Slashdot Mirror
Mystery Gamer Makes Millions Moving Markets In Japan
HughPickens.com writes Jason Clenfield writes in Businessweek that tax returns show that a former video game champion and pachinko gambler who goes by the name CIS traded 1.7 trillion yen ($15 Billion) worth of Japanese equities in 2013 — about half of 1 percent of the value of all the share transactions done by individuals on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. The 35-year-old day trader whose name means death in classical Japanese says he made 6 billion yen ($54 Million), after taxes, betting on Japanese stocks last year. The nickname is a holdover from his gaming days, when he used to crush foes in virtual wrestling rings and online fantasy worlds.
"Games taught me to think fast and stay calm." CIS says he barely got his degree in mechanical engineering, having devoted most of college to the fantasy role-playing game Ultima Online. Holed up in his bedroom, he spent days on end roaming the game's virtual universe, stockpiling weapons, treasure and food. He calls this an early exercise in building and protecting assets. Wicked keyboard skills were a must. He memorized more than 100 key-stroke shortcuts — control-A to guzzle a healing potion or shift-S to draw a sword, for example — and he could dance between them without taking his eyes off the screen. "Some people can do it, some can't," he says with a shrug. But the game taught a bigger lesson: when to cut and run. "I was a pretty confident player, but just like in the real world, the more opponents you have, the worse your chances are," he says. "You lose nothing by running." That's how he now plays the stock market. CIS says he bets wrong four out of 10 times. The trick is to sell the losers fast while letting the winners ride. "Self-control is so important. You have to conserve your assets. That's what insulates you from the downturns and gives you the ammunition to make money."
"Games taught me to think fast and stay calm." CIS says he barely got his degree in mechanical engineering, having devoted most of college to the fantasy role-playing game Ultima Online. Holed up in his bedroom, he spent days on end roaming the game's virtual universe, stockpiling weapons, treasure and food. He calls this an early exercise in building and protecting assets. Wicked keyboard skills were a must. He memorized more than 100 key-stroke shortcuts — control-A to guzzle a healing potion or shift-S to draw a sword, for example — and he could dance between them without taking his eyes off the screen. "Some people can do it, some can't," he says with a shrug. But the game taught a bigger lesson: when to cut and run. "I was a pretty confident player, but just like in the real world, the more opponents you have, the worse your chances are," he says. "You lose nothing by running." That's how he now plays the stock market. CIS says he bets wrong four out of 10 times. The trick is to sell the losers fast while letting the winners ride. "Self-control is so important. You have to conserve your assets. That's what insulates you from the downturns and gives you the ammunition to make money."
Let me play games all day and some day I'll be rich!
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
I'm sure he had a good couple million to start with, too.
Exactly, it's likely he would have done better just from staying long rather than trading. Lets just see how well he does in a down year.
He sounds like a kid with serious ADD trading stocks just to kill time and pretend that he actually knows what the hell he's doing. The market in Japan is up, only an idiot could lose money in a up year. Let's see how well he does when the big boys cash out of the musical chairs games at lightning speed with their HFT algorithms and leave him and the rest of the Muppets holding the bag.
So, no studying PtoE, company fundamentals, etc. etc. Further proving that the Stock Market is almost entirely disconnected from the underlying companies. Basically, it's a Ponzi scheme.
The US government would have invested Social Security in the Stock Market, but they can't find a spokesperson from the financial industry you can advocate the scheme without drooling at the prospect.
Because 0.5% just takes way too long to type and read.
War & Buh Fett
Table-ized A.I.
Its called "Billionaire Girl".
From the same guy that wrote "Spice an Wolf", another economic textbook pretending to be a Manga.
Joke aside, IIRC all profits in day-trading are simply out of sheer luck, not skill.
The value of a company simply does not change all that much over a period of a few hours to be predictable.
| CIS says he bets wrong four out of 10 times.
That's not at all impressive.
Good trading strategies can return positive results if you bet wrong more than half the time. I'd be impressed if he can bet wrong 9 times out of 10, and still make a profit.
