A User Manual for the Wrong Readers

Why You Shouldn’t Read This Substack

Operating Instructions: What This Is (And Isn’t)

I’ve been writing here for almost two years. You may have noticed there was no celebratory milestone email, no confetti, no “look how far we’ve come” post. I wouldn’t know how to write one without sounding like an idiot. So just: thank you all for reading.

But somewhere along the way I noticed a pattern: a decent number of readers fundamentally misunderstand what I’m doing here. If many people keep asking the same questions, the common denominator is probably me. I didn’t explain myself well, or even at all. I just naively assumed people would understand. So here’s an attempt at a proper manual.

The feedback is almost always well-intended, but it often misses the point. (Occasionally I’m also told I’m a Chinese spy spreading propaganda, which is less well-intended but at least more creative.) You should build a brand. Show your real name. Why no photo. Use the Substack chat feature. Launch a podcast. Do YouTube. Display your portfolio. Give target prices. Send real-time trade alerts.

I’m not going to do any of that.

If you need a brand, a headshot, or a chat feature to decide whether something is worth reading, I have to warn you early: this will be disappointing. I’m not hiding because of some dark secret — have I mentioned I am bald? I just enjoy a peaceful life where my wife is not regularly informed by strangers on the internet that her husband is an idiot. She knows that already; she doesn’t need external confirmation or reinforcement.

More importantly, if an argument only works for you after you see my face, or after I give you a precise price target for a specific date, we’re no longer talking about research. We’re talking about marketing theatre.

I am bad at theatre.

Why I write at all

This might be disappointing, but I write for selfish reasons.

Long before Substack, I was already reading filings for fun, listening to too many earnings calls, digging through Chinese regulations, doing scuttlebutt.

MIT likes to say studying there is like drinking from a firehose.

The famous firehose at MIT.

That’s how I do research. Absorb everything, then distill. Writing is that distillation. It forces precision. In my head, everything sounds brilliant. On the page, half of it turns into nonsense. The gap between those two is where the actual learning happens.

For years this lived in a private journal. Then Covid happened. I was locked down in China, and started putting parts online to see if anyone cared. A few people did.

Great people did! Some knew far more than I do — former employees, local operators, fellow investors who’ve watched a sector for ten years longer than I have. They told me where I was wrong and where I was missing data. They engaged with me.

From the outside, you barely see any of that. The comment section looks empty. The interesting part happens in private. For me it’s pure upside: writing makes my thinking less bad and attracts people who can challenge it, while still letting me keep a low profile in real life.

Who this is not for

If you want a model portfolio you can copy, real-time trade alerts, target prices, neat DCFs, or personalised investment advice — this is the wrong place. Those are perfectly reasonable things to want. Plenty of smart people provide exactly that. I’m not one of them.

Have you noticed that when people say “this is not investment advice,” what follows is usually exactly investment advice? When I say it, I mean it. No targets, no alerts. Just ideas, insights and observations you can use or ignore.

I’m genuinely humbled that a very small number of people have asked me to manage money for them. But I’m not going to run a fund or manage anyone’s capital.

There are many good reasons, but the only one that counts is this: doing that would destroy what I care about. My freedom would shrink. I report to nobody. I don’t own a calendar — if I have an appointment, it’s important enough that I can remember. Otherwise I don’t have that appointment. I wake up in the morning and decide what to work on. I like it that way.

The moment I manage outside money, I start writing defensively, softening language, defending positions that might look stupid at a dinner table. And I really don’t want phone calls from nervous investors telling me a stock I own is down 25% — I can read a screen. I’d rather spend that time figuring out what actually changed than playing therapist to someone’s brokerage app.

I don’t hold hands.

I prefer the current setup: I absorb as much as I can and stay focused on research. I manage my own capital. You manage yours. We meet in the middle at the level of ideas.

There is exactly one standing rule: if I write positively about a company, I own it. This doesn’t mean I’m right about it. It just means I’m eating my own cooking, for better or worse. But I’m not telling you my position sizing, when I add, when I trim, or when I sell. I don’t write about all the companies I own.

