Recently studying the trading history of the Japanese stock market, I discovered stories of two legendary figures and especially want to share them with everyone.

One is known as the God of Trading, BNF, whose real name is Takashi Kotegawa, and the other is the strongest retail investor, CIS. These two are not only longtime friends but also have remarkably similar experiences. Both started engaging in trading during university, gradually accumulating from small capital to over a billion yen; they also both made a name for themselves during the famous J-COM order mistake incident. That day, CIS earned 600 million yen, but Takashi Kotegawa was even more aggressive, making 2 billion yen in just 10 minutes, which was about 150 million RMB at the time.

Interestingly, in Japan’s usually low-profile trading circle, these two rarely shared their trading ideas. Takashi Kotegawa once released a trend-following strategy, and CIS summarized his trend-following trading principles, which many traders have studied and applied, and are still quite relevant today.

Takashi Kotegawa’s story begins with his contrarian investing approach. Around 2000, the internet bubble burst, global stock markets entered a bear market, and the Japanese market also suffered, with investor sentiment extremely pessimistic. But he saw different opportunities — although the bear market was declining, it was also accompanied by repeated rebounds. He found that many asset prices were severely undervalued, and he used the deviation rate of the 25-day moving average to select targets. Simply put, when the stock price is far below the 25-day moving average, the deviation rate becomes significantly negative, indicating that the price may be heavily suppressed, and this is a buying opportunity to catch a rebound. This method helped his account grow from small to 100 million yen.

By 2003, as the Japanese stock market began to rise, Takashi Kotegawa’s strategy also shifted. He moved from picking cheap stocks to trend-following, and his assets skyrocketed to 8 billion yen. He was accustomed to short-term trades lasting two days or overnight, holding 20 to 50 stocks simultaneously to diversify risk. He would hold a stock overnight, then the next morning take profits or cut losses, quickly switching to a new batch of targets. He was especially good at leveraging industry linkage effects — for example, among the four major steel companies, if one rose, he would buy the other three that hadn’t risen yet, riding the entire industry’s upward wave.

Although CIS doesn’t have a specific methodology, his trend-following principles complement Takashi Kotegawa’s strategy well. He believes that stocks that are continuously rising are likely to keep rising, and stocks that are continuously falling are likely to keep falling. It sounds simple, but most people can’t do it. Many are afraid when stocks rise quickly and want to wait for a pullback to buy; others buy in and then add more when they lose money, trying to gamble on a rebound with more funds. But the market actually has strong continuity — the strong get stronger, the weak get weaker. We must accept the market’s power rather than fight against it.

CIS emphasizes that what truly matters is not the win rate, but the overall return of the account. Risks and losses are inevitable; the key is to cut losses in time and make small losses and big gains. He also warns traders not to blindly believe in any golden rules. The market is a complex, dynamic system — once rules are widely spread, they lose effectiveness. The best traders often emerge during stock crashes and crises; when most people panic, the few who can remain calm and judge clearly stand out.

After hearing these stories, I feel that the essence of trading is understanding the power of the market and then following it. Whether it’s Takashi Kotegawa’s contrarian + trend-following switch or CIS’s pure trend-following principle, the core is a deep understanding of market laws and execution ability. Of course, investing involves risks, and trading should be cautious — these are just historical cases and ideas shared for reference.