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Japanese Day Trader Made $34 Million During Monday/Tuesday Market Panic

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Akira

Member
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While a lot of investors were hitting the panic button Monday, a Japanese day trader who’d made a big bet against the market timed the bottom almost perfectly and narrated a play-by-play of the trade to his 40,000 Twitter followers. He claims to have walked away with $34 million.

As financial markets got crazy this week, many people turned cautious. Some were paralyzed. Not the 36-year-old day trader known by the Internet handle CIS.
“I do my best work when other people are panicking,” he said in an interview Tuesday, about an hour after winding up the biggest trade of a long career betting on stocks. He asked that his real name not be used because he’s worried about robbery or extortion. To support his claims, he shared online brokerage statements showing his trades second by second.

CIS had been shorting futures on the Nikkei 225 Stock Average since mid-August, wagering it would fall. By the market close on Monday, a paper profit of $13 million was staring him in the face. He kept building the position. When he cashed out late that night, a collapse in New York had caused his profit to double.
Instead of celebrating, he kept trading. He started betting the market had bottomed. When he finally took his winnings off the table on Tuesday, he tweeted, “That’s the end of my epic rebound trade.” His profit, he said, had almost tripled.

“It was a perfect trade,” said Naoki Murakami, who follows CIS on Twitter and whose markets blog has made him a minor celebrity in his own right.

Modern stock market Kira? Some comments in the Asia crash thread were right: people made off with money earlier this week.
 

Zaptruder

Banned
Where there are losers... there are also winners.

Global economy is one big game of winner takes all, with big as poker hands and player pools and significant differences in decision making and execution.

If you're not making trades with up to the minute information, you're basically a patsy in this game...
 
I wonder how much leverage he had.

Also, kids, don't try this at home. This could have easily gone the other way and he'd be left holding the bag if he didn't exit his play soon enough. Shorting, particularly with leverage, isn't for the faint of heart.
 

K.Sabot

Member
While he made much more, I made around 900k USD from Asia markets, mainly China and Japan. Feels pretty good man.

Damn, good shit.

Also this guy is a legend. If I had some extra scratch to work with during this crisis, it would have been buy buy buy buy buy (and subsequently sell sell sell the ones that aren't riding immediately of course). I'd have to invest in at least like... 3 more screens to do anything like he did though.

I don't feel a thing for the people who panic and lose everything tbh, just how the process works.
 

MrChom

Member
Things like this are the reason we have:
1. huge market volatility.
2. no nice things for anyone.

Frankly shorting and derivatives STILL need a massive cleanup, and preferably eliminating but there's way too much big money in keeping this stuff around, making isolated big profits for these groups and individuals, but largely miserable times for everyone else.
 

Chichikov

Member
Investors contribute capital for productive people to be productive.
Day traders hardly ever contribute money to productive people, and short sellers (like this guy) don't do it at all.

He made money without contributing anything to society, that money had to come from somewhere.

p.s.
Yes, I'm aware of the idea that short selling can increase market efficiency by identifying bad stocks and the likes, but I think it's a bit hard to make the case that he (and people like him) provide some valuable service (like, tens of millions of dollars valuable) to the stock market as a whole.
 

Rogan

Banned
Sölf;176778395 said:
Everytime I read something like this I think I should try to get into this whole investement thing.

Its fun, but don't expect much when you start. Its not like he invested $5 and got $34000000 back.
 

vpance

Member
You need money to make money.

What was his start budget?

Assuming he was working with 100:1 leverage, and maxed out, he would've certainly had an account worth at least a million to make that much off the drop from the top to bottom. Likely he wasn't completely levered since that is suicide in which case his account would be in the millions already.
 

Dennis

Banned
While he made much more, I made around 900k USD from Asia markets, mainly China and Japan. Feels pretty good man.

As proof, please send me 100k USD.

Its cool, you will still have 800k UDS yourself and you will have proven yourself not to be a liar!
 

bobbytkc

ADD New Gen Gamer
Sölf;176778395 said:
Everytime I read something like this I think I should try to get into this whole investement thing.

This is a common misconception. Investment means you buy a stake into the business hoping the value of the business will increase. Trading just means you take advantage of the fluctuations and trends in the price movements, without caring much about the underlying business.
 

Zoc

Member
This would be an awesome way for the Yakuza to launder money. Fake a bunch of screenshots of trades and publicize it. Not saying that's what happened here, though...
 
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