Stock Market Breaker: From Retail Investor to Private Equity Ace

Chen Mo’s life took a turning point on a bitterly cold winter night in 2019. He put the 200,000 yuan down payment he had saved for his wedding into a hyped-up “quantum communications demon stock” on the strength of the crowd, only to see it dwindle to 30,000 yuan in a single week. As he stared at the message on his phone saying the “limit-up mentor” had blocked him and listened to his fiancée crying on the other end of the line, he clutched a screenshot of his depleted account and sat on the steps outside a securities brokerage all night.

That same night, he ran into Lao Zheng, a retired veteran regulator. Pointing at the abnormal trading volume on the market app, Lao Zheng exposed the shadowy practices of speculative traders: “This isn’t stock trading. They use hundreds of separate accounts to build positions, hire online shills to spread fake research reports and push prices up, then dump their shares and fleece retail investors.” His words struck like thunder, waking Chen Mo up. He began poring over financial reports in the library, tracking speculative trading seats on the Dragon and Tiger List, and charting the manipulation patterns behind every “demon stock.” He even infiltrated stock-tip groups run by speculators to uncover their entire playbook: “accumulate shares, create a hot topic, lure investors in, then dump.”

Three years later, Chen Mo used the 500,000 yuan he had saved to establish Mingze Private Equity. Unlike other firms, its core strategy was to “target market manipulation”: issue early warnings about pump-and-dump schemes, expose false restructuring news, and even short stocks as speculators pushed up their prices, using legal methods to break the cycle of market manipulation. In 2022, he accurately predicted when speculators would dump a certain new-energy stock and warned investors to get out in advance. His own fund earned 40% through hedging, growing from 5 million yuan to 500 million in just six months.

Today, Chen Mo’s funds manage over 5 billion yuan. On the wall of his office hangs