Richard Dennis proved that systems could be taught. The turtles learned his rules and made $175 million. But Dennis himself was defeated by the market in 1987, because the conditions under which his rules worked had changed—and the rules themselves could not tell him this.

This essay moves in a different direction. A man spent two years building a complete trading theory on the internet. That theory was so precise that countless people still use, study, and debate it today. Then he died at age 39.

The system remained. The man did not.

Put these two things together, and you sit still for a long time.

"Chan Zhong Shuo Chan" was a Sina blog ID. He opened his blog in June 2006, and his inaugural post was a classical poem called "Jiang Lin Xian":

Turbid waters surge thirty thousand li, solitary on the lonely peak. Dragons rest, lions sleep, awaiting wind. The heartless bow their heads, yet tears shed by heroes. Long swords lean on starlit sky, ancient and modern all turn to emptiness. Heaven and earth yield to fate. On half a moon above the vast sea, a reed sails east on the great river.

The poem's scope was vast. The man who wrote it claimed to have created "the world's first blog."

He never said who he was. His blog contained no information about his real identity. But his writing ranged widely: classical poetry, music, commentaries on the Analects, Buddhism, meditation, politics and economics, mathematics, football, stocks. 1,134 posts. The breadth and density of his work astonished people.

What made him truly famous was one column: "How to Trade Stocks." 108 lessons.

These 108 lessons were not sentimental trading tips. They were a complete theoretical system. Starting from the most basic candlestick patterns, it built layer by layer: defining "brushstrokes," line segments, pivot zones, trend types, and three classes of entry and exit points. Every concept had strict mathematical definition. The core thesis of the entire theory was five words: "Trends reach ultimate perfection."

What did that mean? It meant that any market movement, no matter how chaotic it appears, has a complete structure. Uptrend, downtrend, consolidation—these three trend types exhaust all possibilities. You cannot predict tomorrow's price, but you can use this classification system to determine at any moment which structural stage the current trend occupies.

This was not a "prediction system." It was a "positioning system."

This distinction mattered greatly. Most trading theories try to answer "Will it go up or down tomorrow?" Chan's theory did not answer that question. Instead it asked: "What is the current trend structure, what stage is it in, has it completed or not?" You did not need to know the future—only the present.

He wrote the 108 lessons over nearly two years. During those two years, he simultaneously published real-time market analysis on his blog, using his theory to interpret price action with remarkable accuracy. He called the 2007 bull market and the approximate level of the 6124 peak. He repeatedly insisted he was not "predicting" but "classifying," yet to his readers, the results were indistinguishable from precise prediction.

His followers grew. Some compiled his blog posts into books, others created Chan indicators, still others formed study groups. Today his blog has nearly 200 million views. "Chan theory" became an independent school within China's stock market.

In 2008, he revealed he was ill. Nasopharyngeal cancer.

His posts became irregular. Sometimes months passed without an update, then suddenly he would post something in a different tone. He wrote at one point: "I write these things without reservation to warn everyone: life can be spent, squandered, but you must bear the consequences. No one escapes, not even someone like me. This is a warning for those who come later to heed."

In October 2008, he died. The blog froze where it was. The 108 lessons were never fully completed—the final few lessons clearly rushed.

Only after his death was his true identity gradually confirmed: Li Biao, born 1969, mathematics degree from Zhongshan University. He began trading while in university, became a professional trader after graduation. From 1998 to 2000, he was the principal operator of Yi'an Technology, taking the stock from single digits to 126 yuan—China's first hundred-yuan stock. He pioneered the "limit-down washout" technique, methods so fierce they became legendary in the industry.

A mathematics graduate turned trader, he gained profound understanding of market structure through combat, then in his final two years of life, crystallized that understanding into a complete theory.

There was enormous tension in this.

When Li Biao operated Yi'an, what he did was viscerally concrete: raising capital, locking in shares, manufacturing panic to force retail traders to sell, then driving the stock price up. Pure combat, bloody, specific, calculated share by share.

But when he wrote Chan theory on his blog, he did something entirely different. He abstracted. He took the concrete experience from fifteen years of market fighting and distilled it into mathematically-described structures: brushstrokes, line segments, pivot zones, trend types, entry and exit classifications. Each concept moved away from specific trading action toward higher-order formalization.