How I think about stocks

After some of my recent articles, I got strong feedback that made me realise I never properly explained this part. My fault — but this Substack was much less planned than you may think. If you come from a world where every opinion must be either “all in” or “this is trash,” my writing will frustrate you.

I have no emotional attachment to any company I own. I don’t feel attacked if you think something I like is uninvestable or a stupid idea. I don’t need external confirmation — I only mention that to sound humble, since I just told you not to reinforce my wife’s views.

Disagreement is the only information that can actually change my mind, which makes it the only information I care about. I’m not team bull, not team bear, and I don’t join cults around tickers or founders. The founders certainly don’t know I exist, so it would be a very one-sided cult. That said, Pony Ma, if you’re reading this — may I meet you? (I’m only human. Sorry for this moment of weakness.)

In practice, this means: when I look at a company, I try to identify the three or four things that really move the equity — key business drivers, not every KPI under the sun. If I can’t get the story down to a handful (sometimes just one) of variables, I probably don’t understand it well enough to own it. Then I assign probabilities to different scenarios for each driver and keep updating those as real data comes in. Most headlines are noise. A few datapoints actually move the odds. Those are the ones I care about.

This creates a problem when you only see the written output. If new information makes bad outcomes more likely, I’ll write a critical piece. That doesn’t necessarily mean I sold, or that I “hate” the company now. It means the weight I give to certain negative scenarios has increased, which changes expected value. From the outside, you see the negative tone and it looks like a U-turn. From the inside, it’s just a probability update.

There’s a second distortion. Because I already know the upside story for anything I own, I rarely spend space repeating it. I use writing time to stress-test what can go wrong. That makes the public tone systematically more negative than my actual portfolio. If you translate everything I write into a simple buy/sell label, you will keep misunderstanding what I’m doing.

I focus on the downside because the upside doesn’t need my protection. If something wonderful happens that I didn’t foresee, I’ll take the money. If something terrible happens that I didn’t foresee, that’s a failure of imagination I have to own.

Who this is for

The way I hope you use my Substack is how I interact with the people I learn from: as a sparring partner. I read and discuss with others to test my hypotheses, steal useful datapoints, and see where my story breaks. Treat me the same way. Take what’s useful, compare it to your own work, see whether anything changes in your head. Ignore what isn’t.

If you can hold in your mind that a company can be attractive overall and still have serious risks whose odds shift over time — you’re probably in the right audience. If you can read sharp criticism of a business you own without treating it as an attack on your identity, and you want to check your thesis against someone who spends an unhealthy amount of time reading about these companies, you’re probably in the right place.

If you mainly want a simple buy stamp, a price target, or the next guaranteed ten-bagger — wrong address.

My tone and attitude will stay the same: low tolerance for corporate euphemism, zero interest in fan clubs, and a tendency to say things not optimised for everyone’s feelings.

If my tone bothers you more than weak governance, or more than overlooking a glaring hole in an investment thesis, this probably isn’t the right place for you.

If You’re Still Here

Rereading this, I worry it sounds like I have a secret identity. I don’t. I’m not Batman — no butler, no cape, no Batcave. Quite a few people know who I am, and several have been in my apartment when they visited Shanghai to enjoy the view, drink coffee, and discuss stocks for hours. Let me know if you are in town.

This is where most of the thinking is done

I started writing for selfish reasons, but somewhere along the way it became something bigger. The messages, the people I’ve met through writing — that’s the best part. I’ve met so many amazing people. Some are still in college. Others are already retired. Some are like me, unknown to everybody. A few are well known in the investing world — people I looked up to when I started investing. And now, through this writing, I get to exchange ideas with all of them. I still can’t quite believe that.

I didn’t start this with a strategy. I just started. And that turned out to be enough. If you’ve been waiting for the right moment to share your ideas — stop waiting. The people who need to hear them will hear them. And some of those people will change how you think. That’s the whole magic of it.