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The story
In the live-reaction thread for the anime “FX Warrior Kurumi-chan,” fans buzzed over the storyline where the protagonist’s mother loses a fortune trading FX (leveraged foreign exchange margin trading). Viewers repeatedly questioned her motive — “why would she pour 20 million yen in seed money into risky FX trading?” — and some posters cited the real-world crash of the Australian dollar against the yen, which plunged from 104 yen to 55 yen in 2008, to explain how forced liquidations and margin calls work. Meanwhile, when amateur posters pointed out “she should have just sold while she was still in the black,” others countered with a psychological explanation: she simply couldn’t suppress the greed of “more profit… just a little more…” The thread debated just how terrifying leveraged trading can be.
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Source: fxkurumi-info.com / original article here
What people said
so it feels like you could win if you just studied that stuff.
FX is the kind of thing that sucks in studious, ambitious people.
That's just stuff you can explain after the fact — it doesn't mean you can actually see what's coming.
Please, enlighten me — I got wrecked by Tr()mp!!
If you're the kind of person with 20 million yen in seed money to throw around, why on earth would you walk the dangerous tightrope of FX of all things?
The daughter's narration did paint her as not exactly the sharpest tool in the shed, but even so —
couldn't margin trading on individual stocks have worked instead, at least (though that's plenty risky too)?
Did she want money so badly that leisurely trading stocks outright just wasn't going to cut it?
Is the reasoning behind all this ever going to get explained?
Just from how panicked she'd get whenever the chart didn't move the way she wanted, you can tell she'd put in money she was never supposed to touch.
The 20 million yen she burned through wasn't all seed money —
a lot of it was actually poured in later to cover margin calls and dodge forced liquidation.
She was trading AUD/JPY, which went from 104 yen in July 2008 to 55 yen by October 2008.
To rescue her position she raided the household savings and borrowed from her grandmother and relatives too.
Probably maxed out loans from consumer finance companies as well.
There were envelopes stacked up like a mountain.
As for the original seed money, wasn't it more like 2 or 3 million yen?
If she ran that at 10x leverage long, a move from 100 yen to 55 yen would trigger forced liquidation and wipe out a 20-million-yen margin call — that's the math.
Probably around 15 million of it was household money and 5 million was debt.
The reason they moved from the condo to the apartment was that she couldn't keep up with paying back relatives and the loan anymore.
You sometimes see news stories about investment fraud victims, and the damages per person run into the tens of millions of yen,
which just makes you think "wow, people really do have money."
And on top of that, they're paying that much in cash within three months of signing up for some LINE investment (scam) community.
Might as well post this one too, I'd say
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HTm_IGcbUAEzd0n.jpg
That's really not that hard to believe.
100x leverage is brutal.
Stocks basically trend upward over time so you've got decent odds,
but forex is a seesaw — one currency only goes up because the other goes down, so it's basically 50/50.
Feels like a bad deal to me.
Before the Lehman Shock, stocks required 1 million yen just to get in,
but you could start FX with as little as 100 yen, so the barrier to entry was low.
In the serialization currently running, there's a scene where
a "rotten woman" (slang for a fujoshi, a BL-manga fan) wants to buy stock in the company she works for, but can't afford it — a single unit costs 700,000 yen against her entire net worth of 800,000.
Leverage itself isn't a bad thing.
It lets you trade even with a small amount of capital.
That is, if you've got money management, discipline, and experience…
Isn't FX leverage capped at 25x in Japan?
So Kurumi-chan = Jashin-chan, huh
Anyway, I wonder if it'll just proceed exactly like the original manga
She shows up now and then in flashbacks.
This series has very few characters —
aside from the 4 main cast members plus the parents, everyone else is just nameless background extras.
If so, why didn't she?
"More profit… just a bit more…"
That's why.
Because you never know if that's the peak or if it's still got room to climb.
If you could nail the exact timing for taking profits and cutting losses, FX would be easy.
It's not knowing that which makes everyone struggle.
Guess I can't expect any of the racy stuff then…
If you're going to depict FX realistically, you shouldn't go soft on that part.
Late-night anime with fancy, cute art styles
tend to be the ones that turn out merciless and brutal.
"I Became the Strongest Witch — Living Freely in a World Where Only I Can See the 'Walkthrough Site'"
that are my top two.
