Epilogue: Paradigm Shift

I've never been successful at short-term trading. Well, there have been times when I anticipated downturns and sold, only to buy back at lower prices, or when I leveraged correctly during bull markets and profited handsomely. But when I reflect on my entire investment journey spanning more than a decade, considering all the opportunities I missed while focusing on short-term trades, I've ultimately failed miserably at day trading.

Yet we can't resist the temptation of day trading. Why? Because the experience of winning is too sweet. Those small and large victories in day trading make us feel like superior beings who can see through human psychology and market trends in this unpredictable jungle of a market. These sweet memories rationalize or make us forget the opportunity costs we're incurring.

For the average person, long-term success with day trading is impossible. There are two main reasons. First, short-term predictions are difficult. Charts incorporate millions of variables. You might get lucky once or twice and profit from correctly predicting short-term directions. But try repeating it 100 times. I guarantee your return will converge to 0%. The longer you day trade, the more it resembles a casino game with fixed odds.

Second, ordinary investors lack information, time, and tools. In short, we have no weapons to fight short-term market volatility. We have no information edge—average investors are the last to receive information, so acting on it in the short term is meaningless. We also lack time for in-depth analysis and research, and we don't have the specialized trading tools that incorporate such information and time. In a market where someone must lose for someone else to win, if whales and institutions with information, time, and tools are profiting, it's clear who's losing.

Day trading is particularly difficult and dangerous in the cryptocurrency market. Coin Market Cap alone lists over 10,000 coins. Including unlisted ones, the estimate exceeds 20,000. Unlike stocks, these countless coins don't have company performance metrics or immediate utility. When price movements are based solely on narratives and crowd psychology, do you think you can succeed with day trading in such a market? If you think you can win in this situation, you're foolish; if you actually can win, you're a genius. But neither you nor I are either of those.

What about medium-term predictions a few months out? This too is difficult. Predicting when a specific coin will rise and by how much is essentially just an expression of hope. No one can know when or how or to what extent someone will adopt a specific coin or the cryptocurrency industry itself, when the U.S. government's attitude will change, or how whales and institutional investors will respond. Not even Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse, who actively lobbies the U.S. government and Trump directly, knows this.

My point is that for ordinary people, there is no royal road to investing in stocks or coins except long-term value investing. And in the cryptocurrency market, which is just beginning to emerge and has no financial statements to analyze, value investing means "investing with consideration for the long-term growth potential of the investment target, without being swayed by short-term market fluctuations."

Last October, a Japanese investor made headlines by authenticating that he had achieved a 350-fold return through long-term value investing in NVIDIA over 11 years. He said, "When I invested 10 years ago, I was just an engineer who liked NVIDIA," adding, "I was fascinated by the parallel processing capabilities of GPUs, and I intuited that NVIDIA would become central to AI business as AI technology grew."

But NVIDIA wasn't the only investment with substantial long-term returns. If you had invested in gold 11 years ago, you'd have doubled your money by now. The S&P 500 would have quadrupled it, NASDAQ would have given a 6x return, and Apple a 16x return. The law of consistently successful investing is simple: identify "the ones with potential" and "hold" for profits. You might say that's easier said than done. But it's actually simple. Study to gain conviction about which ones have potential, then commit to long-term investing. So which ones have potential?

I want to conclude this book by discussing the concept of a "Paradigm Shift." A paradigm shift refers to a fundamental change in markets and industries intertwined with technological innovation. This aligns with economist Joseph Schumpeter's concept of "Creative Destruction," which I've studied for many years. As technology evolves, various industries transition from one technological paradigm to another, and when a new paradigm begins, everything starts from a new baseline.

NVIDIA is a prime example of a company that has risen during a paradigm shift. When Bitcoin emerged in the 2010s and NVIDIA's GPUs began to be used in the mining industry, it presented a new business opportunity for NVIDIA, allowing some growth. But what truly transformed NVIDIA into what it is today was the deep learning boom, which triggered a paradigm shift in the AI industry, which in turn led to a paradigm shift in the semiconductor industry as its foundation. As the primary semiconductor paradigm shifted from CPU to GPU, NVIDIA transformed from a company that only made gaming GPUs to suddenly becoming the world's most valuable company by market cap.

I believe the international financial ecosystem is currently experiencing a paradigm shift. With the emergence of blockchain technology, the concepts of currency and finance are changing. Trump and his pro-cryptocurrency team have appeared with strong will and power to accelerate the international financial paradigm shift. As the dollar crisis looms, the United States is preparing a powerful strategy based on cryptocurrency to extend its reserve currency status once more. The stablecoin market is growing, and major cryptocurrencies are being incorporated into institutional frameworks one by one through ETFs. Blockchain technology adoption is happening across the international remittance market, led by SWIFT, and countries are racing toward the CBDC era, each with their own political considerations. The evidence for this paradigm shift in the international financial ecosystem is abundant and self-evident.

And I am convinced that Ripple will stand tall as one of the major winners in this emerging international financial paradigm shift. Ripple has long and diligently prepared for this paradigm shift through the best solutions and strategies. That's why I plan to "hold" Ripple, my "one with potential." What do you think? Would you like to join me?