Same stocks, same decade: US up 13%, China down 10%珍爱生命，远离A股！

Through the first nine months of 2026 the S&P 500 gained 13.4% while the CSI 300 lost 9.8%, a 23-point gap the author uses to renew his case for abandoning Chinese stocks.

The author is a software engineer in Silicon Valley who has been writing about money for over twenty years. This year he has been watching one number: the S&P 500 up 13.4%, the CSI 300 down 9.8%.

This is not a one-year story

The last time the gap looked this ugly was 2023: US up 26.3%, CSI 300 down 9.1%, a 35-point spread. That was the year he started telling Chinese readers online to sell their A-shares and buy US index funds instead.

Stretch it to ten years and convert everything to dollars, and the S&P 500 returns 15.5% a year against 4.7% for the CSI 300. Ten points a year, compounded, adds up to two different lives.

The people getting stuck are people you know

A friend mentioned the other day that her college classmate back home had lost 500,000 yuan in A-shares, trapped in a junk company with no way out. The author dashed off a little doggerel: some get rich on US stocks, some stay stuck in Myanmar-style A-shares.

His advice comes in three lines: stay away from A-shares, stay away from Chinese ADRs, and write 'never touch A-shares' into the family rules. He even ranks the three unfilial acts of investing: betting on A-shares, betting against the US, and buying the dip in Hong Kong.

One commenter went further: the thing should never have been called a 'stock market' at all. A stock market belongs to a free capital market; a better name would be 'ancient Chinese luck-pulling, enter at your own risk'.

Ten years of divergence, landing on one person, is 500,000 yuan and one exit you can no longer take.