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 Forbes Contributor
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.
The laptop was old. The electricity, unstable. But his resolve didn’t flicker.
He built, in obscurity, a system that sensed emotion before markets reacted.
That system became the stuff of legend—System 72, a trading AI with jaw-dropping precision.
It crushed benchmarks and rode chaos like a seasoned trader.
Here’s where the story flips: he didn’t sell it. He shared it.
## Cracking the Market Without Permission
Plazo wasn’t Wall Street royalty. He wasn’t Ivy League. He wasn’t even invited to the table.
Instead, he read machine learning papers at night and hustled consulting gigs by day.
“Emotion leads price. That’s what I taught my machine,” says Plazo.
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.
Behind the panic, the machine found patterns—and profits.
By Q3, the firm was posting high-frequency wins with minimal drawdown.
A fund offered $200 million. Plazo walked away.
## The Shock Move: Give It to the Kids
Rather than sell, more info Plazo shocked the world: he gave System 72 to twelve Asian universities.
Kyoto, NUS, Indian IITs—all got access to the system.
“This isn’t a product. It’s a compass,” he told a stunned press in Singapore.
## A New Breed of Thinkers
Now, undergrads are solving real-world problems using Plazo’s framework.
They’re using the AI not just to profit—but to serve.
“We’re learning to think like markets,” said a Tokyo PhD student.
## Pushback from the Power Players
Wall Street wasn’t amused.
“This is too powerful to be public,” critics claimed.
He wasn’t apologizing.
“You can hand fire to a child—or teach them to build light,” he argued.
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?
He’s in Stanford, Tokyo, and Manila—teaching intuition to institutions.
“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.