TWO former senior employees of UOB Kay Hian Private Limited (UOBKH) were charged on Wednesday for allegedly lying to the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) in relation to reports on a then Catalist aspirant. Lan Kang Ming, 38, and Wee Toon Lee, 34, each face three charges of providing MAS with false information in October 2018 in relation to due diligence reports on an unidentified company applying to list on the Catalist board of the Singapore Exchange. MAS said in a media statement on Wednesday that it was performing an onsite inspection of UOBKH between June and August 2018, to assess the latter's controls, policies and procedures in relation to its role as an issue manager for Initial Public Offering (IPOs). During the examination, Lan and Wee were said to have provided different versions of a due diligence report relating to background checks on a company applying to be listed on the Catalist board of the Singapore Exchange. UOBKH had acted as the issu...
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Japanese day trader plays Tokyo stock market from his bedroom, one of many individuals who have been pushing up local stocks higher
Bloomberg in Tokyo
27 September 2014
It was six minutes after the opening bell on February 4, and dozens of big-name stocks were still untraded in Tokyo. Telecommunications giant SoftBank was among those that had not budged. The offer price fell 5 per cent, then more, and still there were no takers.
Then an order was filled: 300,000 shares at 6,714 yen (HK$477) - worth just over two billion yen, or almost US$20 million. Other buyers followed, momentum built, and the stock ended the day as one of only two gainers in the Nikkei 225 Stock Average.
The man who made the market for SoftBank that winter morning was sitting in pyjamas in a bedroom cluttered with comic books.
Betting on rebounds was dangerous, but he’d watched SoftBank lose a fifth of its value over nine days, and a drop in the United States markets overnight had driven the shares even lower. The odds were tilting further in favour of a bounce, by his reckoning.
Ninety minutes later, he cashed out with a profit of 140.6 million yen. Then it was on to the next trade for the former video game champion and pachinko gambler who goes by the name CIS. The 35-year-old day trader says he made six billion yen, after taxes, betting on Japanese stocks last year.
During a decade of day trading, having started more or less from scratch, CIS has amassed a fortune that he says now exceeds 16 billion yen. In the process, he has become a cult figure among Japanese day traders, a tight circle of self-taught professionals who take pride in working one of the world’s toughest markets. CIS has been the subject of much chatter and speculation. A Wikipedia page attempts to track his investment results.
Only a handful of his peers know his real name, and no one has watched him work.
CIS, pronounced sis, means death in classical Japanese. The nickname is a holdover from his gaming days, when he used to crush foes in virtual wrestling rings and online fantasy worlds. “Games taught me to think fast and stay calm,” he said.
Rail thin, with a shaggy mop of hair, he showed up in a gray sweater, jeans and trainers. No one would have taken him for a multimillionaire.
CIS wants people to know what he’s accomplished; he just doesn’t want them to know who he is. Married with three kids, he says he’s worried about being targeted for robbery or extortion.
Last year was a very good year to be a Japanese day trader. Pushed by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, the Bank of Japan flooded the market with cash via an asset-buying programme. On top of that, a relaxation of borrowing limits allowed people trading on margin to roll over loans the instant they exited a position. Taken together, the two made for a potent cocktail.
The benchmark Nikkei 225 jumped more than 56 per cent in 2013, the most in four decades. The Mothers Index of small-cap stocks, a magnet for retail investors, soared 137 per cent. The number of shares traded by individual investors more than doubled, according to the Tokyo Stock Exchange.
It was not because more people were pumping retirement money into the market, though Abe’s policies were meant to encourage that. “It was super, super-active day traders,” said Akira Warita, managing director at Matsui Securities. One per cent of the online brokerage’s clients accounted for 70 per cent of its turnover during the last three months of 2013. The 397 people who made 50 or more trades a day were responsible for more than half of the brokerage’s margin transactions.
Stocks entered the picture for CIS when he was in his early 20s and working as a designer of industrial shock absorbers at a small manufacturer. He began by betting on what he thought were undervalued companies, and he lost money.
He found success after a friend gave him a piece of advice: forget the fundamentals.
With the euphoria over Abe’s policies fading and Japan’s market returning to form, many day traders who struck it rich last year are getting out. Who wants to spend day after day glued to computer monitors if you don’t have to?
It’s not a sentiment CIS shares. As of late summer, he was flat for 2014. Nevertheless, he thinks he can hit 100 billion yen in assets by the time he’s 60.