From an “Ordinary Company Employee” to 200 Million Yen in Total Assets… Investor whose new book is the talk of the town reveals his “past of losing big in FX

I am not an investment genius.

In 1998, I started investing in stocks with 3 million yen, and in nine years, my assets reached 20 million yen. I thought I was a genius, and in 2007, I tried FX, but it only worked so far. The losses kept mounting.

I was mentally wrecked at the time, and I heard the devil whispering to me, “You still have some savings you and your wife had saved for the future,” but I said to myself, “Not that much,” and gave up after I had melted down 7 million yen. The following year, in 2008, the Lehman Shock hit, and their assets fell below 5 million yen. In 2009, when I was thinking, ‘This can’t be right,’ I had a daughter.

Ichigo Higashiyama, author of “29 Truths I, a company employee who earned 200 million yen through investment, want to tell my 15-year-old daughter” (JTB Publishing), has assets of 200 million yen. He is not a “billionaire,” but a “two-billionaire. Despite his brilliant achievements, Mr. Higashiyama humbly states, “I am not an investment genius, but an ordinary company employee anywhere.

According to the Nomura Research Institute, the number of households with net financial assets of ¥100 million or more and the number of households with net financial assets of ¥500 million or more totaled 1.65 million, an increase of 11% from two years ago, according to a February 13 survey by the Nomura Research Institute. This is an increase of about 11% from the previous survey two years ago. How did Mr. Higashiyama go from being an “ordinary company employee” to a “200 millionaire”?

I started working for a major media company in 1991 and was assigned to the Nagano Bureau in 1992. I spent those days in a dizzying array of events in Nagano, including the Matsumoto Sarin gas attack in 1994 and the Nagano Olympics in 1998. I was forced to live in a cramped company housing unit with two other employees from the same company, and we were called out to work sites even if it was 3:00 a.m. When we were busy, we had to take almost no time off during a two-month period. When we were busy, we had almost no time off for two months. I am proud to say that I devoted my life to the company as what was then called a “corporate warrior” or what is now called a “company animal.

I started investing in 1997 when “Japan’s Big Bang,” a large-scale reform of the financial system by the then cabinet of Ryutaro Hashimoto, was selected as one of the top ten new words and buzzwords of the year. Right around that time, I was transferred to the Tokyo Head Office and wanted to start something new. I was the type of person who was susceptible to trendy words, so I decided to try investing in stocks and foreign currency deposits.

Resumed investing after the death of his father.

Thus, Mr. Higashiyama started investing in 1998 with his savings of 3 million yen at that time. Gradually, he increased the amount of his investments and the companies he invested in.” In 2006, when Takafumi Horie was arrested and the stock prices of IT companies dropped dramatically, he purchased shares in Softbank (now Softbank Group), which he bought at the right time, and his assets reached the 20 million yen mark with “reasonable results based on luck alone, now that I think about it.

However, as he said at the beginning of his speech, he suffered a heavy loss in FX in 2007.

I couldn’t tell my wife about FX. I had a history of dating and marrying Kami, who was very popular with the ladies, and I was not able to get my head around her. …… In fact, I still can’t tell you.

But for the sake of my wife and our newborn daughter, I decided to stay away from investments and worked hard to be thrifty and save money. I made homemade lunches, carried a water bottle instead of using vending machines, and walked between Shibuya and Shinjuku instead of taking the train. I also made full use of the “Poyikatsu” (a Japanese word for “looting”) and “Furusato” (hometown) tax system. My annual income at the time was about 7 million yen, but I saved 2.5 to 3 million yen a year.

Higashiyama resumed investing in the summer of 2011, just before Abenomics.

It was the death of my father that triggered it. When I inherited about 5 million yen worth of stocks from my father, who had been investing, I checked my securities account for the first time in several years and found that my holdings, which had bottomed out after the Lehman Shock, had risen. Including his savings from his frugal lifestyle, his total assets were 20 million yen, back to the amount he had before he tried FX. To be honest, I felt frustrated because I had lost in the FX market (laugh).

Mr. Higashiyama started his career as an investor again, but something unexpected happened. In the second part of the article, we will introduce the process of how Higashiyama increased his assets tenfold.

What a legendary investor has to say to those who are just starting to invest.