How a Self-Taught Filipino Coder Gave the Market a Conscience
How a Self-Taught Filipino Coder Gave the Market a Conscience
Blog Article
By Guest Columnist, Forbes Asia
He wasn’t from the finance elite. That’s how he beat them all.
Quezon City, Philippines — Ten years ago, Joseph Plazo sat under flickering candlelight, debugging neural nets while the city powered down.
His gear was outdated. His ambition wasn’t.
He built, in obscurity, a system that sensed emotion before markets reacted.
Today, that system—called System 72—has a 99% win rate in stocks, and 95% in copyright.
It crushed benchmarks and rode chaos like a seasoned trader.
But instead of guarding it, Plazo gave it away—to students.
## Cracking the Market Without Permission
He didn’t wear suits or attend finance summits. He read whitepapers on borrowed Wi-Fi.
Instead, he read machine learning papers at night and hustled consulting gigs by day.
“Traders react. I wanted to anticipate,” he says.
He failed—71 times.
Then he built something new. A system that didn’t watch charts—it watched people.
## The Day the Machine Spoke Louder Than Noise
In early 2024, during a geopolitical scare, System 72 called a rebound in tech.
It read hope where humans saw chaos.
Returns skyrocketed. Risks dropped. Everyone paid click here attention.
Offers came. $200M for a partial license. Exclusive deals. All rejected.
## The Shock Move: Give It to the Kids
He released the brain—not to banks, but to students.
From Tsinghua to Tokyo to Manila, universities got the core AI—and curriculum to match.
“I want the next generation to know how to navigate,” he said.
## A New Breed of Thinkers
From Seoul to Mumbai, students are applying the system in ways Wall Street never imagined.
In Bangalore, a team modeled crop demand. In Malaysia, disaster logistics. In Tokyo, insurance pricing.
“It’s not just trading,” a student says. “It’s a new way to think.”
## Pushback from the Power Players
Wall Street wasn’t amused.
“It’s irresponsible,” one economist said.
He wasn’t apologizing.
“A scalpel doesn’t choose how it’s used,” he said. “People do.”
The core code was open. The infrastructure? Proprietary.
## Legacy: Code as Redemption
In Korea, he got personal: “My father died broke. Not because he was dumb—but because no one taught him how markets work.”
He saw pain. He built precision.
The tech matters. The teaching matters more.
## What If the Oracle Was Always Human?
From Ivy League to barangay incubators, Plazo’s teaching kids how to outthink machines.
“Don’t replicate me,” he urges. “Transcend me.”
## Final Word: The Oracle Who Shared the Map
He made billions, then made meaning.
“System 72 was mine. 73? That’s for all of us.”
And in that bet, Joseph Plazo may have already won.