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Written by: Jaleel Plus Six, BlockBeats
This is Vida’s somewhat provocative self-introduction. He claims to be the richest man born in Zhihu 2000 and has at least $7 million in spare money (about RMB 51 million), because the transaction speed is fast enough to make a profit too strong.I have received an investigation notice from Binance’s risk control department five times.
Seeing this, many people will think that this is another eye-catching speech by Zhihu’s pretentious hero.But what if, all this is true?
On November 11, Binance launched two small-cap tokens ACT and PNUT.According to Lookonchain, an on-chain data monitoring platform, within just 2 seconds after Binance announced the launch of the ACT, an address quickly bought 10.9 million ACTs for US$320,000.After ACT’s rapid rise, the investment’s profits soared quickly to US$3.4 million (approximately RMB 24 million).
The buying time of this address is even 7 seconds faster than the release time of Binance’s Chinese Coin announcement. The buying speed is too fast and the profit is huge, so some users immediately questioned that this is “rat trading” and insider trading.
Just as the discussions were intensifying, the Formula News team issued a statement and claimed the address. Their transaction relied on the release of English announcements, 7 seconds earlier than the Chinese announcement.The speed of this transaction comes from the accuracy and speed of programmatic news transactions, and the trader behind it is Vida.
US$3 million, RMB 21 million, only 2 seconds for Vida, the “rich generation born after 2000”.
After becoming the gods in one battle, Vida was called the strongest God of Procedural Trading in this bull market by netizens.Vida himself also answered in response to questions from netizens that his current value is close to 130 million yuan.
Vida’s rapid popularity has attracted countless attention.Not only because of his wealth accumulation speed and stunning trading ability, but also because of his background, growth experience and investment philosophy, he is also quite legendary..From the subjective content and public information on Vida’s Zhihu account, Rhythm BlockBeats tries to piece together the process of starting a genius trader in the 200s.
IQ70, always at the bottom
Vida’s starting point in life is incompatible with the label he is now called “genius trader” by netizens.
He was born in a middle-class family in Jiangsu in 2000. His living conditions are not difficult, but his transcript makes people anxious.
Since elementary and junior high school, Vida’s science foundation has been very weak, and her math scores have been at the bottom for a long time. In addition, a result of 70 was obtained in an IQ test, which made the teacher and classmates’ impression of him be fixed as one”fool”.
In the Chinese public education system that emphasizes science and neglects liberal arts, such achievements make it difficult for him to gain a foothold.”If I continued to stay in public schools, I would be worse than the town’s test-workers. They would at least do the test-work, and I wouldn’t have anything.”
In the year of the middle school entrance examination, Vida gave a answer sheet that dealt with the matter, with a total score of only 194 points, which completely declared his break with traditional education.In later memories, Vida was very glad that she did not continue to stay in the public education system, but found her own advantages and achieved maximum value monetization.
Vida’s talent in language is particularly outstanding, especially her outstanding English ability and her potential for being suppressed in the traditional education system was finally released after entering international high schools.
“My advantage is that my mind is leaping, rich imagination, and good at discovering business opportunities.” This is how Vida describes herself.He found that he was good at grasping the information gap between people in a free and relaxed environment and profiting from it. This “financial literacy” has become the core gene for his future success.
Vida has made such changes, and a large part of it comes from family education.Vida’s father gave him a lot of enlightenment.Since 1996, Vida’s father has entered the Chinese stock market and is a disciple of Buffett’s value investment school. He also has a unique way of investing in the Chinese stock market.Escaped from the top in 2007 and 2015, and bought houses in 2000, 2008 and 2015. By investing in Vida’s father, he went from a foreign company purchasing manager to a freelancer who retired early and often traveled around.
16 years old, first pot of gold
This also made Vida realize that the latest business speculation will never be taught in schools, but needs to do business and experience the fluctuations in the financial market.If a person pursues money, then learning and practicing speculation are more efficient than studying hard books.
“Spend a few years to study and practice speculation may be more effective than studying hard for 100 years.”
Therefore, he hardly reads books much, but he spends many years on Twitter and YouTube, mingling in a high-value English community with more than $2 million per capita assets, focusing only on the speeches of the best traders and drawing experience and wisdom from them.He would rather describe himself as a “grassroots general”: “I am like Li Yunlong, a general born in Caoye. I haven’t read many military books, but I just know how to fight commercial wars.”
