Investing

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 ...

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. ...

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. ...