The Bedroom Trader Who Humiliated Every Banker in Japan

The Bedroom Trader Who Humiliated Every Banker in Japan

The Japanese stock exchange is in chaos. No one knew what happened. A single trade has set the entire market on fire. There are so many people and farms uh went bankrupt because of this incident. The JCOM stock, a newly listed company, has just collapsed. Not because of bad earnings, not because of a financial scandal, but because of one human mistake, an order error so catastrophic it created the opportunity of a lifetime. And in the middle of it all, one man. The reason why his legacy is so big is uh he still remains a mystery in people’s eyes. He doesn’t wear a suit. He’s not on a trading floor. He was categorized as unemployed in social media and TV. his empire, a tiny room filled with monitors, anime figures, and empty ramen cups. But in just a few minutes, he will execute one of the greatest trades in history. He essentially makes $17 million in just under 10 minutes. To understand how we got here, we need to go back The stock market is recovering. In a small apartment in Tokyo, a mysterious young trader is quietly amassing a fortune. Nobody knows his name and nobody knows his face, but his bank account is growing fast. For exclusive insights, we interviewed professional traders Mike Sir and Japanese Forex trader K, who bring a combined 45 plus years of market experience and offer unique perspectives into his story. By 2004, he has millions. By 2005, he’s one of the most successful private traders in Japan. And then one fateful morning in December, he sees it. The opportunity of a lifetime. But we’ll get to that. The only way people refer to this legendary figure, three letters, BNF. Once his name became in public, then he was introduced as unemployed because uh trader basically wasn’t a profession in Japan back then. And that encouraged the other unemployed people or part-time job people to trade and that also made him famous. But before he became a market killer, Takashi Kotava was just a kid in a room. Most kids played for fun. BNF played to win. The outside world didn’t exist. Hours blurred into days. Days blurred into weeks. Because unlike other kids, BNF saw something deeper patterns. Every fighter had weaknesses. Every move had a counter. The game wasn’t random. It was predictable. It was a system. One that rewarded discipline. Years later, he would see the exact same thing in the stock market. A game. A game where predicting patterns could make you rich. The economy is unstoppable. I thought the Japanese were invincible. They seem to be doing everything right and they seem to have so much money to make investments that they would be unstoppable. I felt great about it. I thought it was the East’s revenge on Western capitalism. If it comes to it, I thought we should buy all of the United States. We really should have bought more of America. Land prices up 500% in just a few years. The Nicay stock index climbing to all-time highs. And the banks, they’ll lend you as much money as you want. They used to push us to take up loans even if we didn’t need the money. It didn’t matter if you could pay it back because in this economy, nobody lost. During the bubble years, I remember my parents, especially my dad, was really aggressive on spending money. They said, “You spend all because you get more money tomorrow.” As Japanese technology and games dominated across the world, the entire country believed this was just the beginning. We thought Japan was progressing from a trading nation with high technology into a finance nation with an even brighter future just like Manhattan. But then everything changed. At the time, the US had a problem. I could see that we were going to be in real trouble competitively with the Japanese products. And I wanted to make Americans wake up to that challenge. For years, American companies had been struggling to compete against Japan and West Germany. Factories closed. The trade deficit ballooned. US goods were simply too expensive overseas. To avoid an open trade war, the world’s biggest economies made a deal. The Plaza Accords. a kind of agreement which accomplished much more than everybody expected for the meeting. As part of the deal, Japan agreed to let the yen rise in value against the US dollar to make American products cheaper. Nobody in Tokyo knew it at the time. What seemed like a good deal at first had just set Japan on a course for disaster and would shape the environment our trading legend would soon dominate in. Almost overnight, the yen doubled in value. At the same time as we coped with the doubled yen, we started to believe our ability had doubled as well. We began to think our value had doubled. Japan’s companies, now flush with cash, suddenly had more money than they knew what to do with to keep the economy growing. The Bank of Japan slashed interest rates to historic lows. Borrowing became easier than ever. Corporations took out massive loans, pumping money into stocks and real estate. As a piece of real estate, Japan was worth the whole of the United States seven times over and talked about when to sell the land they owned. Everyone was very excited in those days. Investors followed. Then regular families joined in. It was stupid to leave your savings or retirement pay at the bank. Many of us wanted to do something better with our money. There’s an important psychological factor