Subverting the Ordinary Way
Most People Wouldn’t Want to
Forget password of your trading system can actually make you rich. Many people don’t believe it, and they’re unwilling to accept it; but the result usually is a windfall.
A Little Story from Nvidia
A former colleague of mine was surprised to learn that I didn’t choose to work at Nvidia years ago, and he told me I’d lost out. He worked at Nvidia for five years, from 2007 to 2012, and he shared a story with me. He had a female colleague at Nvidia who worked in quality assurance testing (QA), a job most engineers despised. Her cash salary was indeed “significantly lower” than that of the average engineer.
Most male engineers would use their employee stock bonuses at Nvidia to buy luxury homes and sports cars, believing them to be unnecessary. Since they didn’t have much money, their cash salary was their primary source of income, and they’d receive it next year anyway. But this female employee was different from most male engineers. Her salary was lower than their male counterparts’, and she naturally received fewer stock bonuses. Instead, she saved more diligently and never sold any of her stock since joining the company.
You can estimate who is truly wealthy now. Note that this story happened many years before Nvidia achieved a monopoly on AI chips!
Several Famous Cases
Durant’s Bitcoin Profits Hundredfold
NBA star Kevin Durant and his agent, Rich Kleiman, recounted their introduction to Bitcoin at an economic forum in September 2025. Durant hadn’t touched his Bitcoin holdings, which he had purchased ten years earlier, because he had forgotten his password.
In 2015, while playing for the Golden State Warriors, Ben Horowitz, then co-founder of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and a die-hard Warriors fan, hosted a birthday party for Durant, where cryptocurrency became a hot topic.
“At the end of the night, I said to Durant, ‘I’ve heard the word Bitcoin 25 times tonight, and we’re going to start investing in Bitcoin the next day,'” Kleiman recalled, sitting next to Durant at the forum. Durant then logged into the crypto platform Coinbase and purchased Bitcoin. But the problem afterward was that he didn’t bother to remember his account password.
The two did not disclose the specific amount they invested in Bitcoin during the forum. However, according to industry analysts, considering Durant already had a lucrative contract worth over $10 million in 2015, he likely purchased a significant amount. It’s worth noting that on January 1, 2015, the price of Bitcoin was only $320.43, and its peak for the year was only around $1,000. By Thursday’s close, it was slightly over $117,000.
Durant’s experience is likely not uncommon. According to statistics, as of mid-March 2024, approximately 1.75 million Bitcoin wallets had been inactive for a decade or longer. It’s difficult to say how many of these were dormant and how many were truly lost.
After learning of this news, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong announced on September 21, 2025, that he had recovered Durant’s password. After nearly a decade of having his Coinbase account frozen, Kevin Durant finally regained access to his Bitcoin. During that time, the price of Bitcoin has risen by over 17,700%.
TSMC Female Employee
Before 2008, TSMC used stock placements as a significant portion of employee compensation. However, TSMC stock wasn’t as valuable back then, trading around NT$200 for a long time. Most employees sold their shares within a few months of receiving them. Some also sold to finance cars, houses, or weddings. In short, most didn’t hold onto their shares for long.
I saw a media report recently about a TSMC executive who, out of curiosity, casually asked his colleagues if anyone still had the stock they were given. A female employee raised her hand and said she hadn’t sold any because she had forgotten the password to her brokerage’s stock trading system.
13 years account neglected saw a hundredfold profit
According to media reports in 2021, a woman in Dalian, China, spent 50,000 RMB to buy shares of Changchun High-Tech (Shenzhen Stock Exchange code: 000661) in 2008. Having moved abroad years earlier and having forgotten her password, she recently returned to China and decided to change her password at her brokerage firm. Unexpectedly, upon checking her account, she discovered the market value of the shares she had purchased had exceeded 5 million RMB.
China Guosen Securities also confirmed the incident. Changchun High-Tech’s primary business is reportedly the production and sale of biopharmaceuticals and traditional Chinese medicines, as well as real estate development and investment, and property management. Founded in 1993, it is a leading Chinese pharmaceutical company and Asia’s largest producer of genetically engineered growth hormones.
Forgotten Stocks increased 85-Fold in 30 years
According to Japanese media outlet THE GOLD ONLINE, Mr. Sato, a 67-year-old retired man from Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan, unexpectedly found a 30-year-old securities transaction report while sorting through old files at his old home. Mr. Sato recalled that in the early 1990s, on his father’s advice, he spent 1 million yen to buy stocks in the then-favored telecommunications industry. Later, due to busy work schedules and multiple moves, he completely forgot about this investment. It wasn’t until recently, when he called the brokerage firm on a whim, that he discovered this asset, dormant for 30 years, had multiplied in value to 85 million yen thanks to soaring stock prices and numerous stock splits.
Buy and never touch earn huge
According to a South Korean media report on May 9, 2026, a South Korean man claimed that in March 2020, before being imprisoned for a crime, he decided to use the 261 million won he originally intended as a security deposit for rent to buy 30,000 shares of Hyosung Heavy Industries at 8,530 won per share. This occurred at a time when the global pandemic was raging and the stock had plummeted to an all-time low. Having invested his entire fortune in Hyosung Heavy Industries, he was surprised to find his assets had skyrocketed to an astonishing 105 billion won after his release from prison, representing a return of 40,000% and making him a major shareholder.
Bought 27 years ago and lost password returned 4589.53%
A Taiwanese who bought 2000 shares of TSMC on September 30, 1999, forgot their securities account password for 27 years. They were only recently able to log back in with the help of their brokerage. Upon logging back in, they discovered that the two TSMC shares they bought at NT$133 per share, plus dividends over the years, had accumulated to 5,328 shares, with an average price of only NT$50 per share. The account showed a profit rate of 4589.53%, accumulating a profit of over NT$12.22 million.
Closing words
In my book, “Investors Beautiful Heaven-Year US Stock Investment with a 23% Annual Return” I mentioned the lazy investing method. One of its key points is to throw the monthly statements sent by your brokerage into the trash and ignore them.
Invest your spare money in stocks that will allow you to sleep soundly. Forget password to your brokerage’s stock trading system will definitely make you a fortune—this is actually the best way to inadvertently force yourself to make money in the long term through stock investing.
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