The Legendary BNF: How a Japanese Day Trader Turned $13K into $153M

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Takashi Kotegawa. You might know him as BNF or "J-Com Man." Quite possibly one of trading's most mind-blowing success stories ever. Born in 1978 in Ichikawa, Japan. Self-taught. No fancy background. Just raw discipline and a kind of uncanny market sense.

From Nobody to Trading Superstar

College kid with zero financial knowledge. Gets hooked on stock market stuff from TV. Weird how that happens. He worked odd jobs. Scraped together some starting cash. Studied markets obsessively. Not a comfortable journey.

Then things got interesting.

That Insane J-Com Trade

  1. The J-Com Holdings mess-up. Some poor soul at Mizuho Securities typed in an order backward - selling 610,000 shares at one yen instead of one share at 610,000 yen. BNF spotted it. Jumped in. Grabbed 7,100 shares. Sold some when prices stabilized. Kept the rest overnight.

Made $17 million. From one trade. Just like that.

When Things Went South

Nobody's perfect. Not even legends. In 2008, BNF got greedy. Strayed from his own rules. Bought U.S. bank stocks during the housing crash. Bad move. Lost $10 million.

Expensive lesson. Stick to what you know.

Building the Fortune

His discipline paid off. That initial $13,600? Became $17 million in just two years. By 2008, it ballooned to $153 million. Seems almost unreal. But it happened. Even now in 2025, traders still talk about him.

The BNF Playbook

What can we learn? A few things:

  1. Emotions are killers. Make a plan. Stick to it. Market going crazy? Doesn't matter.

  2. Learn from winners. Find people who've been through market hell and survived.

  3. Focus on process. BNF played trading like a video game. It wasn't about money. He once said something pretty profound: "A $100k loss can feel better than a $6k gain if the losing deal was good and the winning deal was bad."

From broke student to trading legend. That's BNF's story. Not entirely clear how someone replicates such success. But his principles? Those make sense. Stay calm. Stay focused. Keep learning. Timeless stuff, really.

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