dealing in stocks and shares. Even when you sold and made, say, 300,000. If the same share went up further and you could have made more, then you’d feel as though you’d lost money. It was the ultimate gold rush. And for a while, they were right. As long as the market was going up, people were getting richer and they were spending the money and they were buying real estate. They’re taking over US companies. As long as the market was going up, everything was fine. By 1989, Tokyo’s Imperial Palace was worth more than all the land in California. It’s because the banks fund the deals. They finance a purchase of land for 50 million one week, and they finance the sale of the same land for 60 million a week later. One month later, the same bank comes up with 65 million for the same land. That’s how land prices go up. Investors, corporations, even regular salary men were all in. Nobody could see the warning signs, but they were there. After the Plaza Accord, our exports suffered, and people worried it might be an even more serious situation than the oil shock. Many feared the Japanese economy was under threat again. And the moment Japan’s leaders tried to stop it, the whole system came crashing down. At its peak, Japan’s stock market was worth more than half of the entire world’s equity value. It was a bubble. A bubble built on cheap debt, speculation, and pure belief. And like every bubble, it had to burst. On the first day of 1990s, Japanese market began collapsing. The government knew things were getting out of control. So, in early 1990, they hit the brakes. It was as though lots of cars were racing at a speed of 90 mph. Several hundred of them, all bunched up. Leading them was the Ministry of Finance car. It suddenly breaked hard and all the cars behind went right into it. A major pilot. That was the burst of the bubble. Interest rates doubled overnight, suffocating businesses and homeowners who had borrowed too much. Banks once eager to lend suddenly pulled back. tightening credit and choking off the economy’s lifeblood. And with credit drying up, stock market speculation collapsed in an instant. Then came the second blow, the real estate crash. For years, banks gave out loans like candy. Companies, investors, even regular families took out massive loans, betting on land prices going up forever. But then, when the stock market collapsed, the banks panicked. They stopped landing and within months the real estate market imploded. At the height of the bubble, this site was worth 1.8 billion yen. Since the burst, it’s been sold for a tenth of the price. Property values collapsed by 80%, wiping out entire fortunes overnight. Land that was once worth billions became worthless within months. Entire corporations built on debtfueled expansion failed under the weight of loans they could never repay. A country that once felt unstoppable was now frozen in time. Businesses were forced to lay off workers just to stay afloat. People once eager to spend cut back on everything. A generation of workers had just lost everything. For regular families, the dream was over. In the middle of it all, a boy was growing up. Born in 1978, 11 years old Takashi Kodigava was too young to understand what was happening. But he could see it. Money was tight. Banks weren’t trusted. The stock market just a gambling casino for old men. Everywhere he went, the messages were the same. After bubble bursted, uh, people start to think spending money is not good. You better save money in your bank account. Parents taught Japanese kids that risk was dangerous. Most kids grew up believing that avoiding risks and working a stable job was the key to life. Security was the only path to success. But for Tekashi, something about that never felt right. He rather spent his time eating delicious ramen and watching anime. The world outside was recovering. Japan’s economy was still stagnant, but slowly rebuilding. People were finding jobs again. But inside, for Tekashi, nothing had changed. Takashi was a shy kid and barely talked. He doesn’t really care about school or latest trends. All he needs the comfort of his home and a few amenities. Cup noodles, ramen, a game, and silence. Takashi was Hiki Korei. In his room, hours blurred into days. days blurred into weeks and the more he isolated himself, the sharper his mind became. The patterns in games, movements, reactions. He wasn’t just playing, he was predicting. It is in these isolated hours where Takashi develops instincts that would later serve him. While most people see wasted time, Takashi was training for something greater. He just doesn’t know it yet. investors were not the only ones suffering. Far out money manager Victor Neahhoffer and his investors were He was one of the greatest traders of his time. A Wall Street pioneer. A man who built an empire from nothing. His fund one of the most successful in history. His strategies so powerful that even George Soros trusted him with his money. But success in trading is fickle and can vanish at a split second. a wrong decision and you lose everything. That’s exactly what happened to Victor Netherhoffer. Victor, what exactly happened? I was too aggressive. I was always betting on a bounce and one day there was no bounce. The market did something he never expected. It kept falling and in one single trade he lost everything. His hedge fund, his reputation gone. If you could go back, would you do anything