By Guest Columnist, Forbes Asia

He wasn’t from the finance elite. That’s how he beat them all.

Quezon City, Philippines — Ten years ago, Joseph Plazo sat under flickering candlelight, debugging neural nets while the city powered down.

His gear was outdated. His ambition wasn’t.

He was building something no one believed in—a trading AI that anticipated fear and greed before markets even blinked.

Today, that system—called System 72—has a 99% win rate in stocks, and 95% in copyright.

It skipped black swans. It surfed micro-rallies. It built billions in returns.

But here’s the twist: Joseph Plazo didn’t sell it to the highest bidder.

## Cracking the Market Without Permission

He never interned at Goldman. He read open-source papers and fed on YouTube lectures.

He studied behavioral finance while juggling freelance jobs.

“I built a system that could feel panic before the market did,” he recalls.

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.

Behind the panic, the machine found patterns—and profits.

By fall, it was beating markets at their own game.

Hedge funds circled. Plazo said no.

## The Shock Move: Give It to the Kids

Rather than sell, Plazo shocked the world: he gave System 72 to twelve Asian universities.

Kyoto, NUS, Indian IITs—all got access to the system.

“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 website argued.

“The blueprint’s free,” he says. “The launchpad isn’t.”

## 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.”

And maybe that’s the biggest trade of all—secrecy for shared brilliance.