My Investment Memoir
US Stocks · Options · News · Views
From the first all-in bet, to using assets to connect with the world's most advanced productive capacity.
When people see me today talking about U.S. equities, ETFs, options, and cash flow, they probably assume I had it all figured out from the start.
I didn't.
I began in the most naive, impulsive, ordinary way possible: seeing an opportunity and wanting to go all-in; hearing a story and wanting to pile in; making money and assuming I understood investing; losing money and realizing I had simply caught a favorable wind.
So I'm writing this memoir. How an ordinary person stumbled — through savings, a house, mutual funds, Hong Kong IPOs, Chinese ADRs, crypto, options, futures, and FX — all the way to today, slowly growing his own investment system.
What actually changed me wasn't a single big win.
It was that after losing, blowing up, and hurting, I finally admitted something: what an ordinary person lacks most is not a ticker, not a hot tip, and not a single shot at getting rich.
What an ordinary person lacks most is a system that doesn't inflate when winning and doesn't collapse when losing.
In July 2015, I graduated from college and joined a traditional state-owned engineering firm.
My family gave me 50,000 yuan, originally meant as the deposit for staff housing. That money carried a very simple expectation: graduate, join a state firm, buy a house, settle down, and live life step by step.
If I had followed the "correct path" my elders laid out, I should have just left that 50,000 yuan sitting there.
But when you're young, what you don't lack most is a kind of courage with no clear source.
You see an opportunity, your head gets hot, and you go all-in.
That time I got lucky. It was the tail end of a bull market in 2015, and I quickly made a few thousand yuan. A few thousand isn't a fortune, but for someone fresh out of school, it's enough to go to your head. It wasn't salary — money you grind out month after month. It came so fast it made me think I actually understood markets.
Many years later I understood: the first money markets give a novice is often not a reward — it's bait.
The real first lesson was Xinwei Group.
Looking back now, the story it told was like an A-share version of SpaceX: telecom, satellites, overseas markets, cross-border engineering, aero engines — each word bigger than the last, each narrative more distant than the one before.
If you swapped the pitch deck for English and added a few renderings of rockets and Starlink satellites, a lot of people would genuinely have believed this was some kind of Eastern future-tech giant.
The difference is, their rockets actually fly upward.
It eventually wiped out my account.
This is the surreal part of the A-share market. It's not that stories are missing — it's that the storytelling is too good. A company can pitch its narrative to cosmic scale, drape market sentiment in national pride, and push retail imagination through the ceiling.
When it finally lands on the account statement, all that's left is a trading halt, waiting, and delisting.
In December 2016, Xinwei started to unravel. Over the next few years, I watched a company once packaged as a future-tech giant gradually become a textbook sample of an A-share-style scam.
All I knew was that losing money hurt enough — what hurt more was wanting to admit you were wrong, and the market not giving you a button to do it.
The most demoralizing moment for an adult isn't making a mistake. It's knowing clearly that you're wrong, yet having no right to exit.
That was the first time I realized the A-share market can sometimes resemble a financial kindergarten. The kids wave toy guns and insist they're fighting a world war, and every so often the teacher locks the door and says: no trading today, everyone calm down.
After more than half a year in the engineering industry, one feeling became increasingly clear to me: this path might not be for me.
It wasn't that any single day was especially hard. It was that I could see many years ahead being about that hard. The money wasn't great, the workload was heavy, my body was being depleted, my time was being depleted, and I was being slowly consumed by the inertia of "stability."
What actually moved me to change careers was a very ordinary conversation.
Sometime around 2016, my roommate mentioned that a friend of his, a software engineering graduate, was making 15,000 yuan a month in Beijing right out of school.
That number hit me hard.
Not just because of the 15,000 figure, but because software was what I had originally wanted to study. Writing code, for me, wasn't only about making money — it also carried a sense of accomplishment.
You type a line of code, and the thing actually runs. You learn a framework, and the world opens up a little more.
In that moment I suddenly realized: maybe I wasn't lacking effort. Maybe I had just been standing on the wrong track from the very beginning.
