The choices that shaped where I am now

I could not sleep last night and stayed awake past one. The alarms kept sounding this morning until I finally opened my eyes and saw that it was almost ten. I got up in a rush, uneasy about starting the day so late.

Yesterday a friend in a group chat told me about a platform where, they said, I might still be able to open a US stock trading account with relatively low entry requirements. I had no time to try it then, so I set aside lunch today. The application took more than an hour, with a great deal of information to fill in and details to watch. When I finished, I felt both relieved and excited, as if I had completed a small exam. The lengthy process might deter some applicants, though I do not yet know what the outcome will be.

What made this feel so urgent was a choice I had made earlier. I had concentrated my brokerage accounts in Hong Kong instead of considering other places. Now that seems like a single point of risk, and the worry has been costly enough that I expect to remember it when making other important decisions.

Li Xiaolai once suggested asking, whenever we face a choice, “What matters more?” The more important the question, the more time it deserves. When I opened my Hong Kong and US stock accounts before, I compared a physical broker with an online one and chose Futu and ZKBANK. Looking back, I now see both as exposed to the same Hong Kong policy environment. I worry that a tighter mainland regulatory approach could affect both at once. Friends who spread their accounts across Hong Kong, Singapore, or the United States seem, to me today, to have thought more carefully about that possibility. Time makes early choices harder to reverse.

Looking forward, I might make better choices by learning more languages. Each language opens a culture, and different cultures can reshape the values behind a decision. Perhaps I failed to look far enough ahead. Perhaps my values were not clear or firm enough. Either way, I still find myself confused by some of the things that matter most.

At least I have noticed it now.