Homma is rumoured to have made the equivalent of $10 billion in today’s dollars trading in the Japanese rice markets. In fact, he was such a skilled trader that he served as an important financial advisor to the Japanese government at the time and was later raised to the rank of honorary Samurai. I don’t know about you, but I think it’s pretty safe to say we can learn something from a guy who was such a great trader that he become a Samurai because of it, to me that is totally cool in what is probably a semi-nerdy kind of way. Rumour has it that he once had 100 profitable trades in a row….granted there’s a bit of an advantage when you are basically the “inventor” of technical analysis and no one else really knows about it yet…but clearly Munehisa Homma was a force to be reckoned with in the markets and his legend lives on today.
Homma began recording price movements in the rice market on paper made out of rice plants. He laboriously drew price patterns on his rice parchment paper every day, recording the open, high, low and close of each day. Homma began seeing patterns and repetitive signals in the price bars he was drawing and soon started to give them names, including some of the popular Japanese candlestick patterns that you are probably already familiar with like Spinning tops, Stars, Doji’s, Hanging Man and others, each pattern clearly conveyed a specific meaning and Homma began using these patterns to predict the future direction of rice prices. The discovery of the price action patterns left behind by the movement of rice prices gave Homma a huge advantage over other traders in his day, and combined with his passion and skill for trading, this advantage is what allowed him to become one of the most successful traders ever, if not thee most successful trader ever.
More here – Mutiara Damasara
