What a 90-day round trip in Lenovo taught me about deciding with limited information, in markets and in life At the end of July, I bought shares of Lenovo Group in Hong Kong at around HK$21. By mid-September they were trading near HK$38. By late October they were back near HK$22.1 The whole round trip took less than 90 days. The business did not reverse as dramatically as the share price did. Lenovo was still the world’s largest PC maker, and its August results showed a real improvement in server profitability. But those results changed what investors knew. Later, IDC’s preliminary figures showed Lenovo’s PC shipments down 22.6% year on year in the third quarter, while worries about AI financing grew. There was new evidence on both sides. I cannot put an exact percentage of the rise or fall down to fundamentals rather than expectations.2 ...
Expensive In, Narrow Out: Why China VC Barely Pays Today
2026 looks like a good year for Chinese venture capital. IPOs are returning, and the most visible AI and chip companies have produced eye-catching paper gains. I have invested in China’s private markets for more than a decade, but the question I keep coming back to is different: how much of that paper value will reach the people who financed the funds? In the first half of 2026, seven companies accounted for 41% of the value of VC/PE holdings in newly listed Chinese companies, measured at their issue prices.1 That concentration matters. My view is that, at today’s entry prices, many smaller independent managers and individual LPs are unlikely to earn net returns that justify the risk and a decade of illiquidity. This is a judgment about a particular part of the market, not a claim that no Chinese VC fund can perform well. ...
Bare Metal and Virtual Machines: Reading Six Management Papers from an EE Background and an Investor's Seat
On organizational imprinting, strategic pivots, and what business research is actually for I spent the last few days reading six papers on organizational imprinting and strategic change. This is preparation: I am about to start a PhD in management focused on strategic redirection in Chinese deep-tech ventures, after a decade of investing in exactly those companies. Before I let the field’s vocabulary reshape how I think, I wanted to record how I think now — as someone whose undergraduate training was in electronic engineering, with a later detour through strategic marketing at Cardiff, and with a portfolio of hard-tech companies whose founders I have watched pivot, refuse to pivot, and occasionally run out of cash while deciding. ...
The Company That Tells Five Stories
Notes from a work-in-progress on valuing businesses that promise you everything There’s a certain kind of company you’ve probably met. It has a perfectly respectable core business — makes real products, earns real (if modest) profits, has done so for years. Then, over eighteen months or so, it announces that it is also entering five frontier industries. New materials! AI supply chains! A joint venture with a famous research institute! The stock triples. The P/E ratio hits 300. ...
Interrogated by a Machine
I do due diligence for a living. I sit across from founders and ask the questions they hope I won’t ask: what happens if you’re wrong, where is the key-person risk, show me the assumption your whole model quietly rests on. It is a comfortable seat. The person asking the questions is never the one being measured. Last week I lost the seat. To a machine. It started as a game. Twenty questions — I think of something, the AI guesses. It took seventeen turns to figure out I was thinking of “a human being,” and afterward it diagnosed its own failure with a phrase that stuck with me: it had searched the entire animal kingdom while excluding the questioner’s own species from the candidate set. A blind spot, it said, of leaving yourself out of the search space. ...
A Methodological Study of Continuous Price-Weighted Dollar-Cost Averaging for Cyclical Assets
The Case of Bitcoin, and the Epistemology of Its Parameters Working paper · Methodological research June 2026 Abstract This paper examines a class of capital-deployment methods for building positions in assets that exhibit endogenous cyclicality, using Bitcoin as its case. Bitcoin’s protocol embeds a deterministic supply-decay mechanism — the block subsidy halves every 210,000 blocks, approximately four years — producing a price history with a non-sentiment-driven periodic structure. This institutional fact is the foundation on which the method rests. ...
I Do Not Know, and I Must Act
An operational epistemology I am not going to argue for anything. On the question of whether human beings can know the world, I have argued many times, and I have learned something uncomfortable: I am weak on that battlefield. The lines I was proudest of — the ultimate truth is faith, human beings cannot know, the world is not built on logic — each has a true first half and a conclusion that does not follow. ...
Answer of the Fugue: On Rules, Recursion, and a Metronome Hardcoded in Silicon
Prelude: Two Voices On January 3, 2009, someone whose identity no one knows wrote a rule into a piece of code: For every 210,000 blocks produced, the issuance of new coins is halved. The rule gives no reason. It doesn’t explain why 210,000, doesn’t explain why halving rather than some other decay. It simply exists, like an axiom. Seventeen years later, on some night in 2026, I sat in front of my screen and wrote down a rule of my own: ...