differently? I should have been more careful. The light from the TV reveals a pair of eyes, sharp, unmoving. Takashi is watching. Most people saw a cautionary tail. Takashi saw something else. He was hooked. The documentary changes everything. Before Takashi has no direction, but now he has an obsession. But there was a problem. Trading felt like a secret. The resources that did exist weren’t made for someone like him. There were no guides, no instructions, just numbers. If he wanted to learn, he had to teach himself. Every spare minute, every late night, he was studying. He wasn’t just reading. He was breaking down the numbers line by line. And then something bothered him. It was too long, short, simple, unmistakable. It would be his name in the future, he decides. But it doesn’t mean much. Not yet, but soon it would. The goal was simple. Save enough to open an account roughly 2 million yen. But reaching it beyond difficult. Every paycheck saved. Every coin stored away. No eating out, no new clothes, no spending. Just work safe. repeat day after day, month after month, year after year. Then he finally had enough money to open an account and jump into the markets. In 2000, he starts full-time, but he couldn’t have picked a worse time. The market wasn’t just bad. It was a bloodbath. It was an unforgiving bare market. And BNF, a complete beginner. Will he survive? Fortune favors the brave. In 2018, crypto was the future. In 2021, meme stocks and NFTts were the future. In 2023, AI was the future. Every time, investors called it a new era. Money was essentially free. So, companies with no revenue were worth billions. Everyone was getting rich. Sounds oddly familiar. The internet is the future of business. Then everything changed. They called it the new economy. The internet was changing everything. If a company had a.com in its name, it didn’t need revenue. Well, we are a famously unprofitable company. And that is a conscious strategy and an investment decision. Investors didn’t ask questions, they just bought. And then the crash began. The biggest financial euphoria in history ended. Money evaporated. Fortunes disappeared. By the time it was over, the NASDAQ had lost 78% of its value. But this wasn’t just a market crash. It was the end of an era. The longest bull market in US history had been fueled by cheap money and speculation. Now venture capital dried up. Banks pulled back. Tax dogs turned radioactive. The world was forced to reset. Optimism had blinded everyone. Now reality had arrived. By 1998, Takashi had studied everything he could about trading. But books and reality, two completely different things. His first real trades were a total disaster. But BNF wasn’t the type to quit. Instead, he adapted. If the market was this bad, if everyone was selling, then who was buying? That’s when he saw it. Stocks didn’t fall in a straight line. Even in a crash, there were moments of irrational panic. What if buying at the extreme lows could be profitable? The data was clear. When stocks dropped too far, too fast, they almost always bounced back. This wasn’t just a hunch. It was a pattern comparable to the games he excelled at. Yeah, he has a simple but really, really powerful rule and that is to only buy stocks that are going up. Now, specifically what I mean by that is he only buys stocks that are already showing strength and have a clear upward direction. The foundation of his legendary contrarian strategy was born. At the core of it, a concept called moving averages and mean reversion strategy. Let’s start with moving averages. Yeah. So moving averages they measure the average performance of a stock over a set number of days. So they generally you know moving averages are served as a trend indicator or trend tracker. So for example if a price or stock price is above a moving average so hence that it’s in an uptrend. If the price the stock price is below the moving average so it’s suggesting that it’s in a downtrend. But it’s not only the moving averages BNF is looking at. So BNF focuses on identifying and capitalizing on significant price deviations from the moving average. It’s about how much prices move away from the moving averages. Now specifically he uses um a specific percentage threshold uh to determine an entry or exit price for his trades. um he looks to buy a stock when the price drops 5% below the moving average and then he sells it when it returns to 2% above the moving average. So essentially the moving averages that he typically uses is you know could be a 20-day moving average or 50-day moving average. The foundation for this approach is what often separates professional traders with beginners the mean reversion strategy. Yeah. So a lot of traders don’t utilize what we call a mean reversion strategy and it’s based on the concept where if the price deviates too far away from its average price which is the moving average then will at some point revert back to its mean or to the average price over a time period. BNF’s strategy worked at least sometimes. Some trades hit perfectly but others didn’t. The market was still brutal and his savings still shrinking. Yet he had found a strategy. Now he just had to refine it. Just when BNF thought he had found a working strategy, the market surprised him again. Lowpriced stocks wiped out overnight. This wasn’t normal selling. It was outright panic. Would this contrarian strategy survive? or was he