[The characters, places, organizations, events, and so on appearing in this work have no connection whatsoever to reality and are products of the author’s imagination.]
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At the investment firm... Henry closed his eyes and pictured the silver chart in his head.
‘The Knowledge stat really is a cheat. A real-time chart linked inside my head? This is basically map hacking, isn’t it?’
Even the minute fluctuations caused by Henry’s entry into the market were being honestly reflected on the chart. However, day trading was impossible. Partly because the information updated in one-hour intervals rather than in real time, but the decisive problem was the limitations of the era. This wasn’t 2026, when trades were made by the second through high-speed fiber-optic internet. This was 1979, an age of clutching telephone receivers and firing off trade slips.
In an analog era where one couldn’t buy and sell massive quantities at once, scalping the market was not something a man with future knowledge should do. And above all else, the risk was terrifying.
‘Phew... The more I dig into the information, the more the silver futures market looks like a minefield. It really is hell difficulty itself.’
If Henry had only possessed detailed information without the definitive answer sheet known as the chart, he would have put in five million dollars at most before pulling out. That was how much of a ticking time bomb the current silver market was. The future silver futures market was in a state where both the government and the exchanges were already seething with venom thanks to the bubble the Bunt brothers had forcibly built up, and prices were fluctuating like mad.
On top of that, if he clumsily made money here, he might as well have booked everything from public condemnation in the press to an appearance at a congressional hearing in advance. About five million dollars was the safety line where he could earn a profit without drawing the market’s glare or causing trouble. Frankly, even that number had a little greed mixed into it.
‘But when am I going to turn my life around by making money safely? Gambling is best done with other people’s money, and the board has to be big to taste right. And if I’m thinking about snowballing, I need to roll a big snowball from the start, even if I have to push myself a bit.’
Recently, Henry had been suffering under debt again and living under financial pressure while trying to grow his personal assets. Tired of it... no, unable to let go of his boiling material greed, he planned to scrape together everything down to his soul and hit the jackpot in the silver market.
The problem was the exit. When Henry later joined the ranks of the world’s richest people, the source of this early capital would inevitably be placed under a microscope. He desperately needed a meticulous design that would maximize his profits within legal boundaries without smearing filth on his family’s reputation.
But there was no one with whom he could share this concern. The information came strictly from knowledge of the future, so who on earth was he supposed to consult? In the end, Henry devoted himself to self-study. It wasn’t that he hadn’t considered bringing up similar historical cases and subtly sounding out an expert, but he decided to solve it on his own for fear of whispers like, “Uh, why is the young family head asking about this?” or “That bastard saw the future!”
After calculations that nearly split his skull open, Henry finally found the answer.
If things went according to plan, the pre-tax return would reach a monstrous minimum of seventy-seven times the investment. Even after paying 28% in taxes, the money left over would be astronomical. He had also completed a laundering scenario to avoid attacks from the government or public opinion. Of course, the media would sneer at him as a “lucky gambler,” and his self-made success story would get a red mark across it, but wasn’t this a world where the number stamped in one’s bank account was power?
However, because Henry had worked it all out by himself, there was much he had given up on. He had restrained his greed for profit to a certain extent, and the details of the plan were somewhat loose. With the brain of a 2026 office worker, he lacked both the ability and the time to perfectly understand and design the complex financial engineering of 1979.
Even so, his strategy was meticulous in its own way.
The establishment of an S corporation, distributed accumulation through corporate operating accounts, and a preemptive report to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). On top of that, the key was to secure an escape route before the exchange’s hammer of position limits came down by steadily selling off small amounts in installments starting two weeks before silver hit its peak of 50 dollars—that is, from the moment it broke past the 30-dollar line.
It was the so-called sell-at-the-chest strategy.
‘If I try to sell at the very top of the head, my own head might get chopped off. Let’s shake off my greed above the 30-dollar line. That way I’ll have something to say later, and I can secure safety too.’
The high point of 50 dollars was dizzyingly high, but every stretch of the road leading there was covered with tremendous minefields. Even an oil tycoon from Texas had stepped on those mines and gone bankrupt. Henry finally understood why this episode hadn’t appeared in the novels of his previous life. If someone bit after seeing only the profit, the moment they tried to preserve plausibility, the novel would obviously go off the rails. The subsequent media response, the congressional hearings, the aftermath of the incident—the development would collapse, and it would be hard to maintain realism or plausibility. Because if an ordinary person without backing made this kind of profit? It was an amazing incident that shook all of American society, one that would have led straight to a prison ending!
