American Hunting: Starting with Solitary Life in the Wilderness

Chapter 277 The Final Gains
Just as Lin Yu'an uttered those words, sealing the fate of their future home...

The encrypted satellite phone, which he had deliberately neglected for a long time, suddenly seemed to come alive, vibrating wildly on the oak table in his study, making a "buzzing" sound.

The names flashing on the screen instantly replaced the warm and hopeful atmosphere that had just filled the living room with anticipation for the future with a serious one.

It's Scout Braun.

"I'm sorry, my dears." His smile slowly faded. "Our 'kingdom' may have to wait a little while."

He strode up to the study on the second floor, closed the door, and shut out the worried gazes of his two lovers.

In the study, only his breathing could be heard for a moment.

He didn't immediately answer the satellite phone, which was still vibrating wildly like a death knell.

Instead, he walked to the computer, sat down, and tapped his fingers on the keyboard to connect to the high-speed Starlink network.

Countless financial news, data streams, and social media messages flooded the screen like a burst dam.

The screen on the left shows Twitter's trending topics. The hashtags #Gamestonk, #HoldTheLine, and #DiamondHands have turned deep red, followed by millions of discussions, indicating a nationwide frenzy.

But beneath these hashtags, a new hashtag, fueled by anger, is climbing at an even more alarming rate—#RobinhoodScandal.

The central screen displays real-time news feeds from Bloomberg and Reuters, with headlines using the most calm yet alarming language:
"Breaking news! Major brokerages such as Robinhood and Interactive Brokers have blatantly restricted trading access for several stocks, including Game Station and AMC, citing abnormal market volatility."

"In an unprecedented move, several brokerage platforms suddenly announced that they would restrict trading in some highly volatile securities to only allowing liquidation of positions."

"Securities firms suspended buying of GME shares, triggering a strong backlash from retail investors. GME shares plummeted after the trading restrictions were implemented."

A spokesperson for Robinhood stated that the move was a difficult but responsible decision aimed at addressing the rapidly increasing, multi-billion dollar margin demands from clearing houses…

A difficult but responsible decision... Lin Yu'an looked at the sentence and a cold smile appeared on his lips.

They refer to execution as risk management.

They disguised their betrayal as protecting investors.

These are the rules of the game on Wall Street. And right now, the rule-makers are personally getting involved, overturning the table, and pulling the plug.

Lin Yu'an switched to the securities account interface of his offshore trust. The green K-line that once pierced the sky like a giant spear had now broken.

After the high of $650, there was a long, huge red bearish candlestick with almost no lower shadow, like a blood-red waterfall falling from the sky, instantly slamming the stock price back below $200.

At the very bottom of the trading software, in the usually neglected "Platform Announcements" section, a notification marked in small gray print, posted about half an hour ago, lay quietly there:

"Due to recent volatility, we are now restricting trading in certain securities to a position-closing-only basis, including GME and AMC..."

Lin Yu'an's gaze swept over all the information on the screen in turn.

Frenzied retail investors, angry accusations, plummeting stock prices, cold announcements...

The most insane and ugliest scene from his past life has been reenacted in this world without any difference.

The revelry has reached its peak.

The massacre is over.

He slowly leaned back in his chair and exhaled a long breath. That breath seemed to carry away the last trace of suspense surrounding the butterfly effect.

Only then did Lin Yu'an leisurely pick up the satellite phone, which was still vibrating wildly, and press the answer button.

"Lin!" Scout roared from the other end of the phone, his voice a mixture of suppressed excitement and immense fear. "Are you watching the market? My God, the world has gone mad!"

"I'm watching," Lin Yu'an said calmly.

“Listen, Lin, the situation is extremely chaotic!” Scout said rapidly. “Brian and Marty are both online, we need to have an emergency meeting right now! Is it convenient for you to turn on your computer now?”

"can."

Scout said, "Quick! Lin! I'll send the link to the encrypted meeting to your email right away! We need you!"

The phone hangs up.

Lin Yu'an put down the satellite phone, glanced at the link he had just received in his email, and clicked on it.

The screen lit up, and after a brief encryption verification, it split into four independent video windows.

The virtual conference room was deathly silent, the atmosphere so oppressive it felt like water could drip from it.

These four small boxes contain a tremendous amount of energy, enough to leverage half of Hollywood and billions of dollars in capital.

Lin Yu'an's image is the most casual and warm. He is wearing a comfortable cashmere sweater and leaning comfortably on the sofa in the study. Behind him is an Alpha wolf pelt.

It was an unexpected trophy he had acquired when he first arrived in Alaska and hunted Doyle goats with old George, and it was now silently demonstrating its owner's power.

He appeared incredibly relaxed at that moment, like a detached spectator calmly observing the other three.

Scout Braun looked the worst. He sat in his multi-million dollar office, with floor-to-ceiling windows behind him offering a view of the dazzling Los Angeles cityscape, but at that moment he felt like a wild beast trapped in a cage.

