Duan Yongping: The Man Who Calls His Hundred-Million-Dollar Gain a Mistake

In 2001 a 40-year-old man walked away from the electronics empire he had built, moved to America, and told friends that from then on his main occupation was raising children and playing golf.

Investing was just a side job.

Twenty-five years later that side job manages a 20-billion-dollar portfolio.

If you are holding an OPPO or a vivo phone, you are holding a product of the ecosystem this man built. If you have heard of Pinduoduo, the e-commerce platform that at one point made its founder the richest person in China, this man was that founder's mentor.

But most Vietnamese investors have never heard his name.

He is Duan Yongping. Chinese investors call him "the Buffett of China," a nickname he himself dislikes, and one that obscures the most interesting thing about him: he is not a copy of Buffett. He is a genuine business operator who later moved into investing, and he brought with him something most professional investors never have.

From an indebted electronics workshop to a national brand

He was born in March 1961 in Nanchang, Jiangxi province, to two university lecturers. When he was five the Cultural Revolution broke out and the family was sent to the countryside at Jinggangshan. His childhood passed without decent schooling and without a clear future.

In October 1977 the university entrance exam was restored. He passed into the radio engineering department of Zhejiang University at just sixteen, then went on to graduate study in econometrics at Renmin University of China.

In 1989 he took a job most people with his credentials would have refused: running an electronics workshop in Zhongshan, Guangdong province. The workshop had twenty workers, three thousand yuan in cash, and two million yuan of debt.

Six years later that workshop had become Subor, the "learning computer" brand almost every Chinese household of the era knew by name. In 1994–1995 the company earned more than 200 million yuan in profit, mostly from video-game machines.

Then in 1995 he proposed turning Subor into a joint-stock company so employees could share in the gains. The group's leadership refused. He left empty-handed, at thirty-four.

He went down to Dongguan and founded BBK. And he applied the Subor lesson from day one: he distributed shares to all employees and distributors. His own stake fell step by step from 70% to 17%.

That detail is worth pausing on. He voluntarily diluted himself to a quarter of his original stake, in a company he had built with his own hands, with no investor forcing him.

Out of BBK grew OPPO, vivo, OnePlus and Realme. Out of that ecosystem grew J&T Express, the delivery company later listed in Hong Kong at a valuation above 130 billion Hong Kong dollars. His protégés, Chen Mingyong, Shen Wei, Liu Zuohu and Li Jie, all became major names in the industry.

And he went to America.

The first trade, and the real source of his edge

In 2001 the dot-com bubble burst. NetEase, the Chinese internet company listed on Nasdaq, was found to have misstated revenue. The stock fell from around 15 USD to under 1 USD, down more than 95%. Nasdaq suspended trading.

This is exactly the situation every value-investing book describes: a good company, temporary bad news, a collapsed price. It is also the principle John Templeton called buying at the point of maximum pessimism. But there were thousands of such companies in 2001, and most of them really did die.

What made him willing to commit money was not courage. It was something rather funny.

When BBK's investment arm studied the internet industry, it decided to skip advertising, concluding that the internet was just a new form of media and could not grow at a high rate forever on its own. Instead the team put everyone on overtime playing online games. After weeks of grinding, they found that NetEase's Fantasy Westward Journey II had potential well beyond its contemporaries.

In April 2002 he and his wife bought about 1.52 million NetEase shares at around 0.8 USD, later raising the holding to 2.05 million, at one point more than 10% of the company, making him the second-largest individual shareholder after founder Ding Lei. He described the decision very plainly: "After finishing my homework, I basically used all the money I had to buy NetEase shares."

By 2003 that two million dollars and change had become more than 100 million.

Later, asked why he dared, he gave an answer I consider the most important thing in all of his thinking:

We made more than 100 times on NetEase because back when I was running Subor I understood a great deal about games. That understanding is not taught at school, it is not in books, and it cannot be seen in a financial statement. I have tried to explain that understanding to other people, and I found it very hard.

Twelve years selling game machines to Chinese children. That was the real margin of safety.

This is where we usually misread the idea of a circle of competence. We tend to think it means "the industry I have read a lot about." To him it means the industry I have lived inside.