In 2015, 16-year-old Vida first tried to put her theory into practice.He used information gap to engage in light asset arbitrage, and in less than four years he accumulated his first pot of gold of RMB 1 million.
The light-asset, low-cost and high-efficiency arbitrage model has always been his core strategy.Make profits by taking advantage of information asymmetry between markets and people.This model is not only low in cost and high in efficiency, but also extremely fault-tolerant.He admitted that he tried his own ideasSuccess rate is only 10%-20%, but the investment in each idea will not exceed 1% of the total assets.This low-cost trial and error model makes him dare to take risks, and even if he fails, he will not hurt his nerves. Once he succeeds, the reward is often several times or even dozens of times.
At that stage, his trading intuition and market sensitivity first showed his strength. While his peers were still anxious about the exam, this first pot of gold had become his source of capital accumulation and confidence, and also his later macro investment.start-up capital of the stage.
Around 2018, Vida did not go through the college entrance examination, but chose to enter a 3+1 overseas university.
There, he met his peers from all over the world, and also turned his attention to a larger market – macro investment.He began to make investment decisions using his precise judgment of macroeconomics and market trends.At this stage, his wealth increased from 1 million yuan to 7 million yuan.
However, he soon realized that the traditional manual trading method could no longer meet his needs.The market is changing rapidly, and it is difficult to stay ahead in a highly competitive environment with intuition and manual operations alone.Therefore, Vida began to study quantitative trading and explore how to use programs and algorithms to automate and refine his trading model.
He knows better about resource allocation than transactions and codes
“I don’t need to grasp every detail myself, I just need to know the principles and goals of the implementation, and then monitor the team’s execution to make sure the results are in line with my expectations.”
When getting involved in automated transactions, many netizens may think that Vida is very good at code programming and digital coding, but as mentioned before, Vida is not good at science and does not understand code very much. What he is good at is resource configuration and configuration.Continuous optimization.
Vida formed a small team, including programmers and quantitative analysts, through which they translate their ideas into automated trading strategies.”I am responsible for providing ideas and the team is responsible for execution. This way I can use resources in the most critical places.”
He never wanted to regard himself as a trader, but rather to regard himself as “Xiang Yu” – an entrepreneur who charges and understands the command of the rear.”As a manager, I don’t need to write every line of code myself, but I want to make sure my trading strategy is implemented accurately.”
With such resource allocation capabilities, in March 2021, Vida officially included quantitative transactions into its investment system.He began to test how to integrate macro investment strategies into quantitative algorithms, trying to optimize trading efficiency with technology.Initially, his understanding of quantification only stayed at the theoretical level, but through months of practice, the potential of quantitative trading gradually emerged.
By the end of 2021, his quantitative strategy has helped him earn more than 10 million yuan.More importantly, he finally saw the possibility of fully automated trading – transforming trading decisions from “manual mode” to “algorithm” to defeat other competitors in the market with speed and accuracy.
Vida often publicly shares some of his trading strategies on Zhihu because he knows that his moat is not these trading strategies, but the complexity and difficulty of execution of these strategies, which is difficult for 99.99% of people in the market to replicate.
Millisecond level arbitrage art
By 2022, Vida has gained a foothold in the market through quantitative trading.But just like every successful entrepreneur, success brings not satisfaction, but greater anxiety.
That year, he met a French colleague who made millions of dollars using news trading strategies and then arbitrage through Coinbase’s technical loopholes, making tens of millions of dollars in a few months.This fast-accumulating pattern of wealth makes Vida feel “admired and anxious”.He realized that there were people in the market faster and more acute than him.
This sense of crisis drove him to continuously optimize his strategy and strengthen his rethinking of trading philosophy: speed is everything.
“Find a way to get information better than others, and place an order to buy it first. Then, when others want to buy it later, throw it to them.” Driven by this thinking, he began to take root in news transactions and was keen on.It is not conducive to trading because domestic news media usually lag behind the market pace.
Therefore, in the first year of college, Vida opened an encrypted media equation news for the overseas Chinese market, which only broadcast on TG, Twitter and Discord platforms for compliance reasons.
“What I earn is money that retail traders have lagging information and money that market makers have not had enough information channels to withdraw orders. Retail traders often rely on those slow news media or community to obtain information oral communications, the response time to a news is often several minutes, so as long as you buy faster than retail investors, you will make a profit.” Vida wrote on Zhihu.
