New Hire at the Securities Firm (2)
There wasn’t much time to waste.
The future I knew only stretched ten years ahead.
In other words, once ten years had passed, the information in my head would be worthless. If I didn’t want to end up kicking myself in hindsight, then I had to start doing things right now.
As soon as I thought that, my impatience flared.
Like the proper new hire I was, I arrived at the department first and sat down at my desk.
“Haa. I shouldn’t be sitting around here like this.”
Even while I was wasting time, the world kept changing.
If I wanted to seize an opportunity, I had to move as fast as I could.
Now that I’d returned to ten years in the past, did I really need to keep working at this company? It wasn’t as if I was going to work my way up and become the president.
I should be writing my resignation letter this instant, raising my sails, and heading out to sea.
But there was one problem that tied my feet in place. An incident that had changed the lives of countless people, myself included.
If I was going to leave, I needed to deal with that first.
After finishing the task he’d assigned me, I took the documents and reported to Woo Baek-hyeon.
“Here’s the material you asked for earlier.”
The middle-aged manager, with thinning hair and a protruding belly, stared at me with his eyes wide.
“I assigned that this morning, and you’re already done? Don’t do sloppy work just because you’re trying to be fast.”
Woo Baek-hyeon had a meticulous personality, despite his round, harmless-looking face.
If he didn’t like the material I’d prepared, he would make me redo it until he did.
“Please let me know if anything’s lacking after you look it over. I’ll revise it.”
Woo Baek-hyeon scanned the documents with a skeptical expression. But before long, his face shifted into one of surprise.
“What’s wrong?”
“No. This is much better than last time. You really made this all by yourself?”
“Yes. I made it myself.”
I’d even made it as far as assistant manager before, so this level was child’s play.
“When did you get so good?”
“Thanks to your excellent teaching, sir.”
My answer seemed to please him. Woo Baek-hyeon nodded with a satisfied smile.
“Good work. Keep it up.”
“Understood.”
Before I knew it, lunchtime had arrived.
If I wanted to quit the company and do something else, I’d need money first. In the financial markets, money was easy to make if you had the information.
And I happened to have one very useful piece of information.
The game would be unveiled this afternoon. When it happened, the stock price would surge immediately. All I had to do was buy shares in that game company.
When I checked my balance, I was shocked.
“What? Why do I have so little money?”
There were only 5 million won in my account.
After a moment’s thought, I remembered why.
“Ah. I blew it all on stocks.”
I didn’t even have a margin line, and I hadn’t opened any salaryman loan either.
For now, I decided to buy with whatever money I had.
The stock I wanted wasn’t listed yet.
Fortunately, large securities firms also operated platforms for trading unlisted shares, mainly for client convenience and to make money off fees.
The number of stocks traded there was limited, but fortunately, the one I wanted was included.
Its chart had been tracing a steady decline because of the quarterly losses that kept piling up, though it was rising slightly now on expectations for the new release.
The current asking price was 6,500 won.
I clicked and bought 770 shares.
The trading volume wasn’t very high, so it took quite a while for the order to go through.
Dongho, a senior colleague, tapped my shoulder and said, “Let’s go grab lunch. I found a great budae jjigae place.”
I let Dongho lead me out of the company.
The shabby little restaurant really was a hot spot; before long, the place had filled to the brim with office workers from Yeouido.
“This is your first time here, right?”
“Probably.”
It had been a while for me, too.
“So what were you doing back there?”
If you’ve got good information, you should share it, shouldn’t you?
I asked Dongho, “Do you happen to know a studio called RedHole Studio?”
“RedHole? The company that made Hera?”
“That’s right.”
RedHole Studio was a game company that had once developed an MMORPG called Hera.
“I heard they’re working on a new game through a subsidiary. Have you heard anything about it?”
“I think I have.”
“The official launch is next week, but the beta service starts this afternoon. It’s a PC FPS.”
“So?”
