Some personal thoughts on the market

Meituan recently issued a profit warning. I have a hunch that an opportunity may be appearing.

If I wanted to turn 50,000 yuan into 100,000, I would look for assets that seem unusually attractive across different markets. At my current level of understanding, two stand out over a one-to-three-year horizon: BTC and Meituan.

I see one as a leading asset of the digital world and the other as a major local-services company. At the time of writing, BTC is worth almost half what it was at this cycle’s peak, while Meituan has been under pressure from Alibaba and sits near the low end of its range over roughly six years.

My longer-term judgment is that neither is likely to go to zero. I think the chance of either doubling over three to five years from these prices exceeds its chance of halving again—perhaps by more than fifty percent. That is my estimate, not a certainty. In the shorter term, I see today’s Meituan price as similar to levels available a year ago, or even seven years ago; for Bitcoin, I think of prices from about eighteen months back. In that sense, buying now feels to me like moving an entry point fifteen months earlier.

Even if my reasoning proves sound, the trade does not suit everyone. Preferences, portfolio size, market knowledge, timing, position size, and cash reserves all matter. Investing is simple to describe and hard to practice:

Buy low and sell high. But deciding when and how much demands thought.

I also want to revise my old rule that money put into securities must never come out. It encouraged saving, but it was too absolute. If I received 1,000 yuan in New Year gift money, for example, I might use it to buy something I thought cheap, aim for a thirty or forty percent gain, and spend the proceeds on coffee or a few meals. My frugality and lack of interest in spending have kept me from practicing that kind of decision. Looking back, the “money in, never out” rule also made me miss several short-lived opportunities over the past two or three years.