about to be wiped out completely? He had to adjust. The same signals didn’t work across all sectors. He started to switch his strategy to trend follow strategy and that’s when he started to check the stock markets across the sectors. For example, let’s say he sets his eyes on the aviation sector. Once major aviation stocks gain momentum and start rallying, he looks for any other aviation stocks that are still lagging behind any stocks that haven’t joined the initial bull rally yet. And he was super good at identifying them in a second. So he fine-tuned deviation percentages per sector. Instead of buying everything that dropped, he only bought where the data was strongest. But what’s surprising was that he has been monitoring uh more than 700 stock markets per day every day. He wasn’t just betting on fear. Whenever he find opportunity, he doesn’t think he doesn’t think it’s an opportunity. Instead, he says his hands are moving by itself. And by 2002, he had mastered it. He had done it from near failure to one of the greatest bare market traders in Japan. He could now live entirely off trading. But success never lasts forever. Yeah. So basically he was using only one moving average which was 25 and um he was basically uh trading we call it Kylie Kylie in Japanese and that’s like a strangement or divergence. So um whenever the price deviates from the 25 MA then he buys. So actually it’s downtrending and it’s downtrending then um because it was you know uh the stock markets were going down that time back in 2000 to 2003 he was using this strategy but by 2003 the bare market was over for the first time in years stocks are rising again. BNF had spent years mastering fear surviving panic thriving in collapse. But now the market had changed. His strategy now useless. This wasn’t his battlefield anymore. Could he adapt? Or was the very market that made him a legend about to erase him? However, sometimes a slip costs more than just a couple of millions. And on early morning December 8th, 2005 in Tokyo, one slip would change everything. In a matter of a few hours, some will witness the greatest windfall they’d ever see. But for others, by the time the market closes, it will be the end. On December 8th, 2005, Takumi Sato wakes up like any other day. He’s a regular trader at Mitsuho Securities. Minso Security was one of the uh obviously the most biggest uh security firms in Japan back then. It handles high-profile listings for companies looking to go public in Japanese stock markets. Sato isn’t a superstar, just another in the machine, but he’s steady and reliable. A hardworking man looking out for the people around him. For Takumi Sato, it was supposed to be just another day, but by 300 p.m. his world would be turned upside down. In the two years leading up to this morning in December05, the global stock markets have been booming. In Japan, the Tokyo stock exchange is thriving. A steady run in 2005 has pulled the Japanese stock market out of a long funk. The Nicay index is now at its highest level in more than 5 years. And the Mother’s Index has surged 58% in 2005, driven by retail investors chasing tech IPOs. Fortunes made in minutes. And the next big thing, JCom Holdings, a provider of broadcasting services, making its debut on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. The trading floor is buzzing. Sato takes his seat glancing at the morning listings. Just the regular routine of a trader. Traders like myself or BNF, you know, we generally would look at headline news and, you know, essentially see what’s moving the market uh before the market opens. We will also look at the, you know, the stocks that were most active the day before or the day current, if there’s any news, if there’s any type of catalyst that would trigger these stocks to be in play on that particular day. For Sato, the big story today is the JCom IPO. The stock is set to debut at 610,000 yen per share, valuing the firm at 9.1 billion yen. So once the order uh goes to uh let’s say buy or sell on the stock market, then it has to go through MSO Securities in Japan. As the market opens, Sato begins inputting a standard sell order for JCOM Holdings, selling one share at 610,000 yen. He types quickly, following protocol. His fingers move over the keyboard, following his routines and years of experience. He hits enter. No alarms, no warnings, business as usual. Then suddenly, Sato notices Jacob’s prize dipping sharply. His heart races. something’s off. He scans the order details and then the numbers hit him. He has just sold 610,000 shares at 1 yen instead of one share at 610,000 yen. A simple typo, but the kind that ends careers. He lunges to cancel, but another trader beats him to it, frantically trying three times to reverse the trade. Order cancellation failed. The system of the Tokyo Stock Exchange won’t let them. It’s too late. Word spreads fast. Jacob’s stock drops 15% within minutes. A sharp fall triggered by the flawed sell order. It was like only 13 minutes. The stock hits its limit down price. 