave even me a little unsteady.