Seven days have passed since the United States and Israel invaded Iran, and Iran’s spiritual leader Ayatollah Khamenei has been killed in the attack. Washington’s stated justification is familiar: Iran is evil, authoritarian, and in need of liberation, so war becomes a mission to spread civilization and rescue people living under despotism. But within the framework of what is called modern civilization, can attacking a sovereign state and destroying a different faith or civilizational order really be counted as justice? I have thought about that for a week and still cannot resolve the contradiction.
The contradiction does not end there. The old spiritual leader has been eliminated, and the United States now intends to involve itself in choosing Iran’s next one, while making clear that Khamenei’s son is not acceptable. If this is also called democracy, then perhaps democracy itself now requires a new definition.
Political instability quickly turns into economic instability. The attack on Iran sent global equity markets sharply lower, with South Korea and Japan taking the hardest hit. The reason is straightforward: among major economies, those two are the most dependent on Middle Eastern crude. If oil flows are disrupted for an extended period, the consequences for their economies would be severe.
But pressure in such a situation is never one-sided. Japan and South Korea suffer if oil is cut off; Iran also faces pressure if it tries to blockade the Strait of Hormuz and inflict damage on their economies. That is why a prolonged closure of the strait is unlikely. The external pressure on Tehran would become too great for it to bear.
After two trading days, much of the immediate panic had already been absorbed by the market. Futures and equities both began to stabilize and rebound. On China, I remain relatively optimistic about the impact of the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran. During the market swings I did not reduce my positions; I kept adding to them. Even so, today’s trading made one thing obvious: confidence remains fragile. Under that pressure I have spent my time reading, analyzing, and adjusting my holdings. Yet the market value of my portfolio is still roughly where it was before the crisis began, while the broader index remains somewhat lower.
My experience over the past two years has taught me to move against panic during sharp declines triggered by external shocks. That approach has worked before and expanded my returns. But whether that same logic applies this time is something only hindsight can confirm. We are still inside the upheaval, not outside it.
If I had to sum up my investing style plainly, it would be this: I seem capable only of earning hard money, never smart money.
I never chase fashionable sectors, and I never seem to stumble into them at the right time either. If a stock or an industry has no earnings support and is sustained only by market enthusiasm, I do not dare touch it. That is partly because I do not understand it. And perhaps the reason I never fully understand every hot theme or every new track is simply that I am not clever enough for that game.
I managed to preserve the gains from the previous two months during this wave of turmoil, but the past week has still been one of the most psychologically exhausting periods I have had in trading. After yesterday’s close my mind felt clogged and heavy. I had no desire to read at night, so I opened iQIYI and watched two films recommended on the homepage: Detective Dee: Tongtian Pagoda and Hidden Kill. The first was crude, the second a brainless mystery. Neither was particularly good, yet after watching them I genuinely felt lighter. Sometimes, when people are tired, what they need is not a more “valuable” activity to replace an inefficient one. Sometimes they simply need uncomplicated rest.
Money is hard to earn, and neither body nor mind gets much relief in the process. That hardly feels like a personal problem alone.
There is a fruit stall near my door run by a husband and wife who take turns watching it. They are there all day without fail, and their annual income is only around 100,000 yuan.
A doctoral supervisor starts work before dawn, often keeps going until 10 p.m., and gets only symbolic rest on weekends and during winter and summer breaks. Annual take-home pay is under 200,000 yuan.
Then there is a small business owner doing simple processing work. Before 2015, he made over a million yuan a year. Since then, after multiple rounds of equipment upgrades and added environmental compliance costs, he now struggles every year just to stay around break-even.
In fact, the profit margin of China’s large industrial firms has been declining over the past decade, falling from roughly 6% to 5.3%. It briefly rose during the pandemic, then turned downward again afterward and has continued to weaken. And the larger truth is that this is not only a Chinese problem. Across the world, money is getting harder to make. Smart money is scarcer, and even hard money is becoming harder to earn.
Why is that? Why has smart money become rarer, and even the income earned through sheer effort become so difficult?
The most direct answer is a change in supply. Everything is oversupplied now, at home and abroad. In China during the 1990s, if you were bold enough to borrow money and open a factory, almost anything could make money. Today, even with a good idea and professional venture capital behind it, the survival rate of new businesses keeps falling.
The reason is not mysterious. Competition is now packed with smart people and professional institutions. Everyone is crowding into the same race, and that raises the failure rate. In that sense, modern economic competition resembles modern warfare: conflict fought with advanced weapons is far more intense than conflict fought with bronze ones.
The stock market is no different. Three years ago, undervalued gold stocks were everywhere. You could buy almost any of them, hold on, and make money. Now, aside from those with genuinely smart capital behind them, even hard money is difficult to earn. Many stocks still look buyable after research, but they also carry real downside risk. That makes it hard to allocate heavily. In the end, a diversified portfolio often produces only thin net gains after different positions offset one another. One stays busy all day for a handful of scraps.
I have long believed that A-shares still have substantial room to rise. But after screening and analyzing the market over the past week, my confidence has weakened. It increasingly feels as if most stocks have already reached fair value, a large share have entered irrational territory, and the truly undervalued ones are very hard to find. If everyone is to make money from here, then the market would need to become even more irrational and push valuations still higher.
That leads to a more uncomfortable question: what is the point of making money?
I have always thought the answer was simple—money should increase happiness. But if earning less, or even not earning, could buy more free time and therefore greater happiness, would that not be more faithful to the original purpose?
The logic is easy enough to understand. Yet I still cannot let go of the pursuit of money, even when I know that squatting by a wall in the sun would probably feel more comfortable. Perhaps many people are the same: we complain that money is hard to earn and that the chase itself reduces our happiness, yet we keep chasing all the same. Maybe this is one of the obsessions of modern society—to dance ourselves to death for wealth.
Might makes right, people say. Wealth may simply be one form of power, which is why everyone pursues both wealth and power. But does possessing power really mean possessing justice?
Morality and justice are both shared rules formed by human beings in the pursuit of happiness. Both are meant to improve collective well-being by restraining behavior. The difference is that morality restrains individuals, while justice restrains groups. In that sense, justice is the morality of society itself.
If we accept that might is justice, then we are really saying that whoever is strongest has the right to decide the fate of other groups. That plainly runs against the idea that social rules should increase the happiness of all groups, not just the dominant one. And yet the gap between reason and action is immense. Perhaps Marx was right: in the face of interest, people lose not only reason but even morality.
An older thinker made much the same point long ago, though few notice it and fewer remember it. Guanzi wrote: where profit lies, there is no mountain too high to climb, no depth too far below to enter.
That may be the truest description of both war and money.
Note 1: In the current global framework, “modern civilization” here refers specifically to a social order rooted in Western Christian civilization and framed by American notions of freedom and justice.
Note 2: Profit margins rose temporarily during the pandemic, then returned to a downward path afterward and have continued to fall.