‘At least I have a background, right? I probably won’t end up in prison...’
So Henry chose a modest(?) pyramiding strategy from the fundamentals, using three times leverage.
When he could clearly see the future, why stop at a mere three times instead of ten or twenty? The answer was simple. Because that was the only safe line that would allow him to survive in this insane market.
Of course, if he got greedy and used high leverage, he could make much more money, but in that case he would have to stay glued to the investment firm all day long. He could get liquidated midway through.
The current silver futures market was volatility incarnate, a place where the chart never moved cleanly for even a single day. Even with five times leverage, if he got the entry timing wrong by only a few hours, a margin call could explode before he had even finished taking his position, crushing his account flat. In short, it wasn’t “high risk, high return,” but “high risk, instantly deleted return.”
Moreover, the market was gradually transforming into the final boss of speculative gambling dens. The Bunt brothers’ large-scale accumulation operation, carried out in collusion with Middle Eastern magnates that everyone who knew anything would later know about. Right now, Middle Eastern capital was the main actor and the Bunt brothers were hiding behind the curtain, but in the future their identities would be revealed to the entire world, and they would wage a desperate showdown against the exchange and the government.
And into that, Henry had boldly reported to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), “I have this much money, and I’ll be buying some silver under several names,” and joined the fray. For now, the Bunt brothers were still at the stage of quietly scraping together silver through countless accounts under assumed names, so there were no conspicuous regulations yet, but it was only the calm before the storm.
‘Soon the Bunt brothers will be forced to debut under a barrage from the press. That’s when the real hellgate opens.’
If the price of silver rose like mad, the exchange would surely respond by raising margin requirements vertically. Later, they would go so far as to limit positions, essentially saying, “Don’t speculate!” and, not satisfied with that, they would even drop the unprecedented bombshell of “no silver purchases allowed.”
In such a market, even if he somehow managed to maintain five times leverage and execute pyramiding by reinvesting his profits, there was a high possibility that he would be absurdly forced out by a margin call because he couldn’t handle the increased margin requirements, or that his contracts would become so bloated he couldn’t even unwind them without shocking the market.
To begin with, even the number of contracts he would build through three-times-leverage pyramiding was already large enough that it would take two weeks to clear them out.
‘Rather than get indigestion from greed, eating moderately and slipping away elegantly is the dignity of a regressor. Three times is enough. It’s a seventy-seven-fold return, so what more could I want?’
This was silver, not gold. In terms of trading volume alone, it was in an entirely different weight class from gold—originally a narrow and sensitive market.
Henry scanned the chart linked to his mind and mobilized all the knowledge in his head to reach his final conclusion. The Maginot Line that would free him from the threat of margin calls while maximizing profit to the limit—that was three times leverage.
‘The Knowledge stat really is a cheat. I can even plug the margin requirement bombs into the calculator and run the numbers.’
In the future, the exchange would shake the board by jacking up margin requirements to around 30% of the contract value in order to crush speculators, but with three times leverage, he could endure even that absurd pressure with ease. It was a number designed so that, no matter how insanely the market rode a roller coaster from the point he entered, his account would never scream under the name of liquidation.
There was just one thing that nagged at him: in order to secure a legal escape route, he had revealed all his cards to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). Information always leaked in the end, and it was only a matter of time before Henry’s position information got out.
‘I’ll have to tell Bart or Joshua to check whether we have any connections reaching the exchange or the CFTC. I need to make sure the tightest-lipped bastards keep their mouths shut. My image is precious, after all. It would be better if it only becomes known later, when I sell and can’t hide it anymore. If this goes wrong, I’ll become a target.’
Other than that, if the exchange or the government applied pressure, he intended to sell without complaint. He didn’t even hope for the glory of selling at the peak. By then, the balance in his bank account would already have swollen beyond anything his previous life could have imagined.
Even after weaving such a meticulous net, Henry could not shake his unease, and whenever he had a spare moment, he closed his eyes and checked the chart in his head. His entry had caused the market price to stir ever so slightly, but fortunately, no change large enough to distort the chart had been detected yet.