Duan Yongping spent $620,000, but what he got wasn’t an investment secret

In 2006, Duan Yongping paid $620,100 at auction for the chance to have lunch with Buffett. The question on everyone’s mind was: Which stocks did he ask about?

Duan Yongping’s own answer may disappoint those looking for a good story. He later recalled that the lunch “contained nothing new.” If Buffett really had some secret no one else knew, selling it for a little over $600,000 would have been a bit too cheap.

Why did he still take part? First, to say thank you. He said he had learned a lot from Buffett. Second, to support charity. The auction proceeds went to the Glide Foundation in San Francisco, which helps people living in poverty and those experiencing homelessness. Third, he wanted to meet Buffett in person and hear how someone had made it to where he was—not just receive a slip of paper covered in stock tickers.

Their conversation lasted about three hours. They talked not only about investing, but also philanthropy, golf, and bridge. The breadth of those topics is itself a reminder: he wasn’t looking for the answer to a standard test question, but for insight into how a lifelong practitioner thinks about life and choices.

At the auction, he didn’t keep hovering over the screen and raising his bid. He said he set a maximum price only twice: first at $500,000, then at $650,000. Once he had set it, he stopped watching. That detail reflects how he understands investing: decide in advance how much you’re willing to pay, and don’t let the emotions of the moment make the decision for you.

What he really cared about were two situations. When you have a good goal but no money, how do you keep your perspective? And when you have money but no good goal, what do you do? He admitted that he had made both mistakes himself. The first can make you impatient; the second can leave you floundering. When you have little money, you can be pulled along by opportunities; when you have a lot, by the feeling that you “have to do something.”

The young Huang Zheng also joined him for that lunch. Huang later said he came away with an appreciation for the power of simplicity and common sense. But to credit the emergence of Pinduoduo directly to a single meal is to overstate the story. The lunch wasn’t a startup button, nor a ceremony handing over success. What a companion takes away still depends on what they do afterward.

Duan Yongping also said that he didn’t have any one question he absolutely had to ask. Rather than prepare to say, “Please tell me what to buy,” he wanted to hear about the other person’s journey. That also explains why, afterward, he didn’t dress up the meeting as some kind of secret revelation.

What Duan Yongping gained was more like a recalibration. Those principles, it turned out, had no secret version. The hard part is continuing to follow them in different circumstances: not rushing to act when you have money, not letting anxiety distort your judgment when you don’t, knowing what your goals are, and knowing what you don’t know.

So perhaps the most unusual return on those $620,000 was precisely “nothing new.” Only when an investor stops expecting some master to hand them a secret signal do they truly begin to face their own judgment. Common sense isn’t mysterious; it’s just hard to keep following.