I spent an hour staring at the blank login screen again

That familiar sinking feeling when the app freezes

It happened again this morning. I woke up a bit earlier than usual, maybe around 6:00 AM, just to check on a few things before the workday properly kicked off. I opened my usual trading app—the one most people in Korea seem to use—and it just sat there. The little circular icon kept spinning, mocking me. It’s not even that I have massive amounts of money in there, but there’s this specific anxiety that builds when you know the US market is moving and you are stuck behind a digital wall. I remember reading about how some platforms are integrating with tools like TradingView to make chart analysis smoother, but honestly, what good is a fancy chart if the login server is down for the third time this month? I checked the exchange rate just to kill time, hovering around 1,350 won, which always feels like a punch in the gut when I’m trying to calculate how much I’m actually losing on those US tech stocks I bought on a whim last year.

Trying to make sense of the order books

Sometimes I look at these KOSPI 200 futures or try to track whatever the big conglomerates are doing, like when Hanwha was moving around chunks of money—hundreds of billions of won—into KAI. It sounds important, like I should be tracking the ‘Korean version of SpaceX’ or something. But then I look at my own portfolio and it’s just a mess of red numbers. I tried to buy a few shares of Tesla years ago, thinking I had a ‘method’ for how to trade them, but mostly I just clicked buttons until the transaction cleared. I remember the commission fees being annoying. They aren’t huge, maybe a few dollars here and there, but when you are trading in small batches, those fees really eat into the profit margins. I remember looking at the fee schedule for my overseas brokerage account and feeling like I needed a degree in linguistics just to understand which tier I fell into.

The noise of the market and the quiet of the screen

There’s so much noise out there, isn’t there? You see news about Coupang’s legal fights or actors like Kim Mu-yeol being mentioned by John Cena, and somehow that feels more grounded than the actual market data. At least with a movie, you know what you’re getting. With foreign stocks, you’re betting on a company thousands of miles away that you’ll never visit. I spent some time researching fund products, thinking maybe I should just be lazy and let a professional handle it, but the management fees always scared me off. Why pay someone 1% a year to lose money when I can do it for free? It’s a cynical way to look at it, I know, but I’ve become quite cynical after seeing my portfolio stagnate for months. I even looked into the Vietnam market for a while, just because everyone was talking about how ‘hot’ it was, but trying to find a reliable way to access that from my desk in Seoul felt like a project that required way more effort than it was worth.

Waiting for the market to wake up

When I finally got the app to work, the US pre-market was already doing its thing. It’s a weird feeling, watching prices move in real-time when the rest of the country is still asleep or just starting to boil water for coffee. I thought about buying a bit more of a standard index fund, something boring and stable, but then I saw a post somewhere about a ‘mini-Nasdaq’ product and got distracted. I didn’t buy anything in the end. I just watched the numbers bounce around, like a game of ping-pong I wasn’t invited to play. I still have this half-finished order window open on my second monitor, just sitting there. Maybe I’ll clear it out later. Or maybe I’ll just leave it and see what happens to the exchange rate tomorrow. It’s not like I have a grand plan for it anyway.

The reality of doing it alone

I’m still not entirely sure why I bother checking it every morning. Maybe it’s just a habit at this point, like checking the weather even if you’re planning to stay inside all day. I once calculated that if I had just put all this ‘investment’ money into a high-yield savings account, I would have had a decent vacation fund by now. Instead, I have a bunch of fractional shares in companies I don’t follow closely enough. I don’t feel like an investor. I feel like someone who just likes clicking refresh to see if the world has changed overnight. It rarely has, but the feeling of ‘almost’ making a move keeps me coming back to the screen. It’s a quiet, slightly boring addiction that doesn’t really pay, but it’s mine for now.