A Preface for People Trying to Make Sense of Money, Technology and Their Own Lives

One

In May 2025, I finally sat down to write a preface for this blog.

The idea had been hanging around for years. It first became serious during the pandemic, when the world was stuck at home. Freedom shrank, but there was suddenly time to sort through a life. I kept returning to one question: could the things I had lived through, thought about and badly misjudged help someone else avoid a few detours?

Life usually waits for a trigger. Mine was a friend saying, in effect, that it would be a waste not to write any of this down. The remark landed. Perhaps the time had arrived. More honestly, perhaps I had finally become willing to say something to the world.

That is how this blog began.

Two

Education gives a person a starting point for seeing the world. Work decides how that person collides with it.

I studied engineering at a well-known university in China. I will leave the name out. A little privacy still seems sensible in an age when even ChatGPT can help strangers reconstruct your biography.

Engineering left me with a bias toward reason. Logic and structure are two bones in my spine. But reason is an ability, not a complete person. I trust emotion, taste and the temperature of language too. Good writing needs logic and feeling. Good investing is a contest between reason and intuition. A decent life needs both the algorithm and the poem.

Three

Over twenty years of work, I moved from engineering to sales leadership and then to strategic procurement. I went from China into the wider world and now live in Europe. Somewhere in that journey, the engineer building design and calculation models became a commercial specialist.

Europe taught me one lesson above all: stable growth matters more than a sudden win. Relationships and logic both have force. You may think you are negotiating price and terms. In reality, you are negotiating culture, technology, power and human nature.

That is one reason I write. I am not interested in using a grand narrative to lecture people. I want to share what I have learned, what I think I understand and what I got wrong. My angle is unusual.

Of course, an unusual angle may be completely useless.

Four

The practical question is simpler: does any of this work?

My personal investment returns in both 2023 and 2024 were about 70 percent on an annual basis. I am not selling a course, and the number is not bait. It is a private scorecard for a financial model I have tested and adjusted over years.

Luck was part of it. I am not pretending otherwise. But luck does not stay without a theory and a process. By the time I wrote this in May 2025, Trump's return, trade conflict and several wars had produced more black swans than anyone needed. My return for the year was around 18 percent. More important to me, the model had not suffered a drawdown.

Those are personal, unaudited results. They are not a promise about anyone else's future.

Five

What will I write about? Three broad areas.

Wealth

How does a family remain steady in a violent period? How do asset allocation, risk control and cash-flow management turn a pile of possessions into actual wealth?

I am less interested in teaching people how to trade a fund than in two harder questions: how do you become wealthier, and how do you avoid becoming poor again?

Technology

I have spent years in the ICT industry and have never stopped watching science and technology. I will follow the fashionable stories, but I also want to know where the wind came from, why it changed direction, why one person rides it and another lands face-first on the pavement.

AI, the metaverse, industrial bubbles and the survivors after those bubbles are all part of the subject. The real question is how technology is rewriting ordinary life before ordinary people have agreed to the terms.

Economics and the rhythm of the times

We live inside the economy whether we trade stocks or ignore the news. Inflation, war, debt and employment eventually enter the household.

I will try to explain those large questions in plain language. My macro forecasts have historically been right perhaps 60 to 70 percent of the time. That is not prophecy. It is better than a coin toss, but only if I am equally honest about the misses.

The useful distinction is usually this: what can you control, and where should you stop fantasising?

Six

This blog is partly about traffic. It may eventually be about revenue. I am not embarrassed to say so.

But the deeper reason is that every person deserves the right to explain the world in their own language. Bloggerary is my attempt to explain money, technology, politics, work and daily life without asking permission from an institution.

If you are looking for a sharper model, a way into an economic problem, or simply a voice that makes you feel less alone, stay around. We can talk slowly. Money, technology, the times, and how to remain both clear-eyed and interesting.

One last promise, half serious and half shameless: I will at least try to keep us on the road toward real wealth.