[Full disclosure: I own the KWEB ETF.  This is NOT investment advice!  Do your own due diligence.]

“Reactive” is a word that sounds passive and negative. People do not like this word. In investing, I like to argue however, “reactive” can be a good thing.

To proactively predict the financial market is an extraordinarily hard thing to do. Proactively predicting companies’ futures is hard — that is why good stock pickers are rare. Predicting the market is harder — that is why there are extremely few investors who can make it big by just market-timing.

This is NOT investment advice! Do your own due diligence.

Chinese equities suffered sharp selloffs due to policy-related concerns. KraneShares CSI China Internet ETF (“KWEB”), a popular Chinese ETF, declined by as much as 25% over the three-day period from last Friday to this Tuesday — a massive decline since KWEB has previously already declined by 40% from February to June! By Tuesday night, KWEB was down more than 55% from this year’s peak. See the chart above. What a financial “bloodshed”!

If one were watching the market close enough, he/she could discover an asymmetric opportunity during the Tuesday selloff. In a nutshell, between 11:30am and 1:30pm Tuesday (July 27, 2021), for KWEB, its exchange-listed long-dated call options were selling at a price so low that basically “guaranteed” investors great returns.

Inflation is not a very “researchable” topic.  Most projections about inflation are condemned to be wrong. The Fed employs over 400 Ph.D. economists, yet its inflation projections have been consistently wrong for years. 

Scientists versus Water

I believe it is extremely difficult for humans to comprehend and predict the dynamics of a large complex system, even though we have perfect knowledge of all the individual elements in such a system. 

Let me draw an analogy, call it “Scientists versus Water”:  Scientists, in a laboratory environment, think they know everything about water.  Water is H2O; water can freeze, boil, and evaporate.  However, sitting in a lab, staring at water, these scientists could never imagine tides, waves, or tsunami, let alone trying to make predictions of when these phenomena could occur.  Yet, these are what water can do too!  The scientists who only study water in a lab will never know!

I analyzed all American and Chinese companies that were ever publicly traded from 1970s to today. I then grouped them into “U.S.” and “China” according to a company’s country of domicile. In total, my analysis covered over 21,000 listed stocks.

My findings can be summarized in the following tables. Here, the columns “Average ‘Baggers'” mean the number of times a stock has gone up (including dividends) during a given decade — for example, if that column shows 15, it means the average stock from that particular sector has gone up 15x during the given decade — i.e., your $1 of investment has turned into $15.