572,000 yen per share, halting further decline. Phones ring non-stop. The market descends into chaos. At Mitsuho, panic sets in. Sato sits frozen, watching red numbers flood his screen. The cost for Mitsuho already in the billions. He watches helplessly, fearing for his life. Meanwhile, across Tokyo, BNF sits calmly in his apartment, watching the same market chaos. He notices JCOM at the limit down price, 572,000 yen per share. No one knew what was happening exactly, including BNF. But where others see panic, he sees opportunity. Although they don’t know exactly what happened, some people may think that the market goes down. So furthermore, for an experienced trader like BNF, it’s like the feeling of seeing a pile of money on the ground. You know, you’re not sure, hey, is this opportunity real? But you don’t just you don’t think you just start picking up as much as possible of that of those profits off the ground. BNF acts immediately. He bought JCOM when it went all the way down and when it hits stop limit. He buys 7,100 shares, securing nearly 49% of JCOM. He effectively now owns half of the entire company. But this trade also means he’s risking half his entire net worth on one move. So he had back then 8 billion yen asset and he traded with half of his asset which was 4 billion yen into Jacob and so if he lost the trade then uh he would have been lost half of his asset massive risk but BNF doesn’t flinch this is what he lives for so the mental pressure must be enormous you know even if he knows what he was doing back then back at Mitsuho Oh, the bosses scramble to fix the error. They start aggressively buying back shares to cover the flawed sell order. Miso had to, you know, buy back the stock market, stock share of uh JCOM so that the market comes up and, you know, it recovers because of that. Institutional investors jump in sensing Mitsuo’s desperation. The price surges, but their efforts only deepen the damage. Whispers spread that the government might step in to help Mitsuho recoup losses. Most of the people I think uh thought that um Jacob will be frozen for a while. They won’t be able to trade. So lots of people took out the money from uh their trades from the security firms. Traders speculate on whether profits made from this error will stand or will be clawed back. The market will close in 30 minutes. But BNF isn’t done yet. He isn’t selling. As the Tokyo Stock Exchange closes for the day, Mitsuho faces catastrophic losses and hopes to be saved by government intervention. Sato has just lived the worst hours of his life and knows what’s to come. Across the city, BNF slurps ramen monitors still glowing. He holds 6,000 shares overnight, speculating that he can sell at an even higher price tomorrow. But with half his fortune on the line, if his plan doesn’t work out tomorrow, he’s ruined. If it does, he’ll make history. Tokyo Stock Exchange had seen crisis before, but nothing like this. The fallout is immediate. JCOM’s stock collapses so violently that the exchange is forced to intervene. Trading of the stock is halted. They froze so that no one could trade. For Mitsuho Securities, it is nothing short of a disaster. They lose 27 billion yen on the trade, wiping out three months of the firm’s profits. Though no official records confirm it, the Mitsuo broker, the man responsible for the blunder, almost certainly loses his job on the spot. In Japan, you can’t just say you’re sorry. Normally, you have to commit suicide or at least quit your job if you’re the director of a company. But the Mitsuo broker isn’t the only casualty. The Tokyo Stock Exchange itself is humiliated as they are unable to cancel executed trades under their standing rules. The CEO of the prestigious stock exchange, Taku Tsurushima, has no choice but to resign, taking the fall for a system that fails to protect itself from human error. He doesn’t leave alone. Two other highranking directors are forced out in a desperate move to restore credibility. And then there are the institutional investors. At first, banks like Morgan Stanley celebrate. Some walk away with millions in profit, but the mood quickly changes. Professional traders start returning their shares, fearing legal action. No one wants to be the one caught holding a profit that regulators might take away. But not everyone returns their gains. Rogue traders like BNF refuse. They see the game for what it is. They view it as a zero sum game where you’re trading against the market. There’s no other people beside you. You’re essentially competing directly with the market. Now, in a zero- sum game, there’s someone who wins and there’s someone who loses, and he’s striving to win every single trade. As time passes and the government shows no intention of intervening, Mitsuho Securities is left with only one option to stop the chaos, a forced settlement. They agreed to buy back Rogue Trader shares at the expected morning opening price, 975,000 yen. It is an unbelievably high number for a stock that just one day earlier was briefly available for around 572,000 yen. For BNF, it is the perfect ending. His name was already starting to echo through niche trading communities, but now he is known by a new name, the JCOM man. his total profit two billion yen, one of the largest profits ever made by a bedroom day trader. So the Jacob incident became um defining moment for BNF’s legacy because he demonstrated his exceptional trading skills, sharp market intuition and also the ability to seize rare opportunities you know with confidence which ultimately made him status as one of Japanese uh you know most legendary traders. But just as BNF secures his biggest triumph, a never-beforeseen storm brews about to shock Japan to its core. This time it isn’t a typo. It’s an incident so dramatic the Tokyo Stock Exchange