Staring at the Microsoft ticker while my coffee goes cold

Watching the numbers shift in the middle of the night

I found myself staring at my screen at 2:00 AM again, just watching the Microsoft ticker jump around. It feels ridiculous when I think about it in the daylight, but there is something about the American stock market hours that makes me feel like I need to be present for the action. I opened my overseas stock account back when everyone was talking about how easy it was to jump into the Nasdaq, specifically grabbing some TIGER US Nasdaq 100 ETFs because I thought it would be less stressful than picking individual stocks. But somehow, I ended up obsessing over Microsoft and Google anyway. The wait time for my initial deposit to clear took three days back then, which felt like an eternity, but now that the money is sitting there, the waiting is even worse in a different way. It is just constant noise.

The reality of checking the app during the workday

My colleagues are busy talking about things like Posco Future M or the current state of Hyundai Engineering & Construction, and I’m just here trying to calculate if my slight dip in Microsoft holdings means I should have just stuck with something safer. It is funny, or maybe annoying, how much energy I spend on this. I remember reading about how Microsoft beat out other tech giants to climb to the fourth spot, and at the time, it felt like I was part of some big historical trend. Now, it just feels like a line on a chart that refuses to go in the direction I want. When I check the app during lunch, usually around 12:30 PM, the lack of movement just makes me feel like I’m wasting time. I could be doing literally anything else, but I’m checking if the AI hype is finally cooling off enough to make my portfolio look sad.

Why I still look at the local market news

I still keep an eye on domestic stocks like Samyang Foods or whatever is hitting the headlines in Seoul. It is strange how my brain tries to link everything together. If I see a headline about semiconductor trends, I immediately start worrying about whether that implies something for the global tech giants I am invested in. Someone mentioned that Microsoft and Google are spending so much on AI data centers that it might be a bubble, and suddenly I’m back to my desk, overthinking my position again. Is it really a bubble? The reports sound so professional and confident, but then I remember how many ‘experts’ were wrong about the tech sector back in the 80s. It makes me feel like I have no idea what is actually going on, and I am just gambling on a gut feeling.

The lingering uncertainty of the portfolio

I honestly considered selling a portion of my holdings when the market felt particularly volatile last month. I even opened the sell order window at least three times, staring at the ‘execute’ button. The cost of a trade is negligible now, maybe just a few dollars in fees depending on the brokerage, but the mental cost of admitting that I might have been wrong is much higher. I ended up doing nothing. I just closed the app and went to get more coffee. The market kept moving without me, which is probably for the best, but the uncertainty remains. Sometimes I wonder if it would have been easier just to put the money into a boring savings account and never look at a ticker again. But then, there is that part of me that thinks the next big jump is just a few days away, even if I have no actual data to back that up.