Four years later he paid 620,100 dollars for a lunch

In 2006 he won the charity lunch auction with Warren Buffett at 620,100 USD, becoming the first Chinese person to do so. All of it went to the Glide Foundation. He registered under a pseudonym: "Fast is slow."

He brought along a young man named Colin Huang. Twelve years later Huang took Pinduoduo to Nasdaq.

Asked why he spent that much on a meal, his answer was not at all romantic: it was a charitable donation; he could give directly, or give through Buffett and learn something.

And what he says he learned, after all of it, was one sentence:

Later, when I read Buffett's material, I only saw the line "buying a stock is buying a company." I saw exactly that line, and suddenly understood. That line is enough.

That sounds ordinary. But he immediately added the second half, and this is the hard part:

That line, "buying a stock is buying a company" — if even 1% of people truly understood it, that would already be remarkable. Actually doing it is harder still.

Two ideas that govern everything: duty and an ordinary mind

He compresses all of his success into a formula that sounds like a corporate slogan: duty (benfen) and an ordinary mind (pingchangxin).

But the way he defines them is very technical.

Duty = doing the right thing, and doing the thing right. The two halves are completely different. The first is a question of choice, and belongs to values. The second is a question of capability, and belongs to skill. He stresses this point:

Before talent and before effort, doing the right thing matters most. Because that is the only part you get to choose.

Capability takes years to accumulate. The choice you have today.

An ordinary mind he defines outright with an English word: rational. More precisely: the ability, especially under temptation, to strip away all outside noise, return to the underlying nature of the matter, and tell right from wrong.

Then he links the two concepts in a sentence I think should be written out and pinned to a wall:

Doing the right thing, in practice, always turns into: don't do the things that aren't right.

And that is the origin of the thing he is most famous for.

The stop doing list

Most of us keep a to-do list. He keeps a list of things not to do.

His reason is blunt about human nature:

A great many people regularly do things they know perfectly well are wrong, simply because they cannot resist the temptation of a short-term gain.

The OPPO/vivo list, as he tells it:

No sales department. Because there is no need to negotiate sales.

No separate price negotiation with individual customers. One price for everyone. By his reckoning this saves an enormous amount of time and energy on both sides, and compounded over ten or twenty years the figure is staggering.

No contract manufacturing. Contract-manufactured products carry little differentiation and make profit very hard.

No interest-bearing debt. So the company can never die of a cash-flow break. He cites Munger: know where you will die and don't go there. Most businesses that collapse do so because they borrowed too much.

His personal list adds: don't earn money you shouldn't earn, don't lend money to friends, don't touch what you don't understand, don't owe suppliers, don't pay wages late, don't comment on competitors, don't chase market share.

When someone objected that "if I don't understand it, I don't do it" would make him miss opportunities, he replied:

True. By the time you understand it, it may already have gone up. So what? You get many opportunities in a lifetime. But if you try to grab them quickly, you may fall into a pit. That is exactly what "fast is slow" means.

He tells a small story anyone who lived through a Vietnamese property cycle will recognise: seven or eight years ago a former student in real estate came for advice. He said, don't borrow, or sooner or later you will be in trouble. Then he concluded:

Walk along the riverbank long enough, and without a stop doing list you will get your shoes wet eventually.

The double filter: business model and corporate culture

His criteria for choosing a company are only three: business model, corporate culture, reasonable price. But the sequence is what matters.

The simplest filter these days is business model and corporate culture. If it doesn't pass, I don't look further, which saves a lot of time.

Exclude first. Value later.

Business model he defines tersely: the model that generates net cash flow. A good model is one where profit and net cash flow are both strong over a long period, and where a rival would struggle to take it away even over many years. He suggests a very practical test: imagine whose business would be hardest to take away, then ask yourself why.

He always starts from the product, never from the financial statements:

Caring about a business must start from caring about the product, with no exceptions. Finding a company with pricing power is extremely important, and understanding why it has pricing power matters just as much. Otherwise a few market swings and you will lose sleep.