He bet 15 billion and made 50 million. That's about a 0.3% ROI, which IMHO falls into the noise range. Guy is more lucky than good.
If you think that stock brokers and big wall street companies have something you don't have then you are wrong. There is no magic in it, there is no hidden, secret formula. It's about watching news and reading quarterly financial reports of companies. If company made a lot more in that quarter then EVERYONE knows that the stock will go up.. so everyone buys making the stock go higher... Anyway this is for average Joe.. 97% of profits from stock market in big companies from wall street are from high frequency trading.
Next year's headline: Mystery Gamer Loses Millions Moving Markets In Japan
Nevermind the selection bias.
I mean, maybe its like interviewing lottery winners and asking them what their secret is. Maybe the secret is simply "I played", and "somebody has to win".
I'm not saying the guy isn't smart or disciplined or has the right mindset to be a trader, but that doesn't mean he's really an "exceptionally" genius at it.
Literally millions of day traders out there doing technical analysis and picking stocks. Its a bit like monkeys and typewriters in a way. Does the monkey that produces something legible really have any truly special talent?
Useful means of production and tangible assets of benefit, with intrinsic value.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
I've got the playing video games and gambling all day part down. Looking forward to the billions pouring in.
You are welcome on my lawn.
whose name means death
That would sound a lot less sinister if you'd put quotes around the word "death."
control-A to guzzle a healing potion or shift-S to draw a sword, for example — and he could dance between them without taking his eyes off the screen.
He can hit Ctrl-A and Shift-S without looking? The man's a wizard!
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
He seems to have intuited this.
"Sell the losers and let the winners run." It's not complex.
1. Buy companies that have a history of earnings growth. ...
2. Make sure your trailing stop loss orders are up to date.
3. Sell any stock that is down x% (10, 15, 20, whatever). You can always buy it back later at a lower price.
4. Profit.
Buffet doesn't use price targets but a even safer strategy is the above plus selling the winners after they have increased some predetermined amount.
You're just reading about this one guy. Left out of the story is the much larger number of Japanese men who holed up in their rooms playing games and didn't get rich. The lottery, vegas, NFL/NBA hope, etc. They all motivate people the same way. Big news stories about the few big winners. No stories about the vast multitude of losers, who are probably you. If this is going to happen to you, it's going to happen to you. Talent is required, but so is luck. They work together. Talent is the ticket to ride; but the driver might still drop you off in the slums. Sucks, but that's how it is.
So he can hit 6 out of 10.
Wouldn't random chance give him 5 out of 10?
And that's not even factoring in whether his comments are correct. And most people do NOT give accurate reports of their own winning/losing patterns.
And his self-reported "strategy" is to buy what other people are buying and to sell when they sell.
So who is selling when he is buying? Wouldn't he constantly be behind the curve? Paying too much for the stock and selling for too little?
All the Japanese proper nouns end in a vowel or "n". Right?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I'm not surprised. Real world is nothing compared to what we lived through in that game.
And don't get me started on those pussy MMOs today.
You guys make it sound like making millions in the stock market is dead simple. All your posts are missing is a link to an ebook that tell you all the secrets.
Maybe downplaying his gains makes you feel better about yourselves? But making that kind of scratch doesn't happen by change. Even best advisors from open hedge and mutual funds average around 25%.
it's not simple, but neither is it extremely difficult. the factors he cites are important, and sang froid is much more important than technical analysis if you're playing with your own money. however, from one example you can conclude basically nothing.
if just 1,000 people all invested their entire savings in a single double-zero roulette roll, you're almost guaranteed to have a few very lucky winners. does this mean it was a good idea? and is it that unreasonable to think there are about 1,000 similar people who tried exactly what this person did, and failed?
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
I think what people mean is that daytrading has much in common with gambling. And there are a lot of gamblers. One of them is bound to win the lottery at some point, thanks to pure chance and luck. The difference is, if you win at the stock market, people think you are smart, and write articles about you.
