“The kind of person who wastes money on that stuff would never have made it this far,” says Uemura, whom traders know as Kemu. “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.”
One secret was identifying the machines most likely to give bigger payouts. Another was being able to endure 13 hours at a time in smoke-filled and deafeningly loud pachinko parlors; he had to play thousands of consecutive games to take advantage of the odds.
Wicked keyboard skills were a must. He memorized more than 100 keystroke 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.
“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 is 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. For him, a well-played stop-loss is just about the most beautiful trade there is.
He found success after a friend gave him a piece of advice: Forget the fundamentals. CIS does not subscribe to the Nikkei or any other newspaper. Nor does he scrutinize earnings reports or parse central bank statements or spend much time looking at moving averages or other price chart patterns normally associated with technical trading.
Instead, he keeps his ears open in chat rooms and his eyes glued to bid-ask screens, on which he monitors the market’s appetite for its 300 most heavily traded stocks. If there is one basic principle, he says — repeatedly and slowly, as if instructing a child — it is this: “Buy stocks that are being bought, and sell stocks that are being sold.”