So I went into isolation, quit my state-owned job immediately, and pivoted into software development. Little by little, I dug myself out of the industry I'd been in.
Later I met my ex-wife, and together we went to Shenzhen.
For the me of that time, Shenzhen felt like another world. The city was fast, the people were fast, and the air was thick with both opportunity and anxiety.
I joined a financial firm; she went into investment banking, working on Hong Kong and U.S. equities.
It was from that phase onward that I first saw the other side of financial markets.
My earlier understanding of investing had basically been A-shares, mutual funds, real estate, and bank wealth products. After arriving in Shenzhen I learned there were also Hong Kong equities, U.S. equities, offshore accounts, global markets, ETFs, options, futures, and FX.
The world suddenly got pulled open.
During those years I also believed in the power of dollar-cost-averaging as preached on Xueqiu. Looking back, that wasn't a bad thing — DCA at least made me take compounding, discipline, and long-termism seriously for the first time.
But my judgment was still rough in that period.
I bought funds, and I bought into all kinds of thematic products. I even piled into the "Ant IPO thematic funds." Market sentiment was red-hot back then — everyone was talking about it, the platforms were pushing it, and the story was beautiful enough.
In 2018, because I was working on crypto-related projects, I came into genuine contact with cryptocurrency for the first time.
It was a strange world. It wasn't like traditional finance, and it wasn't like the traditional internet. It ran 24 hours a day, no closing bell, no borders — code, consensus, liquidity, and raw human greed all swirled together.
Later, I caught SHIB by accident.
Put in 2,000 at noon, and by evening it was 20,000.
The feeling was a lot like the first time I made money in stocks — only more intense. You suddenly realize that money can move like that. That some opportunities in the world simply don't appear on any map you know.
But I didn't really learn anything this time either.
When you're sitting in that atmosphere, it's hard not to feel you're taking part in the defining opportunity of an era. Only later did I understand: a lot of what gets packaged as a generational opportunity is, in essence, just collecting everyone's excitement and turning it into a sellable product.
In 2020, while helping my ex-wife with her work, I really started learning about Hong Kong and U.S. equities, and I opened my first offshore account.
That account, to me, was not just a bank account.
It was more like a ticket.
From that moment on, I was no longer just standing inside a single local market watching prices go up and down. I finally had an entry point into global financial markets.
After that, I did Hong Kong IPO subscriptions. Back then you could still make some money on those — like buying lottery tickets, you were happy when you won, and not much lost when you didn't.
I also followed the crowd into some Chinese ADRs. Looking back, there was exploration in there, but also blind herd-following; there was learning, but also speculation. But starting from that step, I slowly shed the single-market perspective.
What made me fundamentally question Chinese ADRs was July 2021.
That month, the "double reduction" policy on tutoring landed.
New Oriental, TAL, and similar education companies had been, in many people's eyes, genuinely high-quality. Outstanding founders, strong brands, solid cash flow, real demand, clear business models.
But when the policy came down, the entire sector was essentially uprooted.
That hit me hard.
Because it told me: some companies don't lose to competitors, don't lose to technology shifts, don't lose to customer abandonment — they lose to a policy variable you simply cannot price in advance.
That's different from a U.S. company that misses on operations, ships a failed product, or sees margins compress.
That kind of risk you can at least analyze, track, and review.
Policy risk is different.
It doesn't consult you when it arrives. It isn't in the financial statements, and it isn't in the candlesticks. It isn't a corporate problem — it's a systemic problem.
From then on, I formed a very strong conviction about Chinese ADRs:
No matter how cheap, don't touch. Because cheap might not be an opportunity — it might just be the market smelling risk you haven't smelled yet.
The real turning point came in March 2022.
That year, news broke that Dan Bin of Oriental Harbor had sharply cut exposure — at one point there was even chatter that he was "effectively flat."
Who is Dan Bin?
He's a well-known domestic value investor, famous for years of holding concentrated positions in high-quality companies — especially baijiu stocks. That someone with such a strong long-termism label would cut exposure to very low levels in an extreme market environment was a big shock to me at the time.