That other one you can watch totally brain-dead without thinking about anything,
but there's no way you can watch this one like that!
I've personally been holding FX positions myself for the past several years.
Since the show's running for 3 months straight,
surely some huge market swing is bound to happen at some point, right?
I'm looking forward to that.
The "near-foolproof method" mentioned in the show
is such a boringly unexciting approach that it holds zero fear for me.
long-term, the yen's probably just going to keep weakening, so
if you leverage within your total net worth and just hold tight, wouldn't you basically win?
If you started right after an intervention, it seems like nothing but an easy, guaranteed-win game.
Now I kind of want to try it.
I also trade stocks on a cash basis, but
part of why I'm studying margin trading (FX, futures, etc.) is that I want to try it myself eventually — but also because right now it's the margin-trading crowd (especially Western and Jewish funds) that's driving the big market moves.
It's so I can read their behavior.
That's why people say things like currency interventions are meant to "burn" the high-leverage FX crowd,
or how pushing stock prices up "burns" the short sellers.
I get the theory, but honestly, if I actually tried it, I feel like I'd end up throwing myself onto the train tracks near my house.
In technical analysis, margin balances are important data, but if you're going in with a long-term holding mindset, you don't need to weight it so heavily.
Besides, that crowd can't stick around for the long haul to begin with.
Stop making scenes of Kirito just staring down a PC monitor.
Even if the yen weakens over the long term, if there's a temporary spike toward a super-strong yen somewhere in the middle, you lose everything.
Because currency is the kind of market where the Ministry of Finance and the Bank of Japan periodically plant a bomb and force everyone out.
There are temporary corrections, sure, but couldn't you just keep the leverage within your total net worth?
Like, if your total net worth is 10 million yen, run 100,000 yen at 100x leverage.
It dropped to 152 yen recently and then went right back to 158, didn't it?
You put money in whenever there's an intervention or a temporary dip, it'll probably shoot back up near 160 soon after, and you sell there and switch into an all-country index fund.
The key point is not to double down with the money you made from FX.
As long as you don't get greedy and chase it, it seems like nothing but an easy game.
Though this is just knowledge from watching one episode of the anime.
Idiot.
If a method like that actually worked, the FX brokers would just be doing it themselves.
The "near-foolproof method"
is literally just trading with low leverage.
At that point it's basically no different from a foreign currency deposit.
Her current margin maintenance ratio is over 1800%.
She's been in the black every single year for the past several years,
but with hindsight, she'd have made more money just putting that capital into an all-country index fund or the S&P 500.
No wonder Kurumi-chan doesn't bother doing it that way.
If it made more than foreign bonds at equal risk, brokerages would definitely already be doing it themselves.
If it makes less than foreign bonds, you're effectively losing money in real terms. Well, if you're calling it "foolproof" just because the balance sheet shows a profit, I guess that's not technically wrong either…
No… a 1-yen swing in USD/JPY in a single day is completely normal. And if we're talking long-term holding, moves of 10 or 20 yen over the long run are normal too — just look at the past few years, it went from 100 yen to 160 yen.
"You earn interest just by holding long-term!" is a brain-rotted fantasy.
Background and Key Points of This Topic
Retail FX trading in Japan is currently capped at a maximum of 25x leverage, but that rule has only been in place since the Financial Services Agency’s regulation took effect in 2011 — before that, leverage of several hundred times over was possible. The Australian dollar/yen pair mentioned in the thread was popular as a high-interest-rate currency, but it crashed from the 104-yen range down to the 55-yen range around the time of the 2008 Lehman Shock, a period that lines up with numerous real cases of individual investors on heavy leverage being hit with forced liquidations and margin calls. The thread split between an optimistic view — “leverage itself isn’t dangerous as long as you manage your money properly” — and a pessimistic one — “the market is driven by big margin-trading players, and retail traders are the ones who get burned.” Both views reflect real facets of the actual FX market. The series is reportedly based on an autobiographical manga drawn from the author’s own experiences, though exactly how much of what’s depicted is literally true was never settled within the thread.
*This article was compiled as excerpts and a summary from the 5ch (anime board) thread “FX Warrior Kurumi-chan — Down 20,000 Yen.”
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