On differentiation he explains with a very everyday example. A Beijing–Guangzhou plane ticket is nearly identical across airlines, so in the end they can only fight on price. But breakfast cereals taste different, and people do not switch brands over a 5% discount. The same goes for the iPhone. His conclusion: a company that can keep producing differentiated products users love usually already has a very good business model.

Corporate culture is the layer most investors skip, and he puts it on a par with the business model. The way he suggests verifying it is highly operational:

Read a company's stated culture carefully, then observe over a long period whether what they say and what they do are consistent. That is extremely useful for understanding the company.

And one counterintuitive principle, perhaps the most contentious thing he has ever said:

I like the kind of company that puts shareholders third, and I am most afraid of the kind that says "shareholders come first."

Customers first, employees second, shareholders last. Because that is the order that produces durable cash flow.

Case study: the profitable investment he calls a mistake

In 2008, in the middle of the financial crisis, he bought General Electric. He bought it out of admiration for GE's corporate culture under Jack Welch; BBK had studied GE for years. He set a target price of 20 USD and sold down as it was reached.

The position made hundreds of millions of dollars.

He files it under mistakes.

The first reason: he never genuinely understood GE's business model. A conglomerate constantly buying and selling subsidiaries, with businesses far too complex, nothing like the simplicity and clarity of Apple or Moutai.

The second reason, and this is the detail I find haunting: he decided to sell when he noticed that the word integrity had disappeared from GE's homepage.

Not when profits fell. Not when the share price dropped. When a line of text vanished from a website.

The conclusion he drew for himself:

Sometimes you make a mistake and still make money.

If a decision does not pass the double filter, then even if it earns a profit it remains the wrong decision. The result does not legitimise the process.

He then used the GE proceeds to buy Apple. And the gap in returns between the two, in his words, "showed up immediately."

He had another mistake, the kind with a real loss. Around 2010, sitting on large gains and plenty of cash, he bought UNG, a natural gas fund. He admits it outright: that was buying without understanding the asset well enough. He cut the whole position. Had he not cut, the eventual loss would have been nearly four times larger.

What he took from it:

Find a mistake and fix it immediately, whatever the cost. That is always the smallest cost.

How he sits still: Apple and Moutai

He bought Apple from January 2011, right through the handover from Steve Jobs to Tim Cook, when Apple was worth about 300 billion USD.

People like to tell the results part: one of his personal accounts was worth about 1.8 million USD in November 2011, and by the end of 2025 had gained nearly 34 million, more than 18 times in fourteen years.

Few tell the middle part. Over that stretch Apple fell more than 30% several times. In 2013 alone the stock dropped to around 41 USD. In 2016 there was another sharp correction.

Moutai was harsher still. He first bought in 2013, as the Chinese baijiu industry absorbed three blows at once: policy restricting public spending on banquets and gifts, the plasticiser scandal, and the argument that "young people will no longer drink baijiu." Moutai fell more than 53% from its high.

The more it fell, the more he bought. Asked whether he found it expensive, he answered:

Expensive or cheap depends on your understanding of ten years from now, not of the present.

He added that in mainland China he very rarely finds a company he can see ten years out on. Moutai was one of them.

And he kept being tested. When Moutai reached the 2,600–2,700 yuan range he admits he intended to sell. What held him back was not faith but a technical question: if I sell, where does the money go?

Investing must always account for your opportunity cost. If you cannot answer the question of where the money goes, then all discussion of investing is just talk.

He did not sell. He bought more. Then Moutai halved. His reaction:

If you cannot accept a 50% drop in a stock, you should not have bought it in the first place.

And here is the harshest line, and the most useful, which he said to an investor worried about Moutai in early 2026:

When a stock falls and your heart fills with fear, that proves you bought a company you do not understand.

Fear is not a psychological problem to be overcome. It is a diagnostic signal telling you that you went wrong at the research stage. If you want to understand traps of this kind more closely, I have written a separate piece on five psychological mistakes that cost Vietnamese investors money.

