A Silicon Valley engineer with decades of US stock experience rewrote more than a dozen classical Chinese poems into jokes about A-shares and retail investors — and the laughs map a gap between two market experiences.
Silicon Valley Jushi studied at Tsinghua, holds a computer science PhD from the US, and has traded US stocks for more than twenty years, claiming roughly 20% annualised returns over the past decade. With markets swinging hard lately, he took a knife to classical Chinese poetry and produced a 'retail investor edition'.
Su Shi's elegy, new ledger
Su Shi's 'Jiangchengzi' is a poem of mourning for his dead wife. Here it mourns a brokerage account: ten years of ups and downs, the index stuck at 3,000 and gazed at in vain, a dream of climbing back to 6,000.
Du Fu's line about the silk-clad never being the ones who raise silkworms becomes 'never the ones holding the stock'. A waterfall 'plunging three thousand feet' becomes the index falling. What he mocks is not the market but the structure and the odds.
The contrast is the blade
One poem stings most: a year ago both markets blushed red together, now A-shares have fallen out of sight while US stocks still laugh in the spring breeze. He adds that across China, 250 million households hold accounts, and plenty of them are a mess.
The target is always the retail investor, never a single stock. Cutting losses, being trapped, eating instant noodles in the dark — all stuffed into lines originally written for mountains, rivers and parting.
In the end it comes down to one plain fact: what makes a man rewrite Su Shi into a complaint about poverty is never the poetry. It is the loss statement.
Why it matters
When someone who has beaten the market for years reaches for a mourning poem to write about losses, the point is not the verse: retail investors are choosing not just between stocks but between two sets of rules.
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