Wang Yiping's 2025 Annual Summary on Evolution Theory: Don't Be a Shadow Chaser

Evolution Theory is an outstanding secondary private equity firm that I have been following. Its founder, Wang Yiping, has been independently engaged in investment since graduating from university, excelling in both subjective and quantitative approaches. Like the company's name suggests, it continuously evolves and iterates to cope with market uncertainties and rapid changes, naturally achieving outstanding investment results.

Below is Evolution Theory's annual summary posted on its official account today. It is worth learning, digesting, reflecting on, and absorbing.

Evolution Theory Wang Yiping 2025 Annual Summary:

Don't be a "shadow chaser." Avoid chasing trends externally; focus on hard work internally. Build something that can accumulate and compound.

1. On the biggest takeaway of the year: Don’t seek externally; instead, solidify the core structure. For funds, a solid structure means diversification and differentiation of investment targets. For models, solid factors mean continuously enriching the dimensions of stock-selection factors. Beyond traditional statistical factors, we’ve also introduced more first-principle-based logical factors. For mindset, slow is fast—don’t crave short-term gains but think about long-term stability and sustainability. This long-term mindset is consistently applied to investment strategies, personal development, and company operations.

2. On the essence of quantitative multi-factor models: Quantitative multi-factor models are like piecing together the truth—a great method. The same thing, observed from different angles, may lead to cognitive biases. Due to differing perspectives, some observations may be close to facts, some may be partial, and others may completely deviate from reality due to extreme positions or wrong directions. Regardless, no one can fully reconstruct the truth. As the Diamond Sutra says, "All phenomena are illusory."

3. On logical quant: Doing logical quant means summarizing the underlying market dynamics into logical factors and integrating them into quantitative models to work alongside statistical factors, enhancing model robustness. Quant is often seen as an arms race of computing power and algorithms, but in our view, investing ultimately boils down to pricing the real world. This world is shaped by economic cycles, industrial shifts, corporate operations, and human 博弈， governed by high-dimensional rules that cannot be simply described by normal distributions.

4. On market outlook and response: For next year’s market outlook, everything is in flux—no more futile attempts to predict like an ant shaking a tree. The economy and stock market follow their own rules. For us, the key is building resilient structures to adapt to changes, gradually accumulating advantages in every shifting opportunity.