“A friend of mine says it looks like it’ll do well.”
Dongho shook his head.
“Nah, that thing’s going to flop hard.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Overclock has the FPS market locked up right now. It’s not a rival any Korean midsize game company can just brush aside. And this new one’s rating will probably be Adults Only. Overclock, on the other hand, is rated 12 and up. Right there, it’s already no contest.”
“Still, if it’s well made, shouldn’t it have a chance?”
His reaction was skeptical.
“What are they going to do about marketing? The marketing budget IceStorm poured into Overclock’s global launch had to be in the tens of millions of dollars. You think RedHole Studio can pull that off?”
“That’d be hard, yeah.”
“And the company itself probably isn’t in great shape either. I’m hearing rumors they’ll be restructuring soon and cleaning out their subsidiaries.”
“Wouldn’t that get solved if the game takes off?”
“Who doesn’t know that a hit game means big money? If that were enough, why wouldn’t every other game company just make a hit already? Even Rexon, one of the three biggest game companies in Korea, has had new releases fail one after another for the last ten years. If it weren’t for Dungeon & Warriors, they’d probably have seen revenue cut in half. And what about SmileDoor? Their new game flopped so badly they shut down service not long ago. They couldn’t even recover the marketing costs, never mind the development budget.”
As he said, the recent string of new game releases had been a parade of failures, and most of the big game companies were surviving on old IP.
That was why, lately, game companies kept slapping on labels like 2, 3, or M for mobile instead of gambling on new titles. Launching a brand-new game was no easy task.
When Dongho saw my expression, he asked, “Why do you care anyway? Don’t tell me you’re thinking of buying stock?”
“I was thinking of buying a little.”
In truth, I’d already bought it.
“You know it’s unlisted, right?”
There are about two thousand companies traded on KOSPI and KOSDAQ.
Those are called listed companies. Most of the rest are unlisted.
Unlike listed companies, whose shares you can buy with a simple click after logging into HTS or MTS, shares in unlisted companies have to be purchased through an over-the-counter exchange.
No matter how much of a junk stock or penny stock a company may be, if it’s on an exchange, it has at least cleared the minimum requirements for listing. But unlisted companies have no disclosure obligations, no proper audits, and opaque financial statements.
In other words, unless you’re an insider, you have no way of knowing what kind of shape the company is actually in.
Investing in companies like that sometimes does strike gold, but most of the time it ends in a total loss. It wasn’t a market for ordinary people, let alone amateurs.
“You shouldn’t touch unlisted stocks in the first place. People say the stock market is full of swindlers, but over-the-counter trading is basically a gathering place for con artists. Even professionals get in over their heads, get slapped around, and crawl back out in tears saying, ‘Ah, this isn’t where I belong.’”
Unlisted stock trading had a few peculiar traits.
Because the number of buyers and sellers was limited, the gap between bid and ask tended to be huge, and there were no upper or lower limits on price.
If you were lucky, the price could go up tenfold in a single day. On the other hand, a stock you bought for 100,000 won could be worth 10,000 won when you woke up the next morning.
“Still, my friend says it might be okay. You don’t want to buy even a little?”
Dongho shook his head firmly.
“Don’t buy that piece-of-shit stock. Invest in good ones like me. Hanjeong Mulsan is a great company. It’s undervalued right now, so if you keep buying stock like that steadily, it’ll become your retirement fund later.”
Judging from the way he spoke, he didn’t have any intention of buying it at all. Even if I told him the game would be a monster hit, he wouldn’t believe me.
“But I saw Hanjeong Mulsan break 50,000 won earlier.”
At my words, Dongho’s face twisted in a scowl.
“Hey! You don’t know the first thing about long-term investing!”
“I thought you were just stuck holding it because you were underwater.”
“Starting today, I’m averaging down.”
“You’ll end up becoming a major shareholder if you keep averaging down like that.”
“……Shut up.”
Apparently remembering all the money he’d lost, Dongho looked ready to cry.
