Seven Losses

In the spring of 2026, 35-year-old Lu Yuon has spent eight years working as a client manager at a securities company, where his daily tasks involve convincing retail investors to open accounts and sell funds to earn commissions. He is well aware of a statistic - out of ten retail investors, seven lose money. He is no exception, having invested 50,000 yuan in 2022 and ending up with a loss of 8,000 yuan after three years of buying and selling. One rainy night, while working late to tidy up client records, he stumbled upon a pattern: a significant number of long-term losing retail investors exhibited a striking behavioral pattern. He began tracking this pattern and found it to be extremely common in the A-share market. He conducted an experiment, using a reverse operation method that avoided the mistakes typically made by these investors. A month later, his account had doubled, three months later it had reached 800,000 yuan, and six months later, he topped the leaderboard in a simulated trading environment. However, his joy was short-lived. When he earned his first million using this strategy in real trading, he realized that his "reverse operation strategy" had inadvertently offended some individuals. A quantitative hedge fund approached him with an offer to buy his strategy for 5 million yuan, but he refused. Shortly thereafter, his account began to be closely monitored, and his strategy was exposed, making him a target for market hunters. His brokerage firm suddenly required a risk assessment, and his former supervisor spread rumors that he was manipulating the market in an industry group chat. It was then that Lu Yuon understood that, in the A-share market, winning as a retail investor requires not only beating the market, but also outsmarting others. This is a realistic novel about China's 2 billion retail investors, devoid of rebirth or systems.