Stock Beginner Chaos

Dae U-jin bought his first stock at thirty-five. The trigger was simple. When his colleague at the next desk said, “I made some money yesterday,” those words touched something in him.

That night, he dove into YouTube. A video with 1.8 million views screamed, “You’ll definitely regret not buying this stock now!” Dae U-jin nodded and took notes. But the next video filled the screen with “10 Reasons to Sell This Stock Right Now.” The one after that declared, “This is rock bottom—the buying opportunity of a lifetime.” By the end of the third video, his notepad was a tangle of twelve stocks to buy and twelve to sell, overlapping halfway through.

At one in the morning, Dae U-jin opened a brokerage app and set up an account. The moment he saw the screen, he froze. There were options for “limit order” and “market order,” but he didn’t understand the difference. He opened YouTube again and found a thirty-minute explanation video. At the end was a notice: “Subscribe to this channel for more detailed lectures.”

The next day at lunch, Dae U-jin ran into Jae-myung, a teacher at Bugang Partners. He asked carefully, “Teacher, what should I buy right now?”

Jae-myung took a spoonful of gukbap and replied, “If three YouTube channels are all saying three different things, that’s not information—that’s noise. Before deciding what to buy, you should first write down why you want to buy it.”

That day, instead of opening the stock app, Dae U-jin opened his notepad. At the top, he wrote a single line: “Why did I want to buy it?”

He had no answer yet. But the fact that the question had formed was a step forward from the day before.

This article is fiction and is not investment advice.