In later memories, Vida felt that this was one of the smartest decisions he made in 2022, completing the complete transformation from timed trading to fully automated trading, and increasing the speed of trading through automated news trading and delayed arbitrageTo the top level in the industry.
That year, the global financial market was sluggish and most investors were helpless. However, Vida accurately retained a large amount of US dollar cash, and relied on trading platforms such as Binance to successfully achieve 8 million yuan to 20 million yuan based on delayed arbitrage and high-frequency strategies on trading platforms such as Binance..
In the past two years of 2023 and 2024, the market has slowly recovered, and Vida’s trading model has basically achieved true automation. His fully automatic news trading system can capture news content and execute transactions immediately, with a millisecond response speedLet him have the advantage in the strong pull-up.
With that, Vida’s net worth has achieved explosive growth, soaring from RMB 30 million to RMB 100 million.
It is unimaginable that Vida, who has a net worth of billions, has just graduated from university for two or three years and is still in control of three main business lines, among which more than a dozen subdivided business lines can be split.
Regarding the next plan, Vida hopes to reach more than US$100 million in three years and to establish its own hedge fund in Singapore or Dubai.
In his long-term imagination, Vida showed more “idealism” and “heroic temperament”: he hoped to create a myth similar to Bill Gates or Zuckerberg, who had a lot of wealth when he was young, andI want to record the whole process. When I get old, I can slowly recall my youthful spirit and give people who want to learn his journey.
“I probably won’t retire within 5 years. If I really retire, I want to be a marine biology researcher, just like Cameron, or be a money-giving up owner like MrBeast.” For life after retirement,Vida is so imaginative.
Reject the theory of fate
“Fate is random, but randomness does not mean you can’t control it.” Never believing in fate is perhaps Vida’s biggest personality trait.
Whether in high school or college, most of the classmates Vida came into contact with during her student days were wealthy.Since then, in the second generation circle, he often heard a voice: “Some things you have when you are born, and nothing when you are born is born.” Vida is very opposed to this idea and scoffs at it.
At the age of 16, the foreign teacher asked the students to write a letter to their future themselves.Vida wrote in the letter: “At 26, I will definitely become a big boss. He wants to use his own practice to prove that the saying “It is difficult for poor families to have noble children” is a lie.
In Vida’s view, pessimistic people think that randomness is fate, while optimistic people use randomness to create opportunities: “Good luck will favor those who try enough. The gap is often the case, who has won more attempts for themselves.Chance.”
Some people think that the money he earns now is given by God, and Vida has a completely different view.”I know clearly where every money I make comes from: either a greedy retail investor or a market maker with insufficient information, rather than relying on illusory trends and heavenly rewards.”
In the three years from 2022.10 to 2024.10, Vida’s real-time odds were a very steep straight line, which made him even less believe in metaphysical Feng Shui and destiny. He only believed in himself.
“I make money by high awareness + computer technology + resource coordination and team management + control of retail investor psychology + large amount of funds enough to control the market in a short period of time.”
“Encryption is a paradise for smart people”
If you only have a principal of less than 100,000 yuan, how should you start?
In Vida’s opinion, the answer is not to fantasize about making a fortune through financial investment, but to start with two things:
First, polish one skill.Choose a sub-field, hone yourself into an expert in this field, and sell some of your time in exchange for money.
Second, explore the information gap between people.Buy and sell goods through Internet business opportunities, or become a risk-free arbitrage between people, making full use of information asymmetry to make profits.
In the past 20 years, China’s wealthy group has shifted from the real estate and mineral resources industries to the Internet, new energy and cross-border trade, and more new models and industries will emerge in the future.There is never a shortage of opportunities, the key is whether you can become the first person to rush forward to grab the stall.
And encryption is a new beachhead.
“To news traders, robots, arbitrageurs, market makers and rebate farmers: If you don’t work hard under such good market conditions, you will regret it in the next four years. Use the conditions of abundant liquidity to complete capitalization,Squeeze as much USD as possible. Long live the big transfer of wealth. “This is Vida’s latest speech on Twitter.
The crypto market is a paradise for smart people, and Vida is such a smart person. He does not hide his preference for the crypto industry. In his opinion, this is one of the rare stages in the world for smart people to stand out.
“The biggest role of the crypto market is to transfer wealth from 95% of the underlying retail investors to 5% of the elites.” Vida wrote on his Zhihu homepage.