From concrete to abstract. From practice to theory. From "how I made this money" to "what is the market really?"

This process was intellectually magnificent. Reading through the 108 lessons, you felt a mind at full power, trying to completely formalize something extraordinarily complex. The proposition "trends reach ultimate perfection" was, theoretically, an extremely strong claim: no market movement exists that cannot be classified. All trends can be exhausted.

Yet Dennis faced the same problem here: the precision of formalization and the boundaries of its applicability are two different things.

Chan's classification system was logically self-consistent. Given any candlestick pattern, you could decompose it according to Chan's definitions into brushstrokes and line segments, locate pivot zones, determine trend types. The problem: this decomposition could be done in hindsight, but real-time operation had far more ambiguity. The same price movement, drawn by different traders, could yield different brushstrokes and pivot zones. The theory was certain, its application uncertain.

Chan's followers still debate these details. How to handle overlapping segments? How to determine pivot zone levels? When to focus on larger timeframes versus smaller ones? These arguments themselves prove something: the theory's formalization is extremely high, but between theory and operation lies a translation process that cannot be fully formalized.

This was isomorphic to Dennis's problem. Dennis's rules were clear, but "under what conditions are these rules valid?" was not in the rules. Chan's definitions were clear, but "how do I correctly apply these definitions in real time?" was not in the definitions.

Formalization always has a boundary. What lies beyond that boundary is not a flaw in the theory—it is the essential nature of theory itself.

But Li Biao seemed to think otherwise. In his blog he repeatedly claimed Chan theory was an "absolutely reliable trading theory constructed on mathematical reasoning." The word "absolute" appeared many times. It was a heavy word. It meant no boundaries. No exceptions.

A man who had spent his life battling in markets, in his final years tried to make his entire experience into an "absolute" theory. This impulse itself deserves contemplation.

Why "absolute"?

Perhaps because he knew he had little time left. If the theory was not absolute, it would need a living person beside it constantly adjusting, explaining, responding to new situations. But if the theory was absolute, it could exist independently of its creator. He would be gone, but the theory would remain. The 108 lessons would stay there, readable and usable by anyone.

"Absolute" was not merely a cognitive judgment. It was a response to death.

Guan Jinsheng made himself into Wan Guo Securities. Nick Leeson made himself into account 88888. Richard Dennis made himself into the Turtle System. Li Biao made himself into Chan theory.

The first three were trapped by their systems' failures. Li Biao was trapped too, but differently. He was not trapped by the system's failure but by its success. Chan theory was too complete, too precise, too much like a monument. He poured all his wisdom into those 1,134 blog posts, then he left, and the posts remained.

This was the quietest trap in the entire series. No explosion, no imprisonment, no eight minutes of madness. Just a man racing against time, before death arrived, carving everything he knew into stone.

His opening poem said "ancient and modern all turn to emptiness." His theory proclaimed "trends reach ultimate perfection."

One says emptiness. One says perfection.

Emptiness is what someone who sees through illusion says. Ultimate perfection is what someone still trying to hold onto something says. These two sentences lived in one body.

What did he leave behind? A theory that countless people still use today. A blog with nearly 200 million views. Countless followers, students, debaters. These are his legacy.

Yet the deepest meaning of that legacy may not be "Chan theory is good." Rather: one person exhausted himself to formalize his understanding of the world, to transform it into something that could exist independent of himself, and then the person vanished while the theory endured.

Was this beautiful? Or cruel?

Perhaps both. Beautiful that he succeeded—the theory truly survived him. Cruel because his very success proved his replaceability as a human: the system runs without him. He spent his whole life forging something whose ultimate function was to prove it did not need its creator.

This is where the "Art of Trading" series reaches its deepest point at its fourth essay. The first three are about people defeated by systems. This one is about a person who created a system successfully, at the cost of becoming the system's raw material.

Next we return to an older story. The most legendary name among all the great traders, someone who went bankrupt four times and rose four times, who never rose from the fourth fall. Jesse Livermore. His story is the heaviest stone in this entire series.