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The Korean Times: Shinhan to Hire Gamers as Day Traders

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Shinhan to Hire Gamers as Day Traders

By Kim Tae-gyu
Staff Reporter

Goodmorning Shinhan Securities, a local brokerage house, plans to capitalize on the manual dexterity of Korean professional online gamers in lucrative day trading.

Goodmorning Shinhan Wednesday said the corporation is presently considering whether or not to hire former professional players of the online game StarCraft.

``Earlier this month, we interviewed a pair of professional gamers to check whether they can be trained as day traders,’’ a Goodmorning Shinhan spokesman said.

``The mastery of professional gamer’s hands and their familiarity with the Internet environment can be good qualities to become day traders,’’ he added. He declined to disclose the players’ identity, though.

StarCraft refers to a real-time strategy computer game developed by the U.S.-based Blizzard Entertainment. Introduced in 1998, it is still one of the best-selling computer games.

In particular, the roll-playing game is all the rage in Korea, where StarCraft tournaments are televised around the clock on cable TV channels. It is a national pastime at least among young males here.

The StarCraft fever spawned professional players for the tourneys as well as training groups vying to join them, who have well-honed skills like quick reflexes and finger dexterity.

Such skills are a must for day traders, the active stock dealers who typically hold positions for a very short time and make several aggressive online transactions a minute.

However, Goodmorning Shinhan is agonizing over the recruitment of the skillful StarCraft players since day traders must be specialists in equity investment and fund management.

``The hitch is that the professional gamers have no knowledge in finance or investment. We will see whether they can develop qualities necessary for day traders through training,’’ the spokesman said.

Indeed, Goodmorning Shinhan might lose big money by employing gamers as day traders because day trading is more risk-laden trading than any other online stock transactions.