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2017.10.09
Yuval Noah Harari, author of the critically acclaimed New York Times best seller and international phenomenon Sapiens, returns with an equally original, compelling, and provocative book, turning his focus toward humanity's future and our quest to upgrade humans into gods. Although technology upgrades bring about unemployment, over the past decades, humankind has managed to do the impossible and rein in famine, plague, and war. The world thus embraces unprecedented prosperity. Upgrade human bodies, improving intelligence, overcoming death and creating artificial life have replaced famine, plague and war and are now at the top of the human agenda.
In Animal Spirits, acclaimed economists George Akerlof and Robert Shiller challenge the wrong economic wisdom, and put forward a bold new vision that will transform economics and restore prosperity. As they expect, people tend to have the blind faith in ever-rising housing prices and are fully convinced that the real estate industry is the best destination of investment. They are given the false impression that the higher the housing price is, the easier to gain from their investment. Shiller also details the challenges in China’s real estate market. The exorbitant property prices have fostered enormous speculative trades. Animal Spirits offers a road map for reversing the financial misfortunes besetting us, and enable readers to channel the powerful forces of human psychology that are afoot in the world economy.
Fooled by Randomness is a stand-alone book in Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s landmark Incerto series which includes The Black Swan, Antifragile, Skin in the Game, and The Bed of Procrustes. Fooled by Randomness is based on an investigation of opacity, luck, uncertainty, probability, human error, risk, and decision-making in a world we don’t understand. It will change the way people perceive business and the world. In this book, Taleb expresses that most people underestimate the influence of happenstance on our lives. Fooled by Randomness provides captivating insight into one of the least understood factors in life. It warns that one should never look at the future through a rear-view mirror.
If you are in Paris Louvre, you are surely recommended the three treasures, namely the Mona Lisa, the Goddess of the Victory and Venus de Milo. But if you are not willing to travel far, we recommend you this masterpiece of western art history. To Everyone's Western Art History is a number one go-to-guide of western arts. It makes the complicated notions of arts accessible to general readers. Jiang Xun looks beyond the paintings themselves and unveils the humanity and lives beneath those works.
Rewritten by: Luo Xinying, Edited by: Du Zhixin, Wei Yiy
Over the past year, the bull market returned, with technology leading the way.
As I said back in October 2024, the rally that began on September 24 was not merely a rebound, but a reversal. Since then, China's capital markets have undergone a broad revaluation, moving from undervaluation toward fair value.
The Shanghai Composite Index reached its highest level in a decade. The "Yi-Zhong-Tian" trio—Eoptolink, Zhongji Innolight and TFC Communication, three prominent Chinese optical communications stocks—saw their share prices multiply severalfold in a single year. Cambricon's market capitalization briefly exceeded RMB 600 billion. Elsewhere in the technology sector, triple-digit price-to-earnings ratios and valuations exceeding RMB 10 billion became commonplace.
Some investors were greedy; others, fearful. Still others asked me: Are technology stocks in a valuation bubble?
My answer is that what we are witnessing is the hunger and anxiety of an era, reflected in the capital markets. Once you understand this, the current fervor for technology investing is no longer difficult to explain.
Investment has nothing to do with macroeconomics, but everything to do with geopolitics.
China-US relations will shape the investment landscape for decades to come. Geopolitics has played a major role in shaping the hunger and anxiety of our times, fundamentally reshaping the way we invest.
What, then, lies at the heart of China's hunger and anxiety?
The Fourth Industrial Revolution is already underway, yet China has not fully overcome the technological shortcomings left by the Third. There is no time to lose.
This is why some people wonder: Why do Chinese computing chip companies command such high valuations when their technologies still lag so far behind NVIDIA's? Why does NVIDIA trade at just 50 times earnings, while a company hailed as "China's answer to NVIDIA" commands a multiple of 300?
To me, this gets the logic exactly backward.
It is precisely because these companies cannot catch up with NVIDIA in the near term that they command a higher strategic premium. The wider the technological gap, the greater the strategic value.
The further something lies beyond our reach, the stronger our hunger. The harder it is to catch up, the deeper our anxiety. If China were to achieve a complete breakthrough in computing chips one day, valuations might actually come down.
Where can one find China's most spectacular natural landscapes?
Much of the answer, I believe, lies in and around the Hengduan Mountains: the Meili Snow Mountains, Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, Mount Gongga, Mount Siguniang, Jiuzhaigou, and many others. Vast differences in elevation and deep fault lines have given rise to landscapes of extraordinary grandeur.
Hard-tech investing follows a similar logic.
Technological gaps, discontinuities in capabilities, and missing links in industrial systems: a leap in difficulty brings a leap in valuation, and a successful breakthrough can, in turn, bring a leap in returns.
This logic extends well beyond computing chips. It is equally evident in memory semiconductors, commercial spaceflight, and other sectors where China still faces substantial technological gaps with other countries.
It was precisely this conviction that led CoStone Capital, starting in 2016, to decisively focus its investments on three areas: hard tech, emerging industries, and life sciences and healthcare. In this context, "hard tech" refers specifically to important industries in which China faces a technological gap with the United States.
Thanks to this forward-looking strategy, CoStone Capital established an early presence across the full value chains of key sectors, including semiconductors, artificial intelligence, and robotics.
Looking ahead, the frontiers of technological progress and industrial upgrading are boundless. Nor can the gaps in hard technology be closed overnight. The twin windows of opportunity presented by technological innovation and the development of homegrown alternatives to foreign technologies have only just begun to open.
The road ahead is long, but the future holds immense promise.
As an investment firm, CoStone Capital will continue to invest where the hunger and anxiety of each era run deepest, move forward with the tensions that shape our times, and extend our reach toward the most challenging—and most important—frontiers.
Spring 2026