I suddenly realized: a truly mature investor doesn't just hold on stubbornly forever.
When systemic risk arrives, surviving matters more than proving yourself right.
More importantly, I saw something else: when someone has the capacity for global allocation, they don't have to grind it out in one market until the bitter end.
Capital doesn't stay in a market just because you happen to know it well.
Capital only asks: where are the better companies, where is the deeper liquidity, where are the clearer rules, where are the richer tools.
At the time the exchange rate was around 6.3. I moved about 80% of my assets, through various channels, to Hong Kong, converted to USD, and began seriously engaging with U.S. equities, options, futures, and FX.
During that stretch I had a very strong feeling: before then, I had thought I was investing, when really I was just standing at the edge of a very small pool splashing in the shallows.
The world outside was enormous. But the higher the floor, the harder the fall.
In February 2022, the Russia-Ukraine conflict broke out.
Volatility spiked. I shorted via options and made 50,000 in a week.
That kind of money comes too fast. Fast enough that you can't help but wonder whether you've finally found the key to the market.
For a few days I watched the account move, with a deeply unhealthy kind of excitement.
What the market does best is, the moment you start to think you can fly, slam you back into the ground.
On March 16, 2022, the market staged a so-called "miracle day."
That night, I lost 100,000.
After that, I started copy-trading various U.S. and European options "signal" rooms, maxing out leverage on volatility products. By then I wasn't investing anymore — I was using my account to prove something about myself.
I refused to admit I was wrong, refused to get off, refused to stop the risk.
Later, around an FOMC meeting, with the market swinging violently around Powell and rate-cut expectations, I blew up overnight and lost 300,000.
That night was very quiet.
The numbers on the screen jumped fast, but the person watching them went numb. You suddenly understand: the market isn't targeting you. It doesn't even know who you are. It just runs by its rules.
You use too much leverage, it liquidates you. You don't set a stop, it educates you. You trade on emotion, it converts emotion into losses.
Only after that night did I truly start to admit: I didn't lose to the market. I lost to not having a system.
Then AI arrived.
I invested in AI not because I read some research report, or because someone was shilling it. I invested because my work naturally brought me into contact with it.
From June 2024 onward, I essentially stopped writing code entirely by hand.
When I ran into a problem, I asked AI. Eventually I realized I should just have it write the code directly. Production had changed.
Before, writing code meant sitting at a keyboard, typing out logic line by line. Later it became: I describe the requirement, decompose the structure, judge the result, correct the direction, and AI handles the bulk of the implementation.
What I felt in that moment wasn't "the tool got better to use."
It was that productivity had actually changed.
A software engineer's understanding of AI is different from someone who only reads the news. Because I'm not imagining it will change the world — I watch it change my own workflow every day.
That's why I made AI my main investment thesis. Not because the word is hot, but because I had already seen, in my work, its efficiency — seen how it amplifies one person's output, seen how it redefines software, content, research, and trading.
In July 2025, I quit my job.
On the surface, it was because I had reached a new crossroads. With my push and support, my ex-wife had been accepted into a master's program in Canada. We had originally planned to go together to see the world, try a different way of life, even talked about emigrating and becoming freer citizens of the world.
I thought life was finally about to open its next door.
But then a serious illness illuminated a lot of things.
When you're sick, you suddenly see clearly a lot of things you usually don't want to look at. Who actually cares about you. Who was only sharing a stretch of road while the wind was at your back. Which road you yourself wanted to walk, and which you only ground yourself through for the sake of the relationship, of expectations, of fantasy.
That illness told me I might have chosen the wrong road, and the wrong traveling companion.
That sentence is light to write. Living through it is heavy.
It isn't a single-day collapse — it's the slow realization that many years of your effort, planning, and sacrifice may not have been leading to the future you thought.
From that point on, I actually became quieter.
Before, I was always pushed around by price action, pushed around by news, pushed around by other people's calls, and pushed around by some imagined picture of a future life.
