On October 7, 2025, Guan Jinsheng died.

The news came two days later—a brief announcement with restrained language. It said he "succumbed to acute illness despite rescue efforts" and that he was "committed throughout his lifetime to innovation and development in the financial sector." He died quietly at seventy-eight.

Thirty years earlier, his name was the loudest in China's capital markets. Three decades later, most young people no longer know who he was.

But if you touched the Chinese stock market anytime between 1988 and 1995, you could not possibly have missed Guan Jinsheng. He was not someone who succeeded in that market—he built it. The Shanghai Stock Exchange's trading rules were written by him. The traders were trained by him. The cross-city trading between Shanghai and Shenzhen was pioneered by his company. He was the pioneer who cleared the wilderness.

Then the wilderness he cleared swallowed him whole.

Guan Jinsheng was from Jiangxi, born in 1947 in a poor village in Ganjiang County. He tested into Shanghai Foreign Studies University to study French, and after graduation worked as a translator in a public security bureau for nine years. Later he passed the entrance exam for graduate school, earned a master's degree in French literature, and was sent to Brussels Free University in Belgium, where he earned master's degrees in law and business administration.

In the mid-1980s he returned to Shanghai and worked at Shanghai International Trust and Investment Corporation. The company had partnerships with Japanese brokerage Nomura Securities, and because of his language skills, Guan had the opportunity to grasp the fundamental framework of international securities business. But after returning, there was little room to apply his abilities.

At this stage, Guan Jinsheng was someone capable but with nowhere to deploy that capability.

He later recalled that during those days, walking home from 33 Bund each afternoon, he would cross several bridges over the Suzhou River. At the bridge entrances, scalpers were trading Treasury bonds. He saw this scene many times, and he saw something in it.

Treasury bonds had price differentials between different cities. Shanghai's price differed from Anhui's; Anhui's differed from Xinjiang's. Information asymmetry, insufficient circulation—there was enormous space in between. Yet no one was systematically doing this business.

The scalpers at the Suzhou River bridges were making small gains on these differentials. Guan saw the same thing, but at a different scale. What he saw was: China needs a securities market.

This was the most important "seeing" of his life.

In 1988, Guan Jinsheng founded Wanguo Securities, Shanghai's first share-holding brokerage company. Ten shareholders pooled together 35 million yuan, with Guan as general manager. The company had only a dozen people when it started.

He led this small team across more than 250 cities throughout China—major cities, small cities, remote villages—everywhere, purchasing Treasury bonds. This was the most primitive arbitrage, built on legwork, information gaps, and nerve. In 1989, Wanguo's revenue reached 300 million yuan.

Over the next few years, Wanguo's growth trajectory was nearly vertical.

In 1990, the Shanghai Stock Exchange was established. The trading rules, trading equipment, trader training—almost all of it was managed by Wanguo. Guan was not merely someone conducting trades in a market; he was building the market itself. This distinction was enormous.

He recruited only from the best schools: Fudan, Shanghai Jiao Tong, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics—over ninety percent. He brought in people from Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs to teach his employees. In 1992, Wanguo partnered with Li Ka-shing to acquire a listed Hong Kong public company. In 1994, it opened branch offices in Singapore and London and was planning an American branch.

His stated goal was straightforward: make Wanguo China's Merrill Lynch.

At its peak, Wanguo Securities handled seventy percent of the Shanghai Stock Exchange's A-share trading volume and almost all B-share trading. It captured sixty percent of primary market underwriting business nationwide. Guan accepted an invitation from CNN and, in English, introduced Shanghai's securities market to the world. He was the first Chinese person to do this.

He was called one of the "three founding fathers of Chinese securities," alongside Zhang Guoqing and Kan Zhidong.

But behind these achievements, a line was quietly tightening. The more successful Wanguo became, the more deeply Guan embedded himself within it. He was no longer simply "someone who worked at a securities firm." He was Wanguo Securities. Wanguo Securities was him. His judgment, his reputation, his ambition, his understanding of himself and the world—all of it had grown together with this institution.

During the rise, this was not a problem. During the rise, it was called "mission."

In late 1993, the Treasury bond futures market opened.

This new instrument gave the market vast room for imagination, and it gave Guan a stage he could not refuse. The fluctuation of Treasury bond futures depends on the preservation premium rate, which depends on inflation, which depends on the nation's macroeconomic policy. In other words, betting on Treasury bond futures means betting not on numbers but on your assessment of China's economic trajectory.

Guan believed he understood the Chinese economy. Seven years of success gave him reason to think so.

In early 1995, "Contract 327" was the hottest contract on the market. It corresponded to a three-year Treasury bond issued in 1992, maturing in June 1995, with a total issuance of 24 billion yuan. The core question was: when it matured, would the Ministry of Finance raise the preservation premium rate?

