The Door's Open
There's an article that's been doing the rounds lately about whether retail traders can still make real money. It tells the story of Takashi Kotegawa, a temp worker in Japan who sat down at a computer in his bedroom in 2000 with the equivalent of $13,600 and started day trading small-cap stocks. No institutional backing. No proprietary data. No team. Just him and a screen. By 2008, he'd turned that into $153 million.
The part that stuck with me wasn't the number. It was something that happened in 2005. A massive selloff hit the Japanese market after an erroneous order from Mizuho Securities. Everyone panicked. Kotegawa bought aggressively and made $20 million in a single day. That opportunity was available to every trader in Japan that morning. He was the one who took it.
I'll come back to that.
I studied finance at the top university in New Zealand. Learned how markets work, how to read a balance sheet, all of it. But the thing that actually changed how I think about money was crypto. Not the price action. The idea underneath it.
Crypto, at its core, was about economic self-sovereignty. Holding, moving, and deploying your own capital without asking permission from a bank or a broker or a fund manager. No gates. No minimums. No "accredited investor" gatekeeping. Just open protocols and open markets, running around the clock. DeFi pushed it further. Lending, borrowing, liquidity, derivatives, all from a wallet you control. No middlemen clipping the ticket.
That idea rewired how my generation thinks about money. We grew up watching managed funds charge 1-2% annually to underperform the index. We looked at that and thought yeah nah, there has to be a better way. Crypto proved there was. It woke a whole generation up to the idea that you don't have to hand your financial future to someone else and hope they don't stuff it up.
Now I want to be clear here because I'm not saying burn your portfolio and go all in on DeFi. I'm not that guy. I have a long-term, long-only stock portfolio in passive index funds. Passive investing is still one of the best things a normal person can do with their money, and fees have genuinely never been lower. That part of finance has gotten better and I'm not going to pretend otherwise.
But passive investing and financial self-sovereignty aren't opposites. One is a strategy. The other is a capability. Knowing how to manage your own money, understanding what your options actually are, having the tools to act on your own conviction when the moment calls for it. That's what I'm talking about.
Because for a long time, even if you believed in that idea, acting on it was a different story. Building real systems to manage your own money required serious technical skills. You needed to code. You needed to understand infrastructure. The philosophy was accessible but the execution wasn't. Most people could see the door but couldn't get through it.
That's what's changed.
I don't code. I'm not a developer. But right now, today, I'm building automated trading bots that execute strategies on memecoins for me. Two years ago that sentence would've been a fantasy. AI has made it real. Not in some abstract, futuristic way. In a practical, I'm doing this right now way.
AI hasn't just made trading easier. It's democratised access to the entire toolkit. The strategies, the infrastructure, the data analysis, the execution. All of it is now available to anyone willing to put the time in. You don't need a CS degree. You don't need institutional backing. You need curiosity and persistence and the willingness to actually have a go.
People my age are doing this across every corner of these markets. DeFi arbitrage, CEX-DEX spreads, on-chain momentum plays, liquidation sniping. Strategies that didn't exist five years ago, on markets that didn't exist ten years ago. Built by individuals, from their bedrooms, with AI as the lever.
There's a lazy analogy that gets thrown around comparing retail traders to pee wee footballers trying to compete in the NFL. Sounds like a slam dunk. It falls apart almost immediately. In football, you're on the same field, at the same time, fighting for the same ball against people who are bigger, faster, and stronger in every way. The pee wee player has zero advantages.
Trading doesn't work like that. You're not on the same field as Citadel. A market maker scalping bid-ask spreads every 50 milliseconds isn't taking your trades. A macro fund deploying $500 million into a currency position isn't competing for your entry. You're in the same market but you're playing completely different games. And retail has structural advantages institutions genuinely can't access. Your positions are invisible. You can change direction in minutes. You can concentrate on high-conviction ideas without a mandate forcing you to diversify into mediocrity.
A memecoin ripping from 500K to 50M market cap in two days? No institutional desk is touching that. But a bot monitoring on-chain flows, social sentiment, and liquidity depth can catch that move and manage risk automatically. The edges exist. They're just in places traditional finance won't look.
The pee wee player has no path to victory. You do.
And none of this requires you to be young or technical or plugged into crypto. I figured this stuff out early because I grew up in it. But the tools don't care about your background. AI doesn't gatekeep. The barriers that used to exist were technical and they've largely been removed.
The self-sovereignty that crypto introduced isn't a generational thing. It's a mindset. The tools that make it practical aren't locked behind any particular skillset anymore. And it doesn't have to mean abandoning what already works. It can sit alongside a passive portfolio. It can start small. It can just mean understanding your options well enough to act when the moment is right.
That's really the point.
Most people won't do this. That's always been true of anything worth doing. But the gap between having the idea and having the ability to execute on it has never been smaller.
Kotegawa was a temp worker in a bedroom with $13,600. The opportunity was there for every trader in Japan that morning. The tools are there for all of us now.
The question isn't access anymore. It's whether you'll be the one who takes it.
Cheers,
Louis Sykes
Senior Crypto Analyst, All Star Charts
