LTCM was a tale of the brightest minds deployed with the most precise mathematical models colliding with the edge of the world. That story is cold, clean, without sentiment. It teaches us that uncertainty is not something you can eliminate.

This essay returns to a personal story. A story of someone profoundly different from everyone who came before. He never went to university, never studied financial theory, never had a Nobel laureate as a partner. When he entered the Chinese stock market at 15 with only 30,000 yuan—his entire family fortune—it was with nothing but raw instinct.

His talent was not learned. It grew from the market itself.

November 1993, Ningbo. A teenager from an ordinary working-class family convinced his parents to let him trade stocks. His father withdrew 30,000 yuan from a credit union and opened an account in his mother's name at a securities office.

In 1993 China, 30,000 yuan was substantial. For a working family, it likely represented decades of accumulated savings. To entrust that sum to a fifteen-year-old child to "trade stocks" required an extraordinary faith in the boy, or perhaps a kind of desperate gamble with fate. Perhaps both.

That 30,000 yuan was lost.

Then his cousin lent him 100,000 yuan.

This time he began to profit. By seventeen, he had bought his parents a house. His mother began borrowing from relatives to let him manage their money. When China's stock market implemented daily trading limits in late 1996, he and his cousin discovered a strategy based on these limits. From 100,000 yuan, by the end of 1997, he had turned it into 3 million.

This pace was not normal. The ability to accomplish such things in one's teens requires something that cannot be taught. Call it intuition, call it market feel, call it natural affinity for price movement. Richard Dennis said trading can be taught; William Eckhardt said it is innate. Xu Xiang's existence seemed to vindicate Eckhardt.

He quickly became famous in Ningbo. The Galaxy Securities branch on Liberation South Road became the city's most vibrant trading floor. Young day traders gathered there, relying on lightning-quick reflexes and keen sensitivity to price action, entering and exiting near the daily limits. The media gave them a name: the Ningbo Daily Limit Suicide Squad.

Xu Xiang stood out among them.

In 2005, he moved to Shanghai. He continued day trading at an Oriental Securities branch, accumulating capital. After completing one full bull market cycle, in late 2009 he registered Zexi Investment Management. Registered capital: 30 million yuan.

From retail trader to private fund manager. From 30,000 to managing billions.

Zexi's performance was exceptional. His funds consistently ranked among the industry's best. He became "China's number one private hedge fund manager." Yet unlike many celebrated fund managers, he attended virtually no public events, gave no interviews, conducted almost no company visits. He was almost completely invisible—only his performance was visible.

This invisibility was itself a constructed strategy. His methods depended on speed and information sensitivity. He needed to be faster, to know things earlier. Appearing in the public eye offered no benefit, only risk. So he made himself invisible.

His world contained only the market. He watched the screen differently than others. Colleagues recall that during trading, he reacted with extraordinary speed, as if he was always half a beat ahead of the market. He was not analyzing. He was sensing.

A person who entered the market at fifteen, by his early thirties, had accumulated nearly two decades of direct market experience. Two decades of muscle memory. Every tick of the price conveyed meaning to him, the way a mother tongue conveys meaning to a native speaker. You don't think about your native language—you understand it directly. He saw directly the forces behind the prices.

This was his chisel—he perceived structures in the market's microarchitecture that others could not see.

Zexi continued to grow. Assets under management expanded from tens of millions to hundreds of millions to billions. His methods required ever more sophisticated strategy as the capital base grew. He was no longer a lone operator at the screen. He had teams, capital flows, relationships with listed companies. Operations became increasingly complex and vast.

What a fifteen-year-old boy developed through talent and 30,000 yuan became a machine.

This machine needed feeding. More information, faster speed, deeper networks. Its operation generated its own logic, no longer purely the logic of that younger self who "sensed prices from the screen." The machine had become larger than the man.

In November 2015, Xu Xiang was detained.

Regarding the legal proceedings that followed, there is little to say here. Those are legal matters for courts to address. What we examine is an arc—an arc of the same shape as those of Guan Jinsheng and Livermore.

A person perceives something (a chisel), builds it into an operational system (a structure). That system grows, succeeds, then exceeds what one person can fully control. The person did not change; what they built did. The machine no longer obeys its creator. It develops its own needs, its own inertia, its own weight.

Guan Jinsheng's Wanguo Securities followed this pattern. Leeson's 88888 followed it. LTCM's trillion-dollar positions followed it. Zexi followed it. Every story has the same shape, filled with different details.

But Xu Xiang's story has one essential difference from the first six.

Guan Jinsheng is gone. Livermore is gone. Chan Zhongshuo is gone. LTCM was disbanded. Their stories are concluded. You can summarize them, evaluate them, mourn them.

Xu Xiang remains.

After his release in 2021, he attempted to participate in affairs of listed companies where he once held stakes. He has spoken, expressed dissatisfaction, submitted proposals. His family's assets continue to be gradually disposed of. His story is an ongoing one.

This changes the tone of this essay from the others. Previous stories could be reviewed, concluded. This one cannot. A living person, a story still unfolding—all you can do is observe the arc he has traced thus far and notice one thing:

He remains.

These three characters appear for the first time in this entire series. The conclusions of the first six are death, collapse, dissolution, suicide notes. In essay seven, the protagonist is still breathing.

This is not insignificant.

A person who has fought in the markets since age fifteen, who experienced the expansion from 30,000 to hundreds of billions, who experienced the system's retaliation, who touched the deepest abyss, and then continued breathing. What his future holds, no one knows. But the simple fact of still being here is itself something.

Livermore wrote in his suicide note: "I am a failure." He could not continue. Chan Zhongshuo was taken by illness, denied even the choice. After prison, Guan Jinsheng lived quietly for more than twenty years, did small things, then departed quietly.

What of Xu Xiang? Will he become a quieted version of Guan, or someone who begins again? Can he return to that screen, to that world he inhabited starting at fifteen? Is that world still as he remembers it?

These questions have no answers. An unfinished story needs no answers. It needs something else: a kind of witnessing. Not the witnessing of judgment, not the witnessing of sympathy, but a quieter witnessing.

Look at a person. A person who once stood at the summit. A person pushed beyond the boundary by something he created. A person who remains.

Next, we move toward the light. A man who also made grave errors, suffered massive losses, yet always maintained the ability to see himself from outside. He was the first to theorize why traders become trapped by their own systems. His name is George Soros, and his theory is called reflexivity.

(The Art of Trading series continues)