Aug

31

Trader longevity

August 31, 2024 |

Shigeru Fujimoto, age 88:

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Bloomberg Originals

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Fujimoto has lived his life by the philosophy that, "You should take a chance, even at the risk of a failure, when something makes you think, ‘This is it’, whatever your age.”

He began operating mah-jongg parlors after he had a flash of inspiration saying, “This is it.” The parlors prospered, and he sold the business for 65 million yen after it had grown large enough to have three outlets.

He capitalized on his nest egg to become a full-time investor in 1986. He rode the tide of Japan’s asset-inflated economic boom of the late 1980s and increased his assets at the time to 1 billion yen.

The economic “bubble,” however, burst. There was nothing he could do as his assets slid to 200 million yen. He suffered an additional blow from the Great Hanshin Earthquake of 1995, which left the entranceway to his apartment crushed.

He fled the strong tremors with only the clothes on his back and walked barefoot on streets that were littered with glass shards. His heart drifted away from investments as he lived the life of an evacuee in an elementary school building.

A turning point came when Fujimoto became acquainted with the world of online stock trading in 2002. Fujimoto, who was 66 at the time, had never even touched a personal computer, but he was undaunted.

His approach has, of course, sometimes led him to make wrong decisions and suffer failures.

“I have stumbled not just seven, but about 50 times,” Fujimoto said in referring to a Japanese idiom that goes, “stumble seven times but recover eight.”


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