The stages and mentality of investment!

$Microsoft(MSFT.US) $Taiwan Semiconductor(TSM.US) $AMD(AMD.US) $NVIDIA(NVDA.US) $Amazon(AMZN.US) $Alphabet(GOOGL.US) $Apple(AAPL.US) $Broadcom(AVGO.US) $Oracle(ORCL.US) $S&P 500(.SPX.US) $NASDAQ Composite Index(.IXIC.US) $Tesla(TSLA.US) Why does it feel increasingly difficult to make progress in investing after reaching a certain stage?
Most investors will encounter a stage where they look at K-lines every day, read many books, and participate in various forums, but their accounts show no significant improvement. It's frustrating, and I've been through this bottleneck too. Today, I want to talk about why this happens and share some of my insights.
1. Fast progress at the beginning is due to catching up, but later it's about reinventing yourself.
When you first enter the market, just learning some basics—like what stop-loss is, compound interest, and diversification—can quickly take you out of the "newbie" stage and even earn you some small profits. Progress is obvious at this stage, like a student improving from 30 to 60 points. Hard work is enough. But when you reach 80 points, improving even one more point becomes extremely difficult because you're no longer just learning—you need to start questioning, overturning old logic, and rebuilding a cognitive system that suits you. For example, you might initially think low P/E means cheap, but later realize cyclical stocks with low P/E can be risky. Or you might think stop-loss controls risk, but later find that stopping too often means you don’t understand the bigger trend.
2. What the books say is correct, but the market is too complex for textbooks to fully cover. Books often teach static logic, like what a margin of safety is or how to pick quality companies. But the market changes daily—news, policies, and liquidity all play a role. The truth is, you might follow the book’s logic to buy a good company, only to find its financials were fraudulent or the industry suddenly faced regulation, leaving you unprepared. Another thing: the market gets smarter. When a strategy becomes widely known—like the "golden cross" in technical analysis—the market often reacts in advance. By the time you see the golden cross, it might already be a peak.
3. Human nature is the biggest obstacle. Many people don’t lose because they can’t pick stocks, but because they can’t overcome their weaknesses.
For example, you know you shouldn’t chase highs, but seeing others make money makes it hard to resist. You know you should cut losses, but when the price drops, you can’t bear to sell. These aren’t things you can fix by reading a few behavioral finance books. It takes deep reflection after losses to slowly develop conditioned reflexes in your brain—and that requires a lot of real-world practice. The longer you invest, the more you’re bound by experience. At a certain point, everyone develops their own style—some only do value investing, others only technical analysis. But if you stick too rigidly to your approach, you’ll miss new opportunities in the market. For example, value investors might look down on trend trading, technical traders might ignore fundamentals, and macro traders might study global trends daily but fail to pick a single good stock. This leads to knowing a lot but doing poorly. I accept uncertainty and no longer aim to be right every time. Investing isn’t fortune-telling—it’s a game of probabilities. No one can buy and see the price rise every time. Experts win by playing high-probability moves and enduring low-probability losses over the long term, not by predicting perfectly. Just remember: the right method can lose in the short term, and the wrong method can win in the short term. But in the long run, the market will reveal who’s right.
4. Ultimately, you need to find your own approach. Some imitate Buffett, but he can hold for ten years without moving, while ordinary people might give up after three months. Others see short-term trading as a quick way to make money and chase trends, only to end up buying high and selling low, making things worse. Strategies that work for others might not work for you. You need to understand your own capital horizon, risk tolerance, time, energy, and comprehension—then build a system tailored to you. That’s far more reliable than following the crowd.

In fact, the later stages of investing are more like cultivation. It’s not about having more education, but thinking more deeply, sitting more firmly, and looking further ahead. I now pay less attention to noise and focus more on calmness, discipline, and cognitive structure.
Don’t rush. Take it slow. Treat investing as a lifelong practice—that’s the real path to long-term profitability.$Dow Jones Industrial Average(.DJI.US)