The Silver Minefield
Episode 1: In Manhattan (3)
The investment firm…
Henry closed his eyes and summoned the silver chart in his mind. ‘Damn, the Knowledge stat is straight-up broken. Real-time chart syncing inside my head? This is basically map-hacking, isn’t it?’
Even the tiniest fluctuations caused by his own entry into the market were being reported with brutal honesty. The only problem was that day-trading was impossible. Part of it was because the information updated in one-hour increments rather than in real time, but the decisive issue was the technological limitations of the era. This wasn’t 2026, where fiber-optic lines enabled sub-second trades. This was 1979, where you still clutched a telephone receiver and hurled paper tickets across the trading floor.
In this analog age, where you couldn’t buy or sell massive volumes in a single breath, scalping with future knowledge was not the move. And above all else, the risk was absolutely lethal.
‘Hoo… the more I dig into the data, the more the silver futures market looks like a goddamn minefield. Pure hell-mode difficulty.’
If Henry had only possessed detailed information without the chart acting as an ironclad answer key, he would have burned through about five million dollars at most before pulling out. That was how volatile the current silver market was—a literal time bomb.
The future silver futures market had been artificially inflated by the Hunt brothers’ bubble, leaving both the government and the exchanges seething with poison. Prices were swinging like a madman on a wrecking ball. On top of that, if he clumsily made any real money here, he’d be looking at a nonstop parade of media condemnation, congressional hearings, and every other nightmare on the menu.
Five million dollars was roughly the safety threshold—the amount you could earn without drawing the market’s full glare. Anything beyond that invited trouble. To be honest, even that number carried a hint of greed.
‘But when the hell am I supposed to flip my life around if I play it safe? Gambling should always be done with other people’s money, and the table has to be huge for it to feel right. Besides, when you think about the snowball effect, you’ve got to roll a big one right from the start—even if it means pushing a little harder at the beginning.’
After suffering under personal debt again while growing his assets in his own name, after living pinched and desperate for cash—no, after simply failing to suppress his boiling greed—Henry had decided to scrape together every last scrap of his soul for one massive jackpot in this silver market.
The real issue was the exit strategy.
When he eventually rose to become one of the richest men in the world, the origin of this seed capital would inevitably come under microscopic scrutiny. He needed an exquisitely crafted plan that would maximize profit while staying within legal boundaries and without tarnishing the family name.
But he couldn’t share this dilemma with anyone. The information came from future knowledge, after all. Who the hell was he supposed to consult?
In the end, Henry threw himself into self-study. He had considered pulling similar historical cases and subtly sounding out experts, but the fear of whispers like “Why is the young patriarch asking about this?” or “That bastard must have seen the future!” made him decide to solve it alone.
After calculations so intense they felt like they would split his skull, Henry finally found his answer.
If everything went according to plan, he would achieve a minimum pre-tax return of seventy-seven times. Even after the government took its twenty-eight percent cut, the remaining sum would be astronomical. He had also completed a laundering scenario designed to dodge both government and public backlash.
Of course, the media would sneer and call him a “lucky gambler,” and his self-made success story would get a few red marks. But in a world where the number in your bank account was power itself, that was a price worth paying.
Still, because he had cooked up the entire plan alone, there were many things he had to give up on. He had restrained his greed to a certain degree, and the plan’s details were a bit loose. A 2026 salaryman’s brain simply lacked both the capability and the time to perfectly understand and design the complex financial engineering of 1979.
Even so, his strategy was meticulous in its own way.
Establishing an S-Corporation, spreading purchases across corporate operating accounts, and making proactive reports to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). The core of the plan was to begin gradually selling off small portions starting two weeks before silver hit its peak of fifty dollars—right when it broke through the thirty-dollar line—so he could secure an exit before the exchange’s position limits came crashing down.
It was what he called the “Sell at the Chest” strategy.
‘If you try to sell from the very top of their heads, you might lose your own. Let’s shake off the greed above thirty dollars. That way I’ll still have something to say later, and I can secure safety at the same time.’
Fifty dollars was an absurdly high peak, but every step of the way was littered with enormous landmines. Even Texas oil barons had stepped on those mines and gone bankrupt. Only now did Henry understand why that episode had never appeared in the novels of his previous life. If the story only chased profit without caring about plausibility, the entire plot would veer straight off a cliff.