holds trading across all listed stocks for the first time in its history. Japanese stocks are unstoppable. Undeterred by the craziness that just unfolded a couple weeks earlier, Japanese investors and traders alike are still bullish about Japanese stocks. The reason, stock splits. For years, the market has been in love with stock splits. A technical corporate maneuver that doesn’t increase a company’s actual worth. Yet, investors treat it like a golden ticket. In simple terms, a stock split is like breaking a big bill into smaller ones. Imagine you have a $10 bill and someone exchanges it for two $5 bills. You still have the same total amount, but now it’s divided into more pieces. For companies, it means slicing existing shares into smaller, more affordable pieces, making them look cheaper without adding any real value. However, in ’05 Japan, each time a company announces a stock split, its stock price jumps. Not because the company is worth more, but because traders believe it will be. This isn’t rational, but rationality doesn’t matter in a bubble. And no one rides the stock split wave harder than Live Door. Originally founded in 1996 as a Japanese internet company, Live Door isn’t only the next hot tech darling anymore. It has turned into a financial machine that exploits the system perfectly. It splits stocks aggressively, fueling a cycle of hype, speculation, and pure euphoria. Everyone is making money until they aren’t. The scandal happened in January 2006. Tokyo prosecutors storm Livor’s headquarters in full force. A high-profile raid. Live isn’t what it seems. Instead, the company lied to everyone. The charges in question, fraud, market manipulation, and falsified earnings. Screens across Japan flicker with breaking news and panic spreads at lightning speed. It’s as if Nvidia were raided today. An entire house of cards collapsing in real time. Lifeor stock is in freef fall. But it’s not just them. It’s a full-blown market meltdown. It’s chaos everywhere. Investors dump everything running from the flames. Traders don’t stop to check if the companies they’re dumping had anything to do with life. It doesn’t matter. Sell orders flood the system, but it’s too many too fast. The sell orders overwhelm the exchange and leave the Tokyo Stock Exchange with no choice. For the first time in its history, it holds trading. A financial system designed to handle billions in transactions per second. Freezes. But amidst the panic, one man doesn’t freeze. BNF watches calmly. He sees the overreaction for what it is. Irrational fear. Solid, fundamentally sound stocks untouched by fraud are being wiped out too just because they exist in the same market. Where other market participants see disaster, he sees a once-in-a-lifetime discount. As he watches the market uh every day, even a scandal can be a great opportunity for him to trade. He buys even where everybody else doesn’t do that. and he is very good at it and also he’s very quick. While others scramble for the exits, BNF moves in. He focuses on companies with strong fundamentals, blue chip stocks dragged down purely by panic, targeting sectors least affected by the scandal, but hit hardest by the sell-off. He uses his contrarian strategy. He buys heavily into undervalued positions, scooping up shares at deep discounts. methodical, calculated, buying aggressively, 100 million yen in total. His approach mirrors his past bare market strategies, buying the fear and waiting for rationality to return. Right now, the market doesn’t care, but it will soon. At least that’s what BNF wants to believe. Weeks pass, the dust begins to settle, prices slowly recover, panic turns to regret, but not for BNF. The IPO was cancelled by Tokyo Stock Exchange in March 2006. So within 3 months when scandal happened until the cancel IPO only 3 months then he made that much profit. He methodically exits his positions and is now richer than ever. By now BNF is more than just a legend in trading circles. People talk about him and even Japan’s elite is listening. Masayoshi’s son, a Japanese tech billionaire who built an empire, Soft Bank. He knows talent when he sees it, and right now he sees it in BNF. He wants him to go pro, manage real capital, and play at the highest level. He wants him to step into a world where he’s not just a trader, but a financial titan. For most traders, this would be the dream. But for BNF, taking this offer would be a nightmare. had told us was that he just doesn’t want others to control how he trades. Like he has his own unique style in terms of trading. But it’s not only about freedom for him. BNF. He just doesn’t like working in like in a high pressure stressful work environment. You know, he prefers a much more private, you know, low stress life. And quite frankly, he doesn’t based on his modest lifestyle, he doesn’t need a lot of capital or need a lot of money to live his uh stress-free life. BNF only needs the game. A screen, a chair, a bowl of ramen, and a market to master. No investors, no expectations, no one watching. Exactly the way he wants it. But the game is about to change. A storm is forming on the horizon. The biggest market collapse since the Great Depression is about to unfold. For BNF, the master of bare markets. This is good news. But this time, BNF makes a critical mistake. The decision to reject Son’s offer will soon haunt him. BNF is about to lose more money than ever before, and