In South Korea, one in every thirty adults has received a margin call. U.S. stocks have pulled back sharply, with the damage concentrated in the small- and mid-cap tech names that led the first half’s rally. A-shares have sunk into a deep correction — on the opening day of the Shanghai AI Conference summit, the index dropped more than a hundred points.
The faces on the street have turned solemn. WeChat Moments has gone flat and unremarkable; the group chats have gone dead quiet. People share their good news with others — and never forget to give it one more coat of polish before they do. Their bad news they hide away, putting on a show of strength and composure, utterly convinced that the borders of their own rationality stretch out vast and wide — until the crash arrives, and they discover that their rationality was nothing but a pile of temporary profits.
Why does the stock market teach people so many lessons? Because it is an amplifier of human weakness — a mirror that reflects back our ugliness. Every color of human nature can be studied simply by watching the people who speculate in it. They mistake luck for skill and believe they can bend the market’s course with their own two hands.
You are merely mediocre — don’t imagine yourself so clever. Without others you are nothing; with them, your eyes are only further clouded, and slowly you molt from the value investor you fancied yourself into a speculating zealot of religious superstition. What you never realized is that you were that zealot all along — it just took a stretch of temporary profits to snap you awake, to rouse the religious obsession that had been sleeping in your heart.
Beijing