The most expensive lesson: don't copy someone richer than you

In 2021 he began buying Tencent at an average of 430–460 Hong Kong dollars, planning to add on every 10% decline. In February 2022 he bought 100,000 ADRs at 53.5 USD. In August 2022, when Tencent fell to 37.37 USD, he bought another 100,000 and said he would buy more at 30.

A great many Chinese retail investors copied him. To them this was a bottom-fishing signal from a legend.

Then someone asked him what weight Tencent had in his portfolio. He answered calmly: under 1%. And added that this "does not yet count as a real investment."

To him it was a probe. To the people copying him it might have been everything they owned.

This is the lesson I think every Vietnamese investor should carve into their head before reading any analysis, including this one: position size, not the ticker, is the investment decision. Buying 0.5% of a portfolio and buying 40% of it are two completely different acts on the same ticker, resting on two completely different levels of understanding.

People see what he buys. They do not see how much, and more importantly, how much loss he can take without being forced to sell.

The number that disappoints a lot of people

If you want to know the tempo at which a real value investor works, here is the answer from the man himself:

I ran businesses for just over ten years, and since then I have been investing for nearly ten years. In that decade, out of the businesses that interested me, I roughly understood fewer than ten companies — the ones I screened out don't count, the ones I got wrong don't count — and I went in heavily on five. About one every two years on average. Not as hard as you imagined, is it?

Then he added a joke that is not a joke:

What, you have invested in many more companies than me? Then you had better be careful.

His entire fortune comes from about five or six decisions over twenty-five years. Not from two hundred decisions. This is also what Walter Schloss proved over 47 consistent years: results come from repeating a simple process for a very long time, not from constantly having new ideas.

He adds that by Buffett and Munger's standard, acting once a year is already a lot. And he concedes that if he had managed that in the past he would probably have made far more money, because once you see clearly you must act heavily, and it is very hard to act heavily when you only half understand.

His entire investment firm has two people

There is one more detail about him that I find even more startling than the figure of five decisions.

His asset-management firm is H&H International Investment, founded in 2017, based in Palo Alto, California, registered with the US Securities and Exchange Commission as an investment adviser. It is also the only account of his that outsiders can follow publicly.

The regulatory filing shows the firm has two investment advisory personnel. He is the sole legally responsible person. Number of clients: three. Assets under management as of the third quarter of 2025: about 16.54 billion USD.

Do the division and you get a hard-to-believe number: roughly 8 billion dollars per investment professional.

The figure needs reading correctly. H&H is not all of his wealth; observers agree he holds other accounts that need no disclosure. And in substance this is a family office rather than a fund: no public fundraising, no marketing, no outside investors demanding quarterly performance reports.

But here is the part worth thinking about. A portfolio of nineteen tickers, whose four largest make up more than 80%, adding roughly one new company every two years, does not need a team. The opposite is dangerous: a large apparatus generates its own pressure to keep producing new ideas to justify its existence. And that is exactly what destroys the principle that acting once a year is already a lot.

A small team is not a consequence of his investing style. It is the condition that allows that style to exist.

How he lives

He stepped back from running the business around 2001, and he really stepped back. He handed full authority to the successor chief executives, with a fairly absolute delegation principle:

They should not be thinking "what would Duan do." If they think that way, we have already lost.

His rhythm: never concentrate on anything for more than four hours, take about sixty days of rest a year, play golf, raise his children. He sees raising children and investing through the same lens: long-term nurture and presence matter more than fast results.

A very characteristic detail: in the years Apple or Moutai hit new highs, he would often open a thirty-year Moutai to celebrate.

On philanthropy, the scale is wildly out of proportion to his privacy. To Zhejiang University alone: 30 million USD in 2006 (40 million together with Ding Lei, a record for alumni giving to a Chinese university at the time, which stood for five years); two gifts totalling 270 million yuan in 2022; more than 1 billion yuan at the end of 2023. Nearly 1.5 billion yuan in all. He and his wife also gave 30 million USD to Renmin University of China.

His philanthropic philosophy is one line: do the things within reach. This way of living will be familiar to anyone who read my piece on Irving Kahn and 86 years of work: the people who accumulate the largest fortunes usually live the simplest lives.