The subsequent media response, the congressional hearings, the aftermath of the incident—everything would collapse, making it impossible to maintain realism or narrative coherence. After all, for an ordinary person with no backing to earn that kind of profit? It was an earth-shaking event that would have landed him straight in prison. An absolutely amazing incident that rattled all of American society!
‘At least I’ve got some background, right? I probably won’t end up in a cell…’
That was why Henry had chosen, from the very foundation, a modest (?) pyramiding strategy using three times leverage.
Why only triple leverage when he could clearly see the future? Why not ten times, twenty times?
The answer was simple. That was the only safe line where he could survive in this insane market.
Of course, if he got greedy and used higher leverage he could make even more money. But in that case he would have to camp inside the investment firm all day. Because if he missed the timing, the position could get liquidated in an instant.
The current silver futures market was the very incarnation of volatility—a chart that never behaved for even a single day. Even with five times leverage, if you were off by just a few hours on your entry point, you could get hit with a margin call before you even finished building the position, and your account would collapse on the spot.
In short, it wasn’t “high risk, high return.” It was “high risk, instant deletion return.”
On top of that, the market was gradually turning into the ultimate gambling den.
The massive accumulation operation by the Hunt brothers, who everyone who mattered would later know had colluded with Middle Eastern tycoons. Right now the Middle Eastern capital was the visible actor while the Hunt brothers hid behind the curtain, but in the future their identities would be exposed to the world and they would wage a brutal war against the exchange and the government.
And into that very arena, Henry had proudly reported to the CFTC, “I have this much money and I’d like to buy silver under several names,” before jumping in.
For now, since the Hunt brothers were still quietly scraping up silver through countless anonymous accounts underwater, there were no noticeable regulations. But it was only the calm before the storm.
‘Soon the Hunt brothers are going to get blasted by the media and make their forced debut. That’s when the real hell gate opens.’
As silver prices skyrocketed, the exchange would undoubtedly respond by raising margin requirements vertically. Eventually they would outright limit position sizes with a “Stop speculating!” order, and if that wasn’t enough, they would even drop the unprecedented bomb of an outright silver buying ban.
In a market like that, even if you somehow managed to maintain five times leverage and kept pyramiding your profits, the increased margin requirements would likely become impossible to meet, resulting in an absurd margin call exit. Or the position would grow so bloated that you couldn’t even unwind it without shocking the market.
From the beginning, the number of contracts he would accumulate with a three-times-leverage pyramiding strategy was already large enough to require two full weeks to liquidate.
‘Better to eat moderately and exit gracefully than to choke from greed. That’s the dignity of a regressor. Three times is plenty. Seventy-seven times return—who the hell needs more than that?’
This was silver, not gold. The trading volume itself was in a completely different weight class from gold. It had always been a narrow, hypersensitive market.
Henry scanned the chart synced to his brain and mobilized every ounce of his knowledge to reach a final conclusion.
The Maginot Line that would free him from the threat of margin calls while still maximizing profit to the extreme—that was exactly three times leverage.
‘The Knowledge stat is seriously cheating. It even lets me run margin bomb calculations through a mental calculator.’
In the future, the exchange would raise margin requirements all the way to thirty percent of the contract value to crush speculators and shake up the board. But with three times leverage, he could comfortably withstand even that monstrous pressure.
No matter how wildly the prices roller-coastered from his current entry point, the numbers were designed so his account would never scream in the agony of liquidation.
There was just one thing that still bothered him: the fact that he had revealed all his cards to the CFTC in order to secure a legal exit route.
Information always leaked eventually, and it was only a matter of time before his position information got out.
‘I need to ask Bart or Joshua if they have any connections to the exchange or the CFTC. I’ll have to make sure the guys with the tightest lips keep their mouths shut. My image is important, after all. It’s better that this becomes known when I sell rather than staying hidden. If this goes wrong, I could end up as a target.’
Aside from that, if the exchange or the government applied pressure, he planned to sell without complaint. He had no desire for the glory of selling at the absolute peak. By then, his bank balance would already have grown to a size that surpassed even his previous life’s wildest imagination.
Even after weaving such a meticulous web, Henry still couldn’t shake his anxiety. Whenever he had a spare moment, he closed his eyes and checked the mental chart. His own entry had caused the price to twitch ever so slightly, but fortunately, the movement wasn’t yet large enough to distort the overall chart.