After quitting, I pulled my attention back, ran my assets carefully, and tidied up my life.
I started asking myself: what is my main thesis? What is my system? Where does my cash flow come from? If the market flips tomorrow, if life flips again, what do I survive on?
I made AI my main investment thesis.
At the same time, I started using options strategies to generate cash flow from my assets.
This was the first opportunity I caught after Russia-Ukraine — the U.S.-Iran war — and I made 200,000 in a month.
But this time, the mindset was different from before.
When I used to make money, I'd get excited, feel like I was good, and want to add leverage and keep pushing. Now when I make money, what I care about more is: did this money come from a system? Can I review this trade? If the direction is opposite next time, will I die?
Same money made — some people get more dangerous after, some people get clearer after.
Software development, AI, and investing finally converged for me.
I started using AI to build my own options strategy software. Because there are too many variables in options: underlying, expiry, strike, delta, theta, implied volatility, margin, risk-reward, tail risk.
Picking by feel will eventually get you in trouble.
People get impulsive. Systems don't. People get greedy when winning and stubborn when losing. A system can at least remind you: you've already drifted off the original plan.
That's also why I increasingly want to write content and build products. I don't want to tell people which stock will go up tomorrow. I want to lay out clearly how an ordinary person, starting from no system at all, can slowly build an asset system, a cash-flow system, and a risk-control system.
If you ask me what the biggest change over these years is — it's not that I know more tickers, or that I've mastered more complicated tools.
It's that I finally stopped fetishizing single outcomes.
Making 50,000 once doesn't prove you can invest. Losing 300,000 in a night doesn't mean you've failed forever.
What matters is whether you grow new rules from each result.
I increasingly believe one thing:
No matter your industry, you should treat investing as a lifelong vocation.
Because money itself is not the destination.
The money in your bank account is, on the bank's balance sheet, just a liability the bank owes you. The cash in your hand is just a circulating IOU inside the modern credit system. It can buy things, but it doesn't itself produce anything.
What actually produces are companies, technology, organizations, the most advanced productive capacity.
And investing is the way ordinary people connect to that productive capacity.
You can't personally build rockets. You can't personally build data centers. You can't personally design GPUs. You can't personally train large models. You can't personally own the world's best engineering teams.
But you can, through capital markets, buy a piece of that productive capacity.
You can, through stocks and ETFs, share in the growth of the world's best companies. You can, through options and cash-flow strategies, keep your assets working while you wait. You can, through global allocation, gradually liberate your fate from a single salary, a single industry, a single market.
That is what's genuinely fascinating about investing.
It isn't about guessing up or down every day. It's about giving an ordinary person, finally, a chance to stand on the same side as the world's most advanced productive capacity.
Starting from those 50,000 yuan at graduation in July 2015, from the luck of that first all-in, from the delisting of Xinwei, from the pivot out of engineering into software, from the first contact with crypto in 2018, from Shenzhen, from the first offshore account in 2020, from Hong Kong IPOs and Chinese ADRs, from the decision in July 2021 to walk away from Chinese ADRs, from the move of most of my assets to Hong Kong and USD in March 2022, from the week I made 50,000 and the night I lost 300,000, from June 2024 when I watched AI change how production works — I arrived here, little by little.
This is not a pretty path.
It holds plenty of greed, plenty of ignorance, plenty of self-righteousness, and a lot of silent nights staring at an account.
But it's exactly those things that slowly pushed me to one conclusion:
Investing doesn't mature from "wanting to make money." It matures from "knowing which money you cannot make."
In the rest of this series, I'll unpack my investment system piece by piece.
Why money shrinks. Why assets grow. Why ordinary people need stocks and ETFs first. Why, even after you have assets, you still need to think about cash flow. When options are a tool, and when they are gambling.
This is not a get-rich-quick roadmap.
It's a map I put together after climbing out of the pit — looking back.
Don't envy anyone for a single big win.
What you should actually care about is: the next time the market turns, or life turns, what will you survive on?
Powell is about to retire. Putin is preparing to retire too. I just want to ask one question: when is the money coming back?