Hold Out and Wait
He hadn't gone to see Oh Se-eun with any particular purpose in mind.
Just looking at her was enough to lift his spirits, and that bright, bouncing way she talked was a pleasure all its own. It was a little like listening to a canary chatter away.
She seemed to know her own charms a little too well, perhaps. But so long as she didn't do anything too outrageous, Oh Se-eun was the kind of person who made everyone around her happy — genuinely, irresistibly magnetic.
He'd told her to go meet other men. That she was still young, that she ought to date around. That was what he'd said.
If he was being honest, though, Jung Jinwoo liked Oh Se-eun quite a lot himself. If she actually started seeing someone else, it would cut him deeper than he'd care to admit.
Even if she made some absurd, unreasonable demand about opening a joint account, he'd go along with it without a word — because part of him genuinely wanted to.
If he married Oh Se-eun and they had a child…
Just imagining it was enough to make him happy. Enough to make his face flush red.
And besides, wasn't Oh Se-eun the investment prodigy that Vice Chairman Ko Yoon-seok himself had acknowledged?
"Well, I have my doubts. Of course the Ukraine reconstruction will consume a great deal of copper, but the same is true of iron ore. At most, I'd expect demand to rise by around five percent."
When Jinwoo relayed what he'd heard from Oh Se-eun, Vice Chairman Ko Yoon-seok tilted his head.
"Please request an investment analysis report from Oh Se-eun, and once you have it, send her a hundred billion won for now."
"Of course. Will you be investing as well, Chairman?"
"I'll make that call after I've analyzed it myself and formed a clear judgment."
"Oh-ho… You've grown cautious."
Ko Yoon-seok smiled, looking thoroughly pleased.
Futures were simple enough. You locked in a cheap price on a raw material for delivery down the line. If the price had risen by the time that day arrived, you stood to make a fortune. If it had fallen, you took a beating.
The world's annual copper trading volume ran to about thirty million tons. The market was worth some $240 billion — roughly 340 trillion won. Around $9,200 a ton.
At that scale, someone like Oh Se-eun could drop a few tens or hundreds of billions of won into the market and walk away with a modest profit. But it was an awkward size for Jung Jinwoo to work with. And several new copper mines had recently come online besides.
By ordinary supply-and-demand logic, copper futures were a hard investment to justify.
And yet.
Just wait a little. You'll be hearing some very interesting news soon…
That was what Oh Se-eun had said. Which meant some political shift, or some realignment of global interests, could send the price surging.
Jinwoo looked into the industries that used copper. It went into power grids, renewable energy, electric vehicles, energy storage systems, cooling equipment. Demand was forecast to rise five to ten percent over the previous year. Prices would climb, yes — but every investor on earth already knew that much.
There was something more complicated at work. Oh Se-eun had clearly gathered every one of those interlocking causes, run the analysis, and spoken from the result.
Given the size of the market, he couldn't bring Jerome or Aziz in on this. Their scale was too large — if they piled in, Jinwoo's own slice of the pie would shrink. He might even draw international condemnation. Should he tell them anyway and ask them to take only a little?
He could always just close his eyes and invest. But he needed to understand the reasons precisely before he could decide how much to put in.
For now, he sent Oh Gong-tae a message asking him to have the AI forecast copper demand one year out and one month out.
The complaining type — but he always did what you asked in the end. Oh Gong-tae was buried in preparations for the Dive In service, so the grumbling came back almost instantly.
A data center?
It had been right under his nose.
Data centers consumed staggering amounts of copper. The electrical and communications cabling, the cooling systems… A service on the scale of Dive In would need facilities on the order of what Gong-tae had just described — an entire data center's worth of equipment.
Even so, that would amount to less than one percent of the global copper market.
Once he had Oh Se-eun's investment plan report, he would use it as the basis for his own analysis.
Should he tip off Number Five this time as well?
Jinwoo considered it for a moment, then shook his head. He could tell them after he'd decided whether to invest himself. He could set a ceiling for Jerome and Aziz, tell them to invest within it, and then share the information. For all he knew, Jerome might even move faster than he did.
In the end, futures trading was a game of taking the same known information in hand and betting on whether the future would rise or fall. In the span of a month, anything could happen. A war could break out. A massive tsunami, a volcanic eruption — even an asteroid impact.
Oh Se-eun's investment report contained several points of genuine interest. Distilled, they came to this:
1. U.S. government tariff hike on imported iron ore. Predicted increase from 10% to 20%.
2. Equipment replacement at Arizona's Morenci Mine, with a temporary production cut. U.S. total output predicted to fall from 1.1 million tons to 800,000 tons.
3. Data center construction (Taiwan's Genvidia, Canada's Technovite, Korea's JW Dive In, among others — five sites in total).
4. Ukraine reconstruction project: 260,000 tons of copper demand.
5. African solar energy projects (Morocco, South Africa, Ghana, Mozambique, Ethiopia, and others — eight countries in total): 120,000 tons of copper demand.