And he is no saint. On the investing forum Xueqiu, where he has disclosed his trades publicly for twenty years, he is known for being direct and sometimes harsh. In March 2025, when someone wrote that "most people buying Tencent don't actually have investing ability," he shot back: "Shut up! You talk as if you're richer than me."

He is also controversial in China for taking US citizenship and for keeping most of his charitable funds abroad. He describes what he wants very briefly: to be a nobody.

Applying this in Vietnam

This is the hardest section, because some of what he does transfers and some does not.

What does not transfer, to be clear up front. A large part of his money comes from an options strategy, selling puts at exactly the price he wants to buy the stock, collecting premiums like an insurance company. Vietnam has no standardised single-stock options, so that mechanism is essentially unavailable. And even if it existed, it is only safe for someone holding the cash to take full delivery without borrowing, precisely what he forbids.

He also has something most of us do not: cash flow from the BBK ecosystem, what he calls his "reserve force." In the 2012–2013 smartphone crisis, when BBK was losing heavily and book cash fell from seven or eight billion yuan to near bottom, he came home and said: if we have to go down, don't go down in an ugly way; suppliers and employees must not bear the loss. He could say that because his investment portfolio never had to be touched.

That is the real source of the composure people admire. Not meditation. A financial structure that means he is never forced to sell.

Now the part that does transfer.

One, define your circle of competence by your lived history, not by industry label. His edge in NetEase was twelve years selling game machines. Ask yourself: which industry have you actually lived inside? Who have you sold to, which suppliers have you negotiated with, for what reasons have you watched customers change their minds? That is your real analytical capital, and it usually does not coincide with the industry whose reports you read most.

Two, run the double filter before you open the spreadsheet. Before calculating a P/E, answer two questions. How does this business generate net cash flow, and why would a rival struggle to take it away over ten years, in three sentences and no jargon. And: over the last five years, what has this company said and what has it done, and were the two consistent? The second question is especially powerful in Vietnam, where the gap between shareholder-meeting resolutions and actual results is often very wide. If it fails those two, stop, calculate nothing further.

Three, the opportunity-cost benchmark. He says the discount rate is simply the investor's opportunity cost, with the risk-free yield as the floor. In Vietnam that number is the 10-year government bond yield, around 5% a year. Every stock investment you make competes with that, accounting for the capital loss risk that the bond does not carry. And whenever you consider selling, write down the specific replacement asset. If you cannot write it down, you do not yet have a reason to sell. This principle is really just another way of stating margin of safety when buying any asset.

Four, separate a mistake from volatility. A falling price is not a mistake; he sat through 30% drops in Apple several times and a 50% drop in Moutai. A mistake is when the thesis is wrong: you discover you never understood the business model, or the corporate culture has changed, or a new fact contradicts your original assumption. For the first kind, do nothing. For the second, fix it immediately, at any price.

Five, write your own stop doing list. This should come before everything above. No margin. No pledging shares. No buying anything whose thesis you have not written down. No buying because you trust some person. No expanding your circle of competence just because you met an attractive new concept.

The test he offers for each line on the list: if you held to this principle for twenty years, would the difference it makes be large enough?

The QuietVC lesson

What strikes me most about Duan Yongping is not the 18 times on Apple or the 100 times on NetEase.

It is that he calls an investment that earned hundreds of millions of dollars a mistake.

We live in a market where results legitimise everything. Profit means you were right, loss means you were wrong. Whoever earned the most is assumed to be making sense. That way of thinking sounds very practical, but it has a fatal hole: it means you never learn anything from the times you got lucky.

He separates two things most of us fuse together. Process and result. A sound process can produce a bad short-term result. An unsound process can produce a good short-term result. Only the process repeats; the result does not.

And his whole system, duty, an ordinary mind, the stop doing list, the double filter, the ten-year standard, serves one single purpose: to protect the process from you, from the version of you that shows up when the market runs hot, when friends are boasting about gains, when you are holding cash and your hands itch.

The list of companies that pass his filter is very short. Fewer than ten in more than a decade. That is not a sign the process is broken.

It is a sign the process is running correctly.

Silent discipline. Compound value.