His former high spirits were gone. He wasn't wearing a tie, the top two buttons of his expensive custom Brioni shirt were undone, his carefully styled hair was somewhat messy, and his eyes were sunken and bloodshot.

In front of him lay an empty Glenfiddich whiskey glass and a half-crumped pack of cigarettes, crumpled and worn. He looked like a gambler who had experienced the highs and lows of life in a casino, ultimately losing all his chips, filled with regret and resentment.

Marty Singh, on the other hand, seemed unusually agitated. He was still sitting in his penthouse study overlooking the Los Angeles skyline, but this time he wasn't drinking; instead, he was incessantly tapping his pen on his desk with an annoying "tap, tap" sound.

A morbid glint shone in his eyes, the bloodthirsty excitement a lawyer possesses when faced with a high-stakes lawsuit. He was like a vulture that had caught the scent of blood, waiting to devour the carcass.

Brian Lord remains the same emperor, his backdrop being the study of a holiday home in the Swiss Alps, with an abstract painting by Gerhard Richter hanging on the wall and a tranquil and pristine snowscape outside the window.

He wore a dark turtleneck cashmere sweater, his expression calm and expressionless, revealing no emotion. But his deep eyes, like a high-precision scanner, swept across the faces of the other three people in turn.

It was Brian who broke the silence first.

“Looks like none of us slept well last night.” Brian’s voice was as calm as if he were discussing the weather, yet it carried a sense of authority that allowed him to initiate the discussion. “Scooter, you go first. Give us a rundown of your achievements.”

Scout took a deep breath, his face filled with complex emotions: relief at surviving a close call, regret for missing out on huge profits, and deep self-reproach for not fully adhering to discipline.

“Lin gave me the exit signal when the stock price broke through 400. I was in a meeting at the time, and the stock price had just broken through 180 before the meeting! I understood what Lin meant by the call. He wanted to say that if I didn’t exit now, I shouldn’t blame him for the losses.”

"I held back for an hour, and finally, at $520, I immediately had the trading team initiate the highest priority liquidation protocol."

“But…” a bitter look appeared on his face, “the market… is crazier than we imagined.”

"Just as we started selling, the stock price didn't stop; instead, it went crazy and continued to surge upwards! $550... $580... and even touched $600 at one point!"

“At that moment, I wavered,” Scout confessed, his voice filled with struggle. “As I watched the tens of millions of dollars in profits increasing every second on the screen, my brain was screaming at me that Lin might have made a mistake!”

"I...I couldn't completely control my greed."

“I told the trading team to hold off on selling the last third of the position. I wanted… I wanted to see it one more time, even if it was just ten more minutes. I even thought we could go up to $700.” He closed his eyes in anguish, his voice hoarse with suppressed anger: “Then, that bastard Robin Hood pulled the plug!”

His tone was as if he were describing a natural disaster: "It's all over. One second ago, the buying was surging like a tsunami, and the next second, the buying in the open market, that torrent of countless retail investors, vanished instantly!"

"Although our institutional channels are still open, the water supply to ordinary people has been cut off, and the entire market ecosystem is dead! Liquidity has completely dried up."

"On our trading screen, there are only a flood of sell orders, but not a single buyer willing to take them! The stock price is plummeting like a free fall, with no support whatsoever!"

He chuckled self-deprecatingly, "Our last third of the position, at that moment, turned into a piece of gold rapidly sinking in the sea. You could see it, but you couldn't move it at all!"

"Ultimately, in my personal account, with a total investment of $500 million, I successfully cashed out the first two-thirds at an average price of $610, earning approximately $6780 million. It was a fantastic start."

“But the remaining third…” He looked at the document, each word seeming to be squeezed out from between his teeth.

"After the crash, it took us a full hour to barely find an institutional counterparty willing to take over at an average price of around $150, and we were able to liquidate our positions. We only recovered a little over $830 million from that part."

"A total of $7610 million was cashed out, with a net profit of $7110 million."

"The situation is exactly the same for Justin. We invested a total of $3000 million, and cashed out about $4.06 million from the first two-thirds of the position."

"But the remaining third, those 333,000 shares, were worth nearly $200 million at their peak, but in the end, they only recovered less than $50 million."

He looked up, his eyes bloodshot, filled with endless regret and anger: "Two accounts, totaling approximately $5.32 million in cash, with a net profit of $4.97 million."

"This number sounds impressive, doesn't it? But because of my final act of greed, because of Wall Street's shameless overturning of the table, our profits of over $150 million on our books just... evaporated!"

Brian offered no comment, but instead turned his gaze to Marty.

Marty stopped tapping on the table, grinned, but his smile contained a hint of relief and undisguised elation.

“I’m a little better off than Scout because I’m afraid of dying, and even more afraid of the SEC. So I bought call options. The time value of options is the devil; I don’t want to live a second longer.”