nothing less than his legacy is on the line. And once he confirmed the loss, he said uh he broke two PC monitors by smashing by a TV remote controller. So he was really upset by by what happened. By 2007, BNF is at the height of his power. Yeah. At that point, he started with around $13,000 USD, and he was able to turn that into over $150 million. He has perfected the game, mastering the e and flow of Japanese markets with surgical precision. For years, he lived frugally, obsessed with reinvesting every yen into the markets. But now, he finally rewards himself. A 400 million yen luxury apartment. A splurge. Yes, but also a calculated move. At this time, he started to invest on the real estate. Back in 2008, he bought um Chong Chong building which is uh in the center of Tokyo and he bought one of the huge buildings right in front of the station, Akihawara Station with uh 9.0 billion yen. It’s a logical diversification into real estate, not a reckless indulgence. But even monklike figures like BNF are still only human and humans make mistakes. Even the greatest traitors can fail. And soon BNF will do so too. But the mistake won’t come from reckless spending. It will come from something far worse. There are fears the sell-off will continue on Wall Street. It is definitely a very, very difficult time and it’s not going to get better quickly. We are watching this market deteriorate. The stock market is now down 21%. The world is on the edge of collapse. For years, Wall Street has built a house of cards. Cheap credit and reckless speculation have fueled an illusion of endless growth. Subprime mortgages are packaged into securities, then shuffled through the system, passed off as safe investments. Banks pretend they aren’t sitting on a ticking time bomb. But by mid 2008, the truth is impossible to ignore. In the United States, the housing market is crumbling. Banks are teetering. Investors are frozen in fear. And at the center of it all, Lehman Brothers, a titan of American finance, an institution renowned for its legendary trading divisions that had survived wars, recessions, and market crashes. Now suffocating under the weight of its own bad bets, its stock had already fallen 73% this year. To most, this is the beginning of the end. But BNF only watches from his apartment. For him, this is JCOM all over again. A stock collapse so extreme, it must be an overreaction. A textbook panic selloff. Exactly what he thrives on. He doesn’t hesitate. September 13th, 2008. BNF bets big. He pours $6.5 million into Lehman Brothers, a massive position in a company that in his mind is too big to fail. His biggest trade outside Japan. But 2 days later, the unthinkable happens. Lehman Brothers doesn’t recover. It doesn’t bounce. It doesn’t survive. On September 15th, 2008, Lehman Brothers files for bankruptcy, proving that the markets were right. Leman’s stock is immediately delisted from the New York Stock Exchange. Technically, BNF could still sell his shares in Lehman. But with many institutional investors and funds having mandates against holding bankrupt companies, liquidity dries up. BNF can’t find any buyers, even at rock bottom prices. He’s left holding the bag. And just like that, BNF’s position is obliterated. $6.5 million gone. BMET’s biggest mistake was breaking his own rule of holding on to a losing trade for far too long and he’s usually very disciplined in cutting his losses quickly when a trade goes against him. You know, however, with the Lehman shares, you know, he just hesitated a bit and he lost more than $6 million. It’s the single worst trade of his career. Trusting the US market like he trusted Japan was his downfall. I think he thought the United States will save the Lehman Brother company. But he didn’t account for the rot underneath the hidden leverage and outright fraud. His golden rule, only trade what you truly understand. This time he had broken it. And now he swears to himself to never again trade US stocks. But this is bigger than the US. The entire world is crumbling. A perfect storm is brewing and BNF is about to face his greatest test yet. The moment that will either destroy him or cement his legendary status forever. With Leman gone, the panic spreads like wildfire. The global economy buckles under the weight of fear. Japan is next. For years, its economy has relied on exports. But as Western demand crumbles, Japan’s largest corporations are in freefall. Factories cut production. Corporations/earnings forecasts. And on October 10th, 2008, the inevitable happens. The entire Japanese stock market collapses. The NIK225 free falls and investors scramble to get out. But BNF doesn’t blink. He has seen this before. He knows this pattern. And this is the moment to redeem himself after his painful Leman loss. He dives in head first, buying aggressively into the chaos, not knowing what is awaiting him the next morning. And if he’s wrong again, it won’t just be another loss. It will be the end of BNF as the legend we know. The next morning, BNF wakes up to a sea of red. The Nicay index keeps dropping and BNF’s losses keep piling up. While most traders would go on a tilt, making desperate attempts to reclaim their losses, BNF remains calm. He finds the discipline to cut his losers short. But his biggest problem, BNF knows his mean reversion strategy. His lifeblood is failing him. During the financial crisis, markets kept falling all around