After reading plendid's post, I also had some reflections and insights @S丨plendid
Like many retail traders, for a long time in the past, my life's focus was completely tilted towards trading. Most of my time, emotions, and energy were tied to the ups and downs of the market. My eyes were only on the K-lines, profits and losses, rights and wrongs, gradually forgetting about life. I would wake up in the middle of the night, stare at the market, agonize over price movements. When it fell, I doubted my buying decision; when it rose, I feared missing out, feared a pullback, constantly draining myself internally and feeling extremely exhausted. I was tossed around in the volatile market.
Before June 2026, I firmly believed that Alibaba's mature business model and Tencent's solid cash cow moat were enough to support the stock price stabilizing at the bottom. I recognized the two giants' underlying resilience, cash flow capabilities, and industry position, thinking the valuation had already fully digested the negative news and should usher in a recovery. But reality taught me a harsh lesson: the Hong Kong stock market's trading volume shrank repeatedly, liquidity continued to dry up, and the market kept probing new lows. The logic was right, but the market price was never right. Pricing power in offshore markets lies with foreign capital. The high-interest-rate environment suppressed valuations, funds continued to diverge, and sentiment was extremely weak, forming a negative cycle of falling prices leading to less trading, and less trading leading to further falls. I understood the company's fundamentals, but I couldn't understand the market's liquidity structure and the logic of capital pricing.
Entering July, I remained convinced that the memory cycle was upward, believing the sector trend was still continuing. But just today, merely an 8% miss in SK Hynix's earnings guidance caused the entire memory sector to fall straight to the bottom without any resistance.
I have fully recognized the real gap between myself and professional institutions: in terms of capturing marginal changes, predicting industry inflection points, and correcting expectation gaps, my judgment is far inferior to any industry researcher; in terms of rigorous valuation systems, cash flow modeling, and fair pricing deduction, I am inferior to any professional modeler on Wall Street.
I think the most fatal mistake is only looking at the "big logic, big trend, long cycle," but the short-term pricing of the capital market only looks at "marginal changes, sentiment expectations, and capital behavior." I look at the future terminal value, while capital acts for current risk aversion; I hold onto the logic of cyclical recovery, while institutions speculate on monthly sentiment corrections.
Let's encourage each other.