As they say, there is nothing wrong with building wealth through investing and saving money so you can retire or get rich. However, there are risky investments, as Kurumi finds out when she comes back to a messy apartment and her mother getting really upset.
We are taken five years back from the origin story before the 2008 financial crisis happened. When Kurumi came home after a normal day from school, all soaking wet from the rain, the apartment was a mess. When Kurumi opened the door, she saw the bedroom filled with garbage and alcohol cans, as her mother looked at her computer screen in total despair. She lost her life savings of 20 million yen from a failed foreign exchange (forex, for short) trade. She begs Kurumi not to tell her father, who is on a long-term business trip.
So, what is foreign exchange? Foreign exchange is basically trading currencies like the US Dollar, Euro, Japanese Yen, etc. Most people will only see this when you exchange your home currency for a foreign one. You usually do this when you travel overseas or buy something online that is in a different currency. The foreign exchange market trades are usually done between big banks and businesses that do business transactions with other foreign entities.
However, foreign exchange, like with meme stocks (think GameStop and AMC), cryptocurrencies, NFTs (non-fungible tokens, or links to jpegs), and betting, is speculative trades that has high rewards and a very high possibility of losing everything. Basically, one can see this as gambling, more so if you do margin trading, which involves borrowing money to execute trades. Margin trading, common in foreign exchange and speculative trading, is extremely risky. If the value goes down and you receive a margin call, you not only hit with a loss, but get into massive debt. This is not really investing. Investing is like taking a percentage of a paycheck into your 401k every two weeks, or dollar-cost averaging into a stock index like the S&P 500 (a stock index of the 500 biggest companies) or a carefully researched and diversified portfolio of stocks. Investing is good for building up wealth, if done responsibly and not investing more than you are willing to lose.
Well, with Kurumi in a panic over the possibility of her family getting split apart, she wanted to help her mom earn the money back. Of course, her mother discourages Kurumi from doing so, or even getting into Forex, as it’s something a child shouldn’t do. That is when her mother set out to work, and obviously, it’s difficult as she seemed out of it. Kurumi becomes worried that her mother is working herself too hard.
Of course, her friend saw Kurumi reading a forex exchange trading book, and she knew about it. Her friend discourages her, as she heard many people end their lives after losing money. Kurumi thought little of this until the day her father was about to come back. Kurumi got upset with her mother because her mother told her to write what she planned to say to her husband. Of course, when Kurumi came back, nobody was home. She saw an ominous message of apology. When she saw it, she panicked. Her father came to the door. He eventually answered the phone call and found out that his wife had taken her own life.
As expected, the first episode took a dark turn as Kurumi never thought it would happen to her mother. Then again, suicides, especially from losing enormous amounts of money. There was a case when someone took their life after seeing a large negative balance in their Robinhood account. This is the same case here as Kurumi’s father knew his daughter was thinking about possibly getting into foreign exchange trading. He tells her not to get into it, as she can live a happy life without it.
Five years later, Kurumi managed to graduate high school and attend university. She works at a part-time job as she earned enough money for her forex trading adventure. This time, she came prepared as she started her trades and see how it goes. She initially got excited as she earned more money than she got from work. She really hoped that her US Dollar/Yen trade will go to the moon.
However, it took a turn for the worse quite quickly as she panicked and racked up the losses. It seems as if she hasn’t learned the lessons her mother. Then again, she is probably not one of those “paper hands” type of traders who sell when they are ahead. Well, it seems as if she is not the only one as three other young women who are doing forex trades are having the same reactions of horror. Well, I guess this is the same reaction retail traders have when their favorite meme stock or crypto currency crashes as they did the trade on margin. I still wonder, why Kurumi put down all of her funds instead of investing just some of it so she won’t lose everything. I guess we’ll find out the aftermath from the miscalculation she made.
(Also known as FX Fighter Kurumi-chan)
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