I Was a Chive for Four Hundred Years

A stock market power fantasy, transmigrating to trade stocks, a finance novel, a money-making thrill ride. I was once hit on the head by a tulip bulb and ran naked through the canals of Lancheng. I once taught Newton how to trade stocks, but he still failed to calculate the madness of human nature. I was playing mahjong on the roof of Lehman Brothers while rumors of people jumping to their deaths were spreading downstairs. I advised Buffett not to buy PetroChina, and he really did regret it later.

Don't ask how old I am. My investment career began four hundred years before the Renaissance.

As a quant trader from the twenty-second century, I fell into the seventeenth century in a space-time jump accident. Armed with a future AI model, I had planned to quietly become a transmigrated stock market legend, but I kept getting swept up in every historical bubble.

From Dutch tulips to the British South Sea Bubble, from the Great Depression of 1929 to China's A-share market in 2015, I lived through every bout of madness that claimed, “This time is different,” and witnessed every crash that proved history has an uncanny way of repeating itself.

This book is my investment memoir, and also a four-hundred-year history of retail investors evolving into cannon fodder. You'll see how to spot bubbles in every era with the simplest logic, and why “This time is different” are the four most expensive words in financial history. There are a hundred ways to die from leverage, so there's bound to be one that suits you. This is a tearful evolution from naive newcomer to seasoned market veteran.