“When Lin called, the stock price was still rising to $400. I didn’t wait like you guys; I immediately had my traders start liquidating their positions in batches. I told him I didn’t care about the peak; I just wanted to pocket the profits.”

He slowly announced a figure that caught the attention of Scout and Brian: "I liquidated all of my five million dollars worth of call options during the period when the stock price jumped from $200 to $450."

"The final cash-out was...185 million US dollars. Net profit was 180 million US dollars."

He shrugged and said in a tone that was both smug and slightly regretful, "Of course, if I could get $600, that number might double."

"But I missed the craziest part later on, and therefore, I perfectly avoided the massacre of having my internet cable pulled."

Finally, all eyes were on Brian.

Brian picked up a glass of water, took a sip, and slowly said, "My situation is more complicated than you think."

His voice was calm and even, as if he were stating a fact that had nothing to do with him, but what he said next made the air in the conference room freeze.

"I have invested a total of $150 million."

The potential profits from this figure sent a shockwave through everyone!
"Due to the large size of the funds, in order to avoid arousing market suspicion during the accumulation phase, our position building process lasted for nearly two weeks and involved six independent funds from three different countries."

Even so, the final average holding price was still raised to around $35.

He continued, "The liquidation process was equally difficult. When Lin gave the order, the stock price was at a high of $480. I had the Swiss team initiate the highest level of liquidation agreement."

"Before pulling the plug, we successfully sold about 80 percent of our positions at an average price of around $560, cashing out more than $1.9 billion."

Nineteen billion dollars! Scout and Marty's breath caught in their throats.

Brian frowned almost imperceptibly. "But just as we were preparing to liquidate the last 20% of our position, disaster struck."

Scout couldn't help but interject, his voice tinged with confusion: "But Brian, Robin Hood unplugged the internet! How did you...?"

Brian's lips curled into a cold smile as he slowly said, "Scooter, you need to understand one thing. Robin Hood pulled the tap that connected to the slums. Our mansion, on the other hand, is connected to a separate main water supply."

"The so-called 'pulling the plug' only targets retail investors who use zero-commission apps. Their trading channels are fragile, congested, and easily cut off."

“And our orders,” he said with a hint of self-righteous arrogance, “were executed through the prime brokerage channels of UBS and Morgan Stanley.”

“They are directly connected to the exchange’s core servers and can conduct large-scale transactions with other institutional players in the dark pool. That’s another world, a battlefield that retail investors can never see or touch.”

"So while Robin Hood users were furiously yelling at the gray sell button, my trading team was in the dark pool, selling our shares to greedy opponents who were eager to cover their short positions or trying to profit from the crash."

These words starkly revealed the class truth of the capitalist world, sending a chill down the spines of both Scout and Marty.

Brian's tone shifted abruptly, the arrogance of his previous domineering demeanor vanishing, replaced by a rare hint of weariness. "However, even the main water supply pipes are on the verge of bursting due to excessive pressure during a tsunami."

“At that moment, all the institutions were frantically selling, and no one was willing to take over. Our trading team was like trying to push an elephant out of a crowded fire escape in a burning movie theater.”

“They spent an hour, using my personal network built up over thirty years on Wall Street, to forcibly liquidate 10% of the positions through UBS’s market maker department. But the average selling price for this portion was a dismal $250.”

“And the last 10%,” he slowly shook his head, “about 42 shares, are locked up tight. They’re completely immobilized. They’re now, just like the ones Scout has, worthless pieces of paper.”

The results are in. Even Bryan, the king of Hollywood, couldn't escape unscathed from the ruthless onslaught that swept through Wall Street.

The conference room fell silent once again.

Brian's gaze shifted from an air of complete control to one filled with complex emotions and a sense of感慨 (gǎnkǎi, a complex feeling of mixed emotions).

"But to be honest, even I didn't expect the final result to be so crazy."

“My initial expectation was that your information, Lin, would bring us a return of three to five times. That would already be a great victory. I had the team prepare 150 million in funds, just to ensure that we would have enough say in this game.”

"But I never dreamed that we weren't playing cards."

"We're printing money!"

His voice was soft, but firm: "We invested 150 million and eventually cashed out more than two billion US dollars, although we still have assets worth more than 250 million US dollars at their peak that are now trapped inside."

He looked at Lin Yu'an and said, "Lin, I've lived for almost seventy years, experienced the dot-com bubble, and the subprime crisis. I thought I had seen everything in the world of capital. But you, and your friends, have taught me another lesson."

He nodded slightly to Lin Yu'an in front of the screen, a rare gesture of equality: "I thank you for this victory."

The results have been tallied.

Scout & Justin: Total investment of $3500 million, net profit exceeding $4.84 million.

Marty: Invested 500 million, net profit 1 million US dollars.

Brian: He invested $1.5 million and cashed out approximately $20 billion in total.

This is a truly insane feast of wealth!

"So, Lin? How are you?" Scout couldn't help but ask.

(End of this chapter)