Chapter 1 [Middle Part]: The Impulse of the Market and the Baptism of N-value and E-value
IV. The car seat of sales and the burning sense of defeat in the chest
The warning sound of forced liquidation was reverberating in my head.
Last night, 300,000 yen blew away beyond the screen.
Most of the take-home 400,000 yen summer bonus vanished like smoke the moment the account balance hit zero.
In 2019, early summer light passed through the windshield and turned the sales car dashboard into a furnace.
Even with the AC at full blast, the uncomfortable dampness of the shirt clinging to my back wouldn’t go away.
I was slumped over the steering wheel inside the car, taking shallow breaths repeatedly.
“...Kumugi-san, you look pale. Is the afternoon’s new business development okay?”
The junior employee in the passenger seat peered at my face with worry.
I deliberately straightened my back muscles and smiled, forcing my facial muscles to lift.
“I’m totally fine, just a little sleep-deprived. Come on, let’s go to the next visit.”
A perfect mask of a salesperson.
But deep inside, a burning sense of defeat and self-loathing was melting into a sludge.
At the client’s office, I spread out the proposal and cheerfully highlighted our product’s strengths, yet half of my thoughts were controlled by last night’s chart’s afterimage.
Between building up a few tens of yen per sale in a dirty job of incentives, I had melted 300,000 yen with one slip of a finger.
(Why... Why did I reach the limit of the E-value calculation? The formula couldn’t have been wrong.)
During lunch break, avoiding the noisy set meal places, I sat alone on a park bench and brought a chilled convenience-store rice ball to my mouth.
When I opened my smartphone, an inorganic email from a securities company arrived: “Notice of forced liquidation completed.”
“Realizing I could pinpoint the market’s top or bottom was just vanity...”
The rice grains of the onigiri slid down my throat as bland as sand.
V. Father’s mask and the vanished bonus
“Daddy, welcome home!”
At night, when I opened the door with heavy steps, the voices of my innocent children welcomed me. The living room carried the scent of warm miso soup and grilled fish.
“Today at school, this happened!” “Daddy, let’s play catch in the park this weekend!”
The children spoke with an untroubled smile. “Yes, we’ll definitely do it,” I thought, patting their heads, while my chest wrenched with acute pain.
(Sorry... I’m really sorry...)
FX, which I had started to expand my family’s future and my child’s future options, yet I had thrown away a take-home bonus of tens of thousands of yen in one night because of my vanity and foolish hunch.
I couldn’t face my wife’s face across the dining table, smiling, “Thanks for your hard work late at night.” It felt as if the stamp of failure as a father who should protect his family was deeply burned into my chest.
VI. The limits of self-study and the night I sought “companions”
Even in bed, I couldn’t sleep, staring at the ceiling. If I closed my eyes, the wildly fluctuating candlesticks and the red numbers in the toolbox of losses burned into my retina and wouldn’t disappear.
“Why… Why didn’t the calculation line of the E-value stop…?”
Regret and self-pity burned like a pitch-black flame in the darkness. My arrogance, thinking I had fully read the waves of the market with the shallow knowledge I had grasped from books and the net. Sitting alone in front of the PC, merely watching charts by myself would never allow me to stand up to the giant monster of the market.
“There’s no way to end by losing. Real traders who survive in the market world, what are they watching and how are they trading…?”
At 1 a.m., I got out of bed and started up the study PC. Online investment bulletin boards, blogs where traders gather, and SNS communities. I completely discarded the pride that once said, “I’ll earn on my own,” and began to greedily search for “places where true traders gather.”
Thus I abandoned lonely self-study and began knocking on the doors of the ‘online investment community’ where night after night fierce experts gathered.