The series is also well remembered for a Hong Kong stock market cultural phenomenon called the "Ting Hai effect".

[4] This is the first modern-age TV drama in Hong Kong history, where the story is told in reverse chronological order In medias res.

After the stock market stopped trading for the weekend, the Tings make the wrong bet and their entire fortune is wiped out, compounded by ending up in billions of dollars in debt.

Ting is a stubborn, uneducated and pathologically self-righteous brute who imagines himself to be a living kong-woo hero, while Fong is an honest, cultured and refined leader of the Asian Stock Exchange.

The stock guru Yip Tin describes the event as a battle to seize control of the "Mandate of Heaven".

The eldest son, Ting How-hai, replays his father's relationship with Lo Wei-ling on one of the Fong sisters, and is driven to violence when she rejects him.

Ting Hai returns to Hong Kong and is convicted of murder, but is pardoned using a forged certification of terminal illness.

Fong Chin-bok's investment company faces the Ting family in a winner-takes-all, last-man-standing stock market epic battle.

Eventually, the Tings make the wrong bet and their entire fortune is wiped out, compounded by ending up in billions of dollars in debt.

Ting Hai forces his sons to commit suicide by jumping off from the top of the stock exchange building before following suit himself, but he survives and spends the rest of his life in prison.

Upon the show's initial run in 1992, the audience found the scene so disturbing that the resulting torrent of complaints forced TVB to make several adjustments to the programme.

[7] The April 2015 rerun, aired after a massive spike in the Hang Seng Index, drew an average of 360,000 viewers, a record for late night television in Hong Kong.

A phenomenon is observed, that whenever a television drama starring Adam Cheng, the actor for the character Ting Hai, is aired, the stock market will drop for unexplainable reasons.

Sean Lau's character Fong Chin-bok was involved in a love triangle with Yuen Mui and Long Kei-man, played respectively by Vivian Chow and Amy Kwok.

[11] She alleged that she was sexually harassed by two renowned seniors in the industry, and was found dead on 3 November 2018, having died a few days prior from injuries incurred from slipping in the bathroom in her flat in Stanley, Hong Kong.