He's kind of a legend in the Japanese trading circles. Has a following on Twitter as well. Some have speculated that his story is propaganda to attract investors to the Nikkei. Does anybody know what his strategy is? I've read he shorts stocks, Futures and even Options.
I think I read once he scalps. he doesn't even look at charts or news...but just looks at the bid/ask spreads. And I think I read elsewhere that he times the broad market. Who knows -- but most of these hugely success stories either turn out to be hoaxes or only telling half truths.
Keep in mind Karen The Super Trader was a legend till she wasn't. Not saying CIS is a fraud just keeping healthy amount of skepticism...
He uses futures on the Nikkei, also trades currencies with the Dollar-Yen as well, going by his posts. With futures and currencies, the built-in leverage would be enough to allow for some substantial gains (ie. much more than the 15-20% annualized returns you commonly hear from top institutional stock pickers..he is also likely compounding at a faster rate than the cash market stock traders, so I think the futures/currencies leverage must have helped...also he seems to be only trading his own capital, so there is likely more latitude on risk constraints there.) If you sift through his tweets closely and check the timestamps, then reference the corresponding charts, you would be able to detect a few patterns / common characteristics to his trades (or to the extent in the subset of trades he posts publicly..) Bloomberg always seems to be able to have their journalists source the most extraordinary traders... You probably would have seen the articles on CIS. There's also one on another trader, who made 62x (=6200%) on stock index futures in 2015: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...200-on-china-futures-says-go-short-or-get-out
I must have it all wrong. I've been trading for a while and make only modest gains. Then again, I find Futures and Currencies(forex) to be highly volatile and risky. But CIS comes from an early gambling background so his risks pay off. High Risk / High Reward Low Risk / Low Reward
You can't trade like him...nobody can. His method is only revealed in generalities and he doesn't often trade. Its that vagueness that makes him a legend in the retail trading of Asia. Also, many curiosity seekers have examine his tweets involving his stock discussions and trades (there are not a lot of them)...its obvious the method is discretionary and he's very good at exploiting unusual market events. They then become famous on a few huge trades while their other trades don't even come close in comparison.
I think he has carried out some research and that's why his trading is based on bid/ask prices. Using US futures market intraday data from 1996 to 2015, I am currently doing research on buy-sell imbalance on ending price e.g. X.01 to X.09. I see significant buysell imbalance results at some particular ending prices. Maybe that's how he has developed his strategy...