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.”
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 30 2014, @12:43PM
I don't think there's any meaningful way of evaluating that. He's clearly made a lot of trades, so it would be tempting to compare the distribution of his profits with a random distribution, but that suffers from selection bias: you're catching him at a particular time when he's "ahead," and for a particularly good year. I suppose you could do some kind of bootstrap - compare subsets of his trades against random - that might be a little more convincing.
On the other hand, the TSE returned 54% in 2013, so one might question whether his return of 0.3% is actually "ahead." Ignoring the $15B trades, and considering only his available capital of $50M, then his return of $55M is more impressive, but not substantially different than would be expected with conventional leverage and index investing.