Above all, President Xi Jinping torpedoed the Ant Financial IPO and cut down Jack Ma to size in an autumn when the Communist Party's regulatory diktat proved far more powerful than the folie de grandeur of Chinese internet billionaires. After all, the one sentence I remember from reading Chairman Mao's Red Book as a school boy is - "power flows from the barrel of a gun" (not just from monthly active users).

As President Xi gets set to anoint himself as the PRC's next great helmsman - for Life at the Third Plenum, I debate whether to nibble on the carcass of China's unloved/bloodied stock market. I believe the cyclical delta is now on the upside at a time when valuations in Shanghai are dirt cheap relative to both their own history and the MSCI EM indices the PRC dominates.

October exports were a beauty. Earnings will improve next year. Regulatory policy is still opaque but the surprise factor on sentiment has hit rock bottom. The property market woes will be managed by local governments and the Politburo. Risk premia in certain Chinese equities make me want to nibble, though not gorge.

Lady Luck had three special surprises last week, my most profitable trading week of 2021. These were the huge rises in Airbnb, Uber and Qualcomm, all ideas I had outlined in this column multiple times in 2021. After all, the exchange of ideas with close friends is a critical component of my investment strategy and if knowledge is not power, it surely is not PowerPoint either.

A popular local camel milk drink is called camelicious and I would call the current Wall Street milieu bubblicious as the share price of Tesla plus Bitcoin/crypto (note Coinbase is up 50% in five weeks) and NFTs would suggest. I learnt early in my trading career, after losing a term's tuition at Wharton speculating wildly in silver futures from my dorm room, that a fool and his money will soon be parted if the fool uses high octane leverage without a nuanced, proactive risk management discipline.

I never allow myself to forget that a successful investor must learn to think conditionally, probabilistically and hypothetically, with an obsession for risk management. The world is now divided in two categories, those who got Tesla and Nvidia right and those who did not. Megacaps soar in value relative to the rest of the S&P 500 and the climax of a stock market bubble, as we witnessed in March 2000 and July 2007.

So the zeitgeist du jour evokes Mark Twain's immortal observation, "history doesn't repeat but it surely rhymes". Speculative mania in financial markets has now gone from the sublime to the ridiculous at the precise moment when the Federal Reserve is finally forced to taper its liquidity tsunami by an undeniable surge in myriad inflation metrics. Robinhood bull-merede has turned an entire generation into meme stock/crypto junkies who are destined to have their net worths and self worth gutted when boogie wonderland meets macro reality.

I am stunned to see leverage ratios rise, even as the valuation of assets hits my nosebleed levels. I want to discuss history and literature at dinner parties but my friends only want to talk about money making investment ideas with me. This is sad but also an infallible SOS of dark times ahead, a Joseph Kennedy shoeshine boy moment.

Lord Keynes taught us that markets can remain irrational a lot longer than you can remain solvent. Yet life in the markets is never a simple binary proposition. The choice for me is not between Tesla and cash but across hundreds of calibrated risk/reward calculus strategies. Like Yogi Adityanath's holy cows, I know the personalities and eccentricities of each of the stocks in my portfolio and even have nicknames for them like Yogi has for his sacred bovines.

There is an old Wall Street cliché, price is what you pay, value is what you get, and I seek value in asset classes across four continents. Remember the Guns N Roses hit from the 1990's "nothing lasts forever, we both know hearts (risk appetites?) can change, it's hard to hold a candle in the cold November rain". (IPA Service)