Guan judged it would not. His logic was: inflation was already falling, the fiscal situation was tight, and the government had neither reason nor capacity to significantly raise the premium. He calculated that Contract 327 would be redeemed at around 132 yuan.

This judgment was reasonable at the time. Many market participants thought the same.

So Wanguo Securities, partnering with Liaoning National Development Group, took a large short position on Contract 327.

The counterparty was China Economics and Trade Corp, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Ministry of Finance. They went long.

The bull-bear battle continued for months. The market price fluctuated between 147 and 148. The bear side's logic was economic rationality; the bull side's hidden strength was policy inside information.

February 23, 1995.

This day was later called "the darkest day in Chinese securities history" by the British Financial Times.

In the afternoon, the Ministry of Finance announced: Contract 327 would be redeemed at 148.50 yuan.

This meant the bears were annihilated. If Wanguo closed at this price, the losses would be catastrophic. Seven years of construction vanished with an announcement.

Guan did not concede.

He made a decision that everyone would later ask "why" about. In the last eight minutes before closing, Wanguo Securities began frantically selling short positions. One order after another. The final order was for 7.3 million contracts, representing 146 billion yuan in face value. Yet the total issuance of Contract 327 was only 24 billion yuan.

He was using an impossible number, trying to bend reality back toward what he believed it "should" be.

The price was driven down to 147.40 yuan.

At 11 p.m. that night, the Shanghai Stock Exchange announced: the trading in the final eight minutes was invalid. The closing price was set at 151.30 yuan. At this price, Wanguo lost 6 billion yuan.

The next day, Wanguo Securities experienced a bank run. In April, Guan resigned. In May, he was arrested in Hainan.

Regarding those eight minutes, there have been countless interpretations over the past thirty years. Some say he knew it was impossible but did it anyway. Some say his gambler nature was revealed. Some say he flipped the table on an unfair game.

These interpretations all have merit, but each grasps only part of the truth.

What deserves closer attention is who Guan was in those eight minutes. A man who had spent seven years turning himself into "Wanguo Securities," when faced with Wanguo's destruction, had no other options. He could not have said, "Forget it, let's accept the loss and I'll do something else." Because there was nothing else. He was this thing.

His judgment of Contract 327 itself was not unreasonable. Inflation was indeed falling, the fiscal situation was indeed tight. Where was his error? In his entire analytical framework, he left no room for one variable. That variable was not the inflation rate or the interest rate, but "would policy itself change the rules of the game?"

He was playing chess with the market. But the decision-maker was not on the board.

Those eight minutes were not greed, not madness. They were the instinctive response of someone who had completely merged with his system, when the system faced collapse. The system could not fall, because the system was "me." So he applied every force available to hold it up, even though that force had exceeded what the physical world could bear.

The 146 billion-yuan sell order was not a trade. It was a cry.

In 1997, Guan Jinsheng was sentenced to seventeen years. In prison, he translated articles about globalization and various countries' economies. In 2003, he was released on medical parole.

After coming out, he was quiet for a long time. He worked as a financial consultant at an accounting firm, undertook some projects in his native Jiangxi. In 2013, at a gathering marking Wanguo's twenty-fifth anniversary, he appeared publicly and spoke. In 2016, he founded the Jiusong Shanhe Fund, returning to the investment field, though at a much smaller scale.

The second half of Guan Jinsheng's life had a bittersweet stillness. It was not that he lacked desire for a comeback—the era had simply changed. The "seeing" of his time—"China needs a securities market"—had become common knowledge. The wilderness he cleared had become a prosperous city, filled with people, with no further need for pioneers.

His talent was "seeing." At the Suzhou River bridge, he saw what others could not. But once a person sees something, he stakes his entire life on it. The deeper the stake, the less he can see of anything else. In the end, that one "seeing" becomes the only "seeing," and it traps him.

On October 7, 2025, he left. The announcement said, "Guan Jinsheng's passing will not affect normal company operations."

A man who once shook all of China's capital markets leaves, and the world does not move. This fact itself may be the gentlest and most brutal epitaph of his entire life.

Guan Jinsheng's story opens the "Art of Trading" series.

We chose him, not because he suffered the most or because his story was the most legendary. We chose him because his story contains something that will appear repeatedly in every essay that follows: a man saw the world's cracks, turned that insight into a system, and then was consumed by the system.

His tragedy is not "greed." If that is greed, then everyone who tries to understand the world and translate understanding into action is greedy. His tragedy is something deeper—something that every person who has seriously engaged in trading has dimly felt but finds hard to articulate.

In the next essay, we look at another person. In the same year, on the other side of the world, he also single-handedly brought down a bank. His name is Nick Leeson. He is completely different from Guan Jinsheng, but what trapped them both was the same thing.