the world with essentially no recovery. you know, essentially breaking the traditional mean reversion strategy or pattern. But he also knows why he has to change. For years, his system of gradually increasing position size based on 25-day moving average deviations had worked. His models accurately predicted the rebounds of fallen stocks. They should have worked again. But over the past years, markets had evolved. Rebounds across Japanese sectors were happening faster. He realizes that his approach is not working anymore. And unless he fixes it fast, he’s done. This is it. His final chance at redemption. And he’s not hesitating. He dissects the nicke sector by sector, company by company, recalculating his deviation targets from the ground up. But the market isn’t waiting. While BNF sharpens his entries, redefineses his numbers, and refineses his approach. On October 27th, 2008, the NIK plunges again. Corporate titans, household names, and once untouchable giants. Everyone is sinking. Retail investors are in full retreat, and big money is dumping positions left and right. No one wants to buy. But that’s exactly when BNF sees his moment, the ultimate opportunity to restore and cement his legacy. And so he goes on a buying spree in the morning, but the market keeps falling and BNF’s losses grow rapidly. The weight of his trade gets heavier and even watching anime, his usual escape, won’t relieve him from the pressure now. But in the midst of it all, he realizes something. His true strength doesn’t lie in his strategies alone. A lot of his traits were coming from his experience, intuition and uh his personality too. All along it had been his ability to block out the noise and remain focused, his discipline, his unwavering commitment to his own market instincts that was his edge. And so BNF didn’t falter. BNF built a strong cash reserve which allowed him to avoid major losses uh at that period of time. and he adjusted his strategy somewhat, but mainly he focused on waiting for the market to recover before getting back with the same strategy that had worked so well for him. Instead of retreating, he doubles down on his approach. He goes all in like never before. One by one, he starts buying into the carnage, diving into the most battered stocks across the decay. blue chips, exporters, tech firms, 90 companies in total, $64.8 million deployed in a single day. A massive career definfining bet. And if he’s wrong, the consequences will be devastating. By lunchtime, the nicke has fallen further. But after the Tokyo Exchange meal break, the tide is finally shifting. The first stocks start to rally. A few large cap names gain traction and a chain reaction begins. BNF watches the nicke turning in his favor. Instead of cashing out by the end of the day, BNF holds tight until markets close. By the next morning, the rally is still in full force and the nicke rebounds hard, reversing its brutal decline. Stocks surge, wiping out losses, restoring billions in market value. Now it’s time BNF starts unloading his positions methodically and precisely like a machine. Each sale locking in profit. By the time the dust settles, he has done it. $12 million in profit. His goat status restored. The greatest bare market trader in Japan has won again. So there’s been very little interviews um of BNF for the past uh number of years. Um, but there is some speculation out there that BNF has grown his net worth to over $1.5 billion. Although he has vanished from the public since his last legendary trade in 2008, there is still plenty of rumors about what he’s up to today. My wild guess is that he keeps trading stock market or land probably not only in Japan but also overseas. uh he looks at some overseas opportunities and uh still buying properties or assets. It’s speculated that he has turned into a real estate mogul, owning multiple buildings in Tokyo and even owning a baseball team. Regardless of whether the speculations are true or not, one thing is certain, the mystery only fuels the legend. A prime example for the unrelentless drive to achieve greatness. He’s a self-made trader success story, you know, proving that you don’t need to work for a hedge fund, you don’t need to work for a bank and still be incredibly successful and still be able to make the same amount of money or even more compared to the big Boys.

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An unemployed man. A market in chaos.
But in 10 minutes, he makes $17 million – and breaks the Japanese Stock Market.

To unpack what really happened that day – and why BNF’s legend still lingers – we sat down with:

🎙️ Forex Kei, Veteran trader (https://keistradingstrategy.com/)
🎙️ Mike Ser, Veteran trader (https://www.mikesertrader.com/)

In December 2005, a single trading mistake brought chaos to Tokyo’s financial center.

As institutions scrambled and billion-dollar positions collapsed, one man saw what no one else did.
While others panicked, he executed.

This is the story of BNF – an elusive retail trader who turned a catastrophic error into one of the greatest trades in modern history.

📍 Who was this man?
💡 How did he spot the opportunity no algorithm could predict?
🔥 And why does his legacy still haunt Japan’s financial elite?

From ramen-stained desks to red-lining graphs, step inside the mind of a trader who didn’t just beat the system – he cracked it.

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