The report had been assembled with painstaking care.
"How did she even know about ours…"
The fact that JW Dive In was building a data center had been entered in the report as well. How she'd found that out, he had no idea.
What truly impressed him, though, was that she had identified the United States' iron-ore tariff policy as a driver of copper prices.
The U.S. produced 1.1 million tons of copper a year, consumed 740,000 tons domestically, and exported 360,000. On those numbers, even a production cut from the Morenci Mine's equipment replacement shouldn't have left domestic demand unmet.
But Oh Se-eun had gone further. She had predicted that by slapping tariffs on imported iron ore, the United States would provoke other countries into imposing tariffs of their own on American copper. And with Morenci's output dropping by 300,000 tons, there wouldn't be any copper left to export in the first place…
Either way, production was falling. Global copper prices would rise.
He had his conclusion. This was not a trade you could lose money on.
This time, it wouldn't be Jerome. Jung Jinwoo would have to be the whale.
The reply came almost immediately. Perhaps because he'd already poured a trillion dollars into the market once before — cryptocurrency, admittedly — a hundred trillion won felt small. It was just a number, after all. Nothing you could actually see with your own eyes.
He sent messages to Jerome and Aziz as well, suggesting they consider investing around fifty trillion won each, quietly enough not to move the market. Then he messaged Number Five, telling them to put in no more than a hundred billion won.
If demand was high, prices would rise. Their investing could only help. There was nothing to lose.
Not three days after he'd made the decision, fresh news began pouring in.
"Ahh… this girl really was born under a lucky star."
That was what he'd said about Oh Se-eun. Her investment plan report alone had been enough to make a copper-price rally a foregone conclusion. But the news that kept breaking, one story after another, left Jung Jinwoo stunned.
The United States had been building five data centers in Alaska? They'd need to lay power grids for those as well. The same was true of the three data centers China had put up in Inner Mongolia. The facilities themselves would devour copper — and wiring them into the grid would devour still more.
And an Eastern Siberia power network? With the war in Ukraine winding down, they were going to lay a fine-grained electrical grid to develop the region. The copper that would take was almost unimaginable.
On top of that, Saudi Arabia's long-stalled Phantom City would be completed as planned. A project begun in the royal family's name, apparently — the kind of thing you couldn't simply halt halfway.
Laying an independent power grid there would consume a fortune in copper on its own, and they would still have to draw power from nearby generating stations. The solar equipment required for that would swallow yet more copper still.
Oh Se-eun was clearly a good-luck charm the gods themselves had assembled from every scrap of fortune they could gather.
Other commodities like iron ore were climbing as well, but they couldn't compare to copper. The price had been $9,200 a ton. Within days, it had blown past $12,000.
And the Morenci Mine, which was supposed to produce 600,000 tons a year, was managing only 250,000 because of the equipment replacement.
Even if they restored output at the fastest possible pace, it would still be two months. Meanwhile, construction projects underway around the world could not be stopped — halt the work, and you hemorrhaged hundreds of millions of dollars a day.
Nation after nation began clamping down on copper exports. Twenty-four million tons of copper were mined in a given year. This year, demand alone was projected to hit forty-two million.
He was watching the situation unfold with genuine fascination when the next story hit.
Chile's Escondida Mine — the world's largest copper mine, producing one million tons a year — has collapsed. In an attempt to capitalize on soaring prices, operators ignored structural stability and increased blasting to raise output. Three workers involved in the blasting sustained minor injuries. That there were no fatalities is being called a miracle. The Chilean government says normal mining operations will not resume for at least two months.
The world's greatest copper mine, producing a million tons a year, had come down. They had been pulling 85,000 tons a month. Trying to ride the price spike, they had pushed to 120,000 — and that was how it had happened.
"Ah, fuck…"
Copper had now blown past $15,000 a ton and was staring at $16,000. Global demand had stampeded in all at once, and supply had suddenly shriveled.
A little more time passed, and the world's investment houses were buying futures at a premium. If someone held the right to purchase copper at $9,200 a ton, a firm would pay extra on top of that — even $19,000 a ton — just to acquire the right itself.
The price was climbing at a vicious clip. Futures quotes kept rising for a simple reason: there were no actual sellers.
Texts arrived from Lee Jinho and Shin Bin-sun. They'd apparently sold into the premium — and they'd only taken fifty percent?
Jerome, Aziz, and Oh Se-eun would be waiting for the highest possible moment to sell. Jung Jinwoo swallowed, watching the market.
A true investor had to be cautious when buying. Getting in at the bottom was a high-level skill. But what mattered even more was the timing of the sale. Catching the right moment to sell — that was an art.
In less than a week, the copper price blew past $20,000 a ton.
If he sold everything now, that was a 120 percent return. A hundred and twenty trillion won in profit. Not a small sum.
But Jung Jinwoo decided to wait.
Sell at $27,000. Then he'd walk away with close to 200 trillion won.
He had to hold out and wait.