The Man Who Won 100 Trades in a Row: Honma Munehisa
If the Dojima rice exchange created the prototype of the futures market, the most famous figure to trade there was someone else entirely. Honma Munehisa, the legendary rice merchant from Sakata. Born in the Dewa region in 1717, he was adopted into the Honma merchant family of Sakata at twenty-three.
People called him the God of Trading, or the God of the Market. Legend says he recorded 100 consecutive profitable trades. He is also known as the man who devised the candlestick chart that investors around the world use today.
As someone who has long followed both finance and history, I have spent time separating record from legend in his story. The two are intertwined, yet the principles he left behind remain valid. And in his story, there is something that outlasts his trading records.
From Sakata to Osaka
Munehisa was born into a rice merchant family in Sakata, in northern Japan. Sakata was one of the most important grain ports in the country at the time. From childhood, he watched rice loaded onto ships and prices rise and fall.
He began trading seriously at the Dojima market in his mid-twenties. Dojima was in Osaka, roughly 600 kilometers from Sakata. Knowing the market price in real time across that distance was nearly impossible.
So he is said to have placed a relay of contacts roughly every six kilometers between Sakata and Osaka. By day they used flags and smoke; by night, lanterns. It was a price transmission network, and in many ways a primitive form of the data networks we rely on today.
"Winning in markets is not about knowing more. It is about knowing sooner."
A Book in 1755
In 1755, Munehisa left behind a book titled The Fountain of Gold — The Three Monkey Record of Money (三猿金泉秘録).
The book is regarded as the first known work on market psychology. He argued that rice prices were driven not by supply and demand alone, but by human emotion. Greed and fear create price, and their patterns repeat.
The "three monkeys" in the title borrow from the traditional Three Wise Monkeys motif. It is not a call to see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. It is closer to this: do not be shaken by what others say, and hold to your own judgment.
The Sakata Five Methods
Munehisa organized his trading rules into what is now called the Sakata Five Methods: Three Mountains, Three Rivers, Three Gaps, Three Soldiers, and Three Methods.
Each represents a market phase and a response. Many of the patterns used in candlestick charting today trace back to this framework. The "Three Mountains," for instance, describes three peaks that signal a trend reversal, closely resembling what we now call a head-and-shoulders pattern.
What matters is that he did not treat patterns as a tool for memorization. He told his readers to read the human psychology behind the pattern. Understand why three peaks form, and why a decline follows them.
The Forest the God of Trading Left Behind
The part of Munehisa's story I return to most is not his trading record. It is the forest his family left in Sakata.
Honma Mitsuoka (1732–1801), Munehisa's nephew and the third head of the Honma family, began planting pine trees along the western shore of Sakata in 1758. The goal was to block the strong winds from the Sea of Japan that carried sand inland and buried farmland. Between 1772 and 1781, a windbreak forest was established along twenty kilometers of coastline. The work did not end with his generation.
The Honma family continued planting across generations. Today, a belt of black pine roughly thirty-four kilometers long still stands along the Sakata coast. The Japanese phrase hakusha seishō — white sand, blue pines — is used to describe that landscape.
Beyond the windbreak, Mitsuoka spent his own fortune on famine relief, river maintenance, and rebuilding the finances of the local domain. In 1925, the people of Sakata built a shrine in his honor. A local saying passed down through generations: "Even if we cannot match Honma, we should at least try to be like our lord."
That spirit continued into later generations. In the Meiji era, the Honma family established a private school for their children, funded the construction of schools and bridges, and gave to the Red Cross and to relief organizations. There is a story that when the family was offered a peerage, they declined it.
None of this was Munehisa's doing alone. But the wealth he accumulated clearly flowed through the family into the region. Money earned in trading became a forest. The forest protected the farmland. The farmland fed the people. Two hundred and fifty years later, that forest still stands.
His writings are still read today. In Korea, The God of Trading, Honma, edited by Lee Hyongdo, was first published in 2006 and reached its second edition in 2008. The book draws on Honma's Honma-hiden to reconstruct his life and trading methods.
In 2014, the same editor released an English edition, The God of Trading, Honma: The Creator of Japanese Candle Charts, as an e-book. The fact that one man's trading records have been translated and reinterpreted across two centuries and two languages says something about the weight of the principles he left behind.
"Wealth begins to vanish the moment it is piled up. But a forest that is planted lives for a hundred years."
As I wrote, a thought stayed with me. The legend that Munehisa won 100 trades in a row is memorable. The fact that his family left thirty-four kilometers of forest is what endures. Many people know how to win in markets. Very few know what to leave behind after winning.
What It Means for Us Today
Three lessons stand out from Munehisa.
First, information is the edge. He built a system to learn prices first across 600 kilometers. That is the ancestor of today's race for data speed.
Second, psychology matters more than patterns. He did not ask readers to memorize candle shapes. He asked them to read the greed and fear behind them.
Third, a record is an asset. He wrote his trading principles into a book. Two hundred and fifty years later, that record is still being read.
Peter Lynch once said, "Invest in what you know." Munehisa knew rice, and he knew how rice moved. That was his edge.
A Practical Note
When you look at a chart, do not just memorize the candle shapes. Imagine the emotion behind each candle. Why did buyers rush in here, and why did sellers appear there. The question Munehisa asked 250 years ago still holds today.
*This content is for informational purposes only and is not a recommendation to invest in any specific product. All investment decisions and their consequences are the responsibility of the investor.