I tend to see it both ways. If you are smart and know what you're doing, you can give your luck some nudges in the right direction, but you will still need to be lucky to succeed.
You guys make it sound like making millions in the stock market is dead simple. All your posts are missing is a link to an ebook that tell you all the secrets.
Its not dead simple at all I know this, and there aren't really any real secrets either. The point stands that if someone beats the market by a lot its probably more luck than brains.
Its like blackjack or poker. The people who 'win' are generally good players, understand the game, are disciplined, etc. I'm sure this guy is all of these things. But winning big? Its just luck. Every trade is a calculated risk -- and probability theory dictates that if you have a bunch of traders all doing this, some will break even, some will lose it all, and some will win big... even if they all play EXACTLY as well as each other. Its just math.
In fact, day trading as a profession is a fanscinating selection bias -- as some of them lose they stop trading so the ones that are still doing it are the ones who haven't lost yet so any survey of the field at any time is mostly people who are "doing ok or better". (Because anyone doing poorly has had to dropped out.)
Of course some are better at it than others, and the ones who aren't good at it are more likely to lose and be forced to drop. So the ones still doing it are at least 'good at it'. And as I said, I don't doubt that this person is good at it. But spectacular success is as much luck as anything.
To put it another way...
Lets say I put an opportunity in front of you and you correctly determine the risk as being 1% chance to quadruple your money, 20% chance of doubling your money, 20% chance to triple it, 49% chance of breaking just above even, 9% chance of losing 50%, 1% chance of losing it all.
Clearly this is a very good bet. 90% of the outcomes are positive, and overall its very net positive. It would be smart to take this bet. So if I present this to a few hundred traders... what happens?
A couple quadruple their money. Are they any smarter or more insightful than the few who lost it all? Why? They all correctly gauged the risk and made the best decision.
I've found that people fundamentally do NOT understand "risk". Whether its the stock market, gambling, their own health care, or IT related risks.
This guy is good at analyzing risk and making smart bets, and he's had good winning streak, but being right about the risk and making the best decisions based on it, doesn't mean the risk isn't there. That he didn't lose is just luck.
Poker is the same way. You can be smart, play well, know all the odds, make all the right calls, and still lose badly.
Even best advisors from open hedge and mutual funds average around 25%.
Hell no they don't. Lots of studies have shown that the top hedge funds don't even consistently beat index funds. And after the management expenses the investor usually ends up behind. Look it up.
You guys make it sound like making millions in the stock market is dead simple. All your posts are missing is a link to an ebook that tell you all the secrets.
Maybe downplaying his gains makes you feel better about yourselves? But making that kind of scratch doesn't happen by change. Even best advisors from open hedge and mutual funds average around 25%.
Count the hits, ignore the misses. Maybe he was just lucky. And yes, someone can be that lucky. People win lotteries (not me!). And slashdot wouldn't have an article along the lines of "Several normal people played the stockmarket and on average did so-so".
"The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes" - Winston Churchill
"That's how he now plays the stock market. CIS says he bets wrong four out of 10 times. The trick is to sell the losers fast while letting the winners ride. "Self-control is so important. You have to conserve your assets. That's what insulates you from the downturns and gives you the ammunition to make money." "
He is either profiting from a stock market phenomena he doesn't fully understand or he isn't tell us a lot about his strategy.
What you say applies to life generally. It's all luck, too, but the margins are sometimes a little wider.
Like in life, we still value the effort. Discounting this man's skill is just sour grapes.
He is obviously laundering his Bitcoins using day trades.
-lh
No, it's not simple. It's so hard that no one has ever been shown to actually be good at it. Studies have consistently shown that the past performance of traders is completely uncorrelated with their future performance. Out of the millions of people trying their hand at trading some of them are bound to get lucky.
If you play the go (the Asian boardgame), you quickly learn how important it is to "cut and run". The critical skill is to identify, as soon as possible, whether or not something is going to work out. And if not, IMMEDIATELY stop investing resources into that venture, and shift to something that has potential.
--- wad