You see a very old topic: how can an ordinary person manage to reach A9?

What people call an “ordinary person” is someone whose family can’t provide too many resources, and who has to rely mostly on themselves to do most things.

The conclusion is roughly as follows: basically there are only three paths.

1、For a technology company executive or senior technical personnel, at least they need to reach the level of Ali P10. P9 is not acceptable. Annual package income is about 3–5 million, but after taxes you can only keep a bit more than half, say around 2 million. With no food, no drinks, and no spending for 50 years, you could become A9, but that’s not realistic.

Within large companies, P10 is roughly the top one percent—about 1 out of 100 people. Getting into a big company is already very hard. On average, it should be at the level of an outstanding 985 university graduate, and you also need to secure a top 1% position on the ladder within the company. That should be harder than getting into Peking University or Tsinghua University.

2. A very small number of high-level stock investors—suppose someone starts with 500,000, earning a 20% annualized return. In 28 years, they can reach A9. I know many investors who are quite capable, and by “knowing” I mean I’ve actually seen them and chatted with them. Most of those who made it to A9 are over 45 years old; only one reached it before age 40. And all of them are doing value investing.

In real life, I only know one person who has achieved A9 through short-term trading, and he did it in his thirties. But nowadays, he may have lost it all back. Online, many people claim they made a fortune from short-term trading. I believe some may be telling the truth, but I can’t tell which ones are real.

Why is it more likely to make a lot of money with value investing in the long run?

My most recent understanding is that no matter what you do, losses caused by decision errors are usually greater than the gains from correct decisions.

For example, if a friend invites you to invest in a business and you make money, they’ll only give you a portion of the profits; if you lose money, you’ll be left with nothing—nothing at all—and you might even lose the friendship.

For example, say you decide to buy a stock: if it goes up, you can make some money; if it goes down, not only do you lose money, but you also have to double or triple your bets to deal with your situation.

With short-term trading, you’re making decisions every day, which damages your energy and mental stamina too much; the more you do it, the worse your decision-making gets. Even if your level is high to begin with, it’s still hard to avoid a fate of repeatedly making disastrous calls.

So if you want to make money—or succeed in other things—you must reduce the number of decisions. Only when you find a very small number of opportunities with both a high win rate and good odds should you place your bet; otherwise, you’ll just fall into endless self-inflicted strain.

This is focus.

3. Being your own boss—there are especially many people like this in Zhejiang. In the past few years, many still reached A9. But the biggest problem with being a boss is the heavy capital investment: rent, equipment, labor, and so on. When the business is good, you can make money, but when it’s bad, you end up losing a lot of it back.

Although I can’t know exactly how much other people have, based on my estimate, most of the bosses who made it to A9 in the past few years have already retreated to A8. That’s the better outcome; the worse ones have even ended up as defaulted debtors.

In the future, if you still want to rely on doing business to reach A9, it will be extremely difficult, because the ecosystem has already changed.

For example, when the internet first took off, many people made A8 and A9 by doing e-commerce—but with AI taking off now, what does this have to do with you, an ordinary person?

The biggest difference from a few years ago is that back then, there were still quite a few people who reached A9 by trading real estate or trading crypto. But now both of those paths are basically cut off. If you pulled out early, you may still have kept some money; if you stayed too long, you might have turned into a defaulted debtor.

In the past 20 years, many people may have accidentally become A9-level earners. This is mainly a windfall from the times, not something attributable to individual ability.

It will be very hard to reach A9 in the future—perhaps in most counties, that’s at the level of a billionaire. Even in first-tier cities, only a small number of people with both strong ability and good luck can make it.

The good news is that if you can’t make money, you don’t have to be too anxious, because people around you might not make nearly that much either—at least you won’t be dismissed as incapable.