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 — Ten years ago, Joseph Plazo sat under flickering candlelight, debugging neural nets while the city powered down.
The laptop was old. The electricity, unstable. But his resolve didn’t flicker.
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.
“Traders react. I wanted to anticipate,” he says.
There were 71 failures before the breakthrough.
Then came System 72. It tracked behavior, not just price.
## 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.
Hedge funds circled. Plazo said no.
## The read more Shock Move: Give It to the Kids
Instead of cashing out, Plazo shared the code with classrooms.
He included docs, code, and teaching guides. Everything but the keys to the vault.
“This isn’t a product. It’s a compass,” he told a stunned press in Singapore.
## A New Breed of Thinkers
Now, undergrads are solving real-world problems using Plazo’s framework.
They’re using the AI not just to profit—but to serve.
“We’re learning to think like markets,” said a Tokyo PhD student.
## Pushback from the Power Players
Naturally, the old guard bristled.
“This is too powerful to be public,” critics claimed.
Plazo stood firm.
“You can hand fire to a child—or teach them to build light,” he argued.
The core code was open. The infrastructure? Proprietary.
## 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?
Plazo now tours campuses, teaching AI philosophy and emotional foresight.
“Anticipate emotion, not events,” he told Stanford students.
## Final Word: The Oracle Who Shared the Map
The world thought Plazo would vanish into luxury. Instead, he became a lighthouse.
“System 73’s coming,” he says. “Let’s build it together.”
Because maybe power isn’t what you own—it’s what you set free.