After lunch and on the way back, I was called into the branch manager’s office.
Inside the spacious room sat a bespectacled middle-aged man with a sharp, severe look.
His name was Yoon Yeong-cheol.
His title was branch manager, and he was the top authority in the Research Department.
At a position like his, meetings with institutional investors and corporate contacts were so frequent that he usually spent more time outside the company than in it.
“You were looking for me?”
When Yoon Yeong-cheol looked at me, he said, “You’ve been here about half a year now, right? Are you settling into the work?”
It felt like I’d finished adjusting ages ago.
“I’m doing my best to learn.”
My answer drew a pleased smile from Yoon Yeong-cheol.
“Woo Baek-hyeon said you seemed smart and hardworking. That’s not the sort of thing he says often.”
“Thank you.”
Yoon Yeong-cheol handed me a stack of documents.
“We’re putting out a fund recommendation report this time. Organize the material here well. Emphasize that it has good returns and high client satisfaction. If there’s anything you don’t know, ask someone else.”
“Understood.”
So he was giving this to me because he wanted me to start handling real work, huh?
Back at my desk, I spread the documents open.
On the first page was the name of the fund we were recommending.
Primus Fund.
I gave a bitter smile.
“Yeah. So this was the one.”
The number of funds sold by securities firms was beyond counting.
In basic terms, they were divided into equity funds and bond funds, but there were also funds that held real estate, commodities, and derivatives, as well as mixed funds that combined those in whatever proportions suited them.
There were funds that invested in specific countries, industries, or sectors. There were even funds made by gathering ETFs, or funds made by gathering other funds.
Lately, it would not be an exaggeration to say that the securities industry was in the middle of a private-equity fund craze. And at the center of that craze stood this very fund.
Primus Fund.
Its official name was the Primus Stable Bond Specialist Private Investment Fund, with numbers and letters appended behind it depending on the order of issuance.
In most cases, banks and securities firms only handled sales; the places that actually created and managed the fund were separate.
The company that managed Primus Fund was Primus Asset Management.
Its CEO was Park Tae-il, a fairly well-known figure in the private-equity and bond markets. He had originally set up funds for corporate clients and sold them to companies, but even among high-net-worth investors, there was so much demand that people kept asking him to open access.
So, starting three years ago, he began issuing private funds for individual investors and selling them through Future Investment Securities and NJ Securities, among others.
Rumors spread that it was as safe as a bank deposit, yet offered a return higher than bank interest, and it sold like wildfire.
Primus Asset Management expanded aggressively, and in just five years from its founding, it had grown into the industry’s number-one manager with over 3 trillion won in assets under management.
Because of that, securities firms were fighting over it, flooding in with offers and scrambling to get their hands on the fund.
Shockingly, DA Securities won that fight and began exclusive sales last year.
That fund was the Primus Stable Bond Specialist Private Investment Fund.
It was a bond fund with a target size of 500 billion won and a target return of 5 percent. It invested only in AAA-rated receivables backed by public institutions in developed countries.
The minimum subscription was 100 million won, but institutional investors and high-net-worth clients flocked to it, so the offering closed almost immediately.
Now they were raising another 500 billion won.
It was so popular that anything they put out sold out instantly, and inquiries kept pouring into the branches. There were even plenty of customers opening DA accounts just to subscribe to Primus Fund.
Not only did it bring in huge sales commissions, it also attracted new customers. It was the kind of product any branch would kill to have.
……That’s what I thought once.
“That is, until the company collapsed.”
If you went around saying, “A securities firm went under because of fund losses,” people would laugh at you as if you were an idiot.
Anyone who knew even a little about funds would understand how absurd that sounded.
Like stocks or bonds, funds were investments. And investments always carried risk.
If there were funds that made money, there were also funds that went negative. That didn’t mean the securities firm was responsible for the losses.
So there was no way a securities firm could collapse because one fund went bad.
Except this case was different.