These are tough times to be a retail investor -- let alone one in the public sphere. Last Tuesday market watchers in Japan spotted that a prolific day-trader, with assets large enough that he appears in mandatory shareholder filings, had cut his stakes in several companies he had previously touted on his must-follow Twitter feed. The choice to do so wasn’t easy, says Toru Yamada, a noted investor in Japan’s equivalent of FinTwit. “I’ve sold a lot of my shares and securities in the last month - at a rough estimate I lost about 8 billion yen ($75 million),” Yamada told Bloomberg News. “I dumped about 20% of my assets ... (full story)