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
Wall Street never saw him coming—because Joseph Plazo never played by its rules.
Quezon City, Philippines — A decade ago, Joseph Plazo coded algorithms during brownouts, lit by candles and ambition.
A secondhand laptop. A wobbly table. But the simulations ran.
He was coding a tool the world hadn’t asked for—an algorithm that could feel panic before it showed up on a chart.
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.
There were 71 failures before the breakthrough.
Then he built something new. A system that didn’t watch charts—it watched people.
## The Day the Machine Spoke Louder Than Noise
During a panic in 2024, his AI spotted the optimism nobody saw.
Social sentiment softened. Options flow hinted recovery. Fear curves flattened.
By fall, it was beating markets at their own game.
Offers came. $200M for a partial license. Exclusive deals. All click here 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 behavioral finance—made teachable,” said one young developer.
## Pushback from the Power Players
Economists called it reckless.
“You don’t hand kids a nuke,” one manager scoffed.
Plazo stood firm.
“A tool is only as moral as its user,” he told a Jakarta audience.
“The blueprint’s free,” he says. “The launchpad isn’t.”
## Legacy: Code as Redemption
In Seoul, during a keynote, he paused and said, “I did this because no one did it for me.”
His family lost everything to a speculative bet.
System 72 isn’t his legacy. The access is.
## What If the Oracle Was Always Human?
He’s in Stanford, Tokyo, and Manila—teaching intuition to institutions.
He teaches them not to copy—“Outgrow it,” he says.
## Final Word: The Oracle Who Shared the Map
People expected a recluse billionaire. What they got was an oracle in sneakers.
“System 73’s coming,” he says. “Let’s build it together.”
And in that bet, Joseph Plazo may have already won.