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Exciting to hear, definitely getting this! I'm curious, were you able to get his personal account portfolios by year in the 50's? I could not find anything concrete after the end of 1951.

Some money really shouldn't be made in the first place.

It should be Apple, PDD, Maotai for the rmb assets (capital controls), Tencent. He mentioned last month before the China surge that he tried to buy PDD and Tencent heavily. He does sell puts/covered calls with Apple at specific times. There's a lot outside of H&H, as that is just one holding vehicle. In 2018 he said Apple was 90% of his assets, I presume not including the PDD angel ownership which was 3.77% in 2020, minus dilution. Anyway the reason I made this was I recently heard about the scenario I alluded to the OP: a successful entrepreneur/investor's mother copied Duan rigidly for many years and has killed the former's own good returns. That got me thinking, both for myself and what I recommend to friends who ask for advice. Fair, guess I need to be more active! He was an extremely famous Chinese entrepreneur before investing so he was able to meet with Ding Lei through that. A young Colin Huang was introduced to him after that, but Duan basically handpicked, mentored and invested in Huang, even giving him key access to his own company (BBK's) resources long before PDD. That kind of selection and mentoring is a huge avenue for value-add. Kind of like what Charlie did with Li Lu, but ideally earlier on before they even had a chance to prove themselves.

D, ideally lower. The fraud and cheating will usually start small but if they get away with it, they are likely to scale up, so it must be dissuaded from the start. I have a friend who ran a private midsize tech company. His cofounder, who oversaw the financial side of the business, hired his secret mistress as an office manager and when they got larger, the controller. Over several years she embezzled many hundreds of thousands, possibly more than a million, including using corporate cards for family vacations and such. The cofounder couldn't do anything because the mistress was blackmailing him, and my friend had no idea until they had an outside audit done. In the end she basically got a slap on the wrist.

Hah the skepticism! I have no reason to make any of this up. Anyway the original person mentioned is Duan Yongping. Of course he's known, he's even Buffett and Li Lu's friend. That was without leverage, and the number is being conservative based on public data. Naturally the returns fall over time once assets grow into the billions. But to keep it simple, when you start with $2-3M and grow into a few tens of billions in 22 years of your own money, even with injecting some new cash in between you're still going get a very big annual return number. Nor is it such an outlandish figure either. Buffett beat the Dow by 35-40% before he started managing other's money, though he did use a large bank loan. We'll never know what his real returns would have been if he never managed outside money. Reece Duca did significantly better than that, albeit with leverage, and he's only done one public interview ever. There are assuredly many more who stay below the radar and only manage their own money. The top 0.1% or whatever of investors will have outstanding results, this should hardly be surprising. The question is how to best use and learn from this with limited time and attention. The extreme answer being like the mother mentioned in the OP, trusting and rigidly copying them. That's the interesting part, like what Gregmal shared.

One of the best investors in the world has publicly posted his moves in real time for the last 10-15 years, while also candidly chatting about companies. This is someone who's beaten the SPX by over 30% annually for a couple decades. Would you be willing to abandon your own investing and simply copy his (few) moves? This isn't cloning one position each from a variety of above average or well-marketed investors, but genuinely outsourcing all thinking to one exceptional person, including portfolio allocation. The combination of abandoning decision making but retaining the execution is a different phenomenon than handing over the money to a fund manager, which is entirely passive. If no, would your answer change if your mother or wife — smart but without experience in business or finance — precisely copied his moves and killed your returns year after year? The above is a real-life example. Not saying there's a right or wrong answer but psychologically it is interesting, in addition to the greater environmental factors that make this even possible. That being investing is a game where amateurs can beat professionals beyond indexes, where a housewife can outperform 99% of fund managers with minimal effort and stress. *Before anyone brings up buying Berkshire, this is different: a) Buffett is managing other people's money, causing him to be extremely risk averse and less focused on maximizing long term returns than if he was managing his own b) Significant age and AUM difference c) Buffett's moves are 13f delayed and he doesn't talk candidly about companies

Indeed, if you can understand PDD then why bother with anything else? Otherwise Maotai is very reliable along with Tencent. Both are simpler to understand.

The Chinese government cannot wreck the economy because that will violate their social contract. They can make it less efficient in the name of reducing risks and increasing security, but there is a limit as to how far they can go. You saw how quickly the government folded on Zero covid once protests erupted. Then last year reasonable video game regulations were immediately canned when the markets freaked out. The regulators apologized and the chief regulator responsible was fired. Their recent ecommerce regulation was made with the lightest touch, having the companies themselves agree to self-discipline with no penalties instead of making public decrees. Importantly, the WW3 talk comes from the west and is not there in China. Xi even told the EU back in 2023 that he would not be fooled into attacking Taiwan, a statement that is not easily walked back internally once leaked. From China's perspective, war now makes zero sense when the US is powerful and ready, especially when its production advantage means it is narrowing the force gap every year. The huge difficulties Russia has experienced make war less likely, not more. Now in 5-10 years if the US is experiencing some severe internal crisis? Completely different story. That said there are many problems with Chinese companies beyond the oft-discussed fraud. A few are absolutely world class, but many are experts in destroying capital to chase dreams. There's a reason the Hang Seng was at 1997 levels earlier this year, not just from depressed valuations. And A shares are worse, not sure if you can profit from holding any company beyond Moutai for several years.