London. The private office at the Hales boutique.

Isabella sat with her chin in her hand, staring at the monitor and getting nowhere.

"Saving…… what's that supposed to mean?"

Something Bear had said during their call kept going around in her head, and she couldn't concentrate on work.

She hadn't believed him from the start.

A man so aggressive about growing his money, simply sitting on that enormous fortune?

Taking a break from investing and waiting?

She had her suspicions, but he hadn't given her an answer. Bear had said he'd tell her when they met in Switzerland. Isabella wanted to know before then.

"What on earth is it……"

Whirrrr.

She rolled the mouse wheel down and up for no reason.

Was he saving up to get something else? For days she'd been combing the world's markets, trying to find the real meaning of Bear's 'saving.'

Commodities. Currencies. Bonds. European stocks. Asian stocks. American stocks.

Dozens of charts flipped by on her monitors without a break.

Nothing grabbed her. Natural gas had already finished its huge wave. So had the pound. The dollar's direction wasn't as clear as it used to be.

Crude was running out of steam. The waves that had been stirring were dying off one by one.

"No……"

Isabella flipped through the charts. One, then another. Then one more.

Her clicking finger stopped for a moment.

America, and the Nasdaq.

"……" She slowly leaned forward, closer to the monitor.

She zoomed in on the chart. An index that had fallen a long way. And, stuck beneath it, the key indicator. The monthly stochastic, down in the bottom zone.

The weekly, too, after a long decline, was crouched low at the bottom. Isabella's eyes moved quickly.

"Huh?"

It wasn't just the Nasdaq. She pulled up the leading tech names one by one.

Semiconductors. Platforms. Cloud. Electric vehicles.

The growth stocks that had once sucked in the world's money all at once had crashed miserably from their highs.

And beneath them. One after another, the monthly and weekly stochastics were tapping the bottom.

Prices still looked crushed by fear,…