Gooaye EP686: Seeing the Prize and Forgetting Your Own Shape

He saw a cicada, which had just found a beautiful shady spot, and forgot its own body;
a mantis, hidden behind a leaf, struck at the cicada — seeing its prize, it forgot its own shape; and a strange magpie followed and profited by the mantis — seeing its gain, it forgot its own true self.
Zhuangzi shuddered and said: “Ah! Things are inherently entangled with one another, and one kind draws on another.”
— Zhuangzi, “The Trees of the Mountain” (English rendering after James Legge, 1891; public domain)

These are my personal notes on Gooaye EP686 (released 2026-08-08). This is not a transcript and not official content. If you want the full thing, please support the original show. What follows is what the episode prompted in me, plus my own framing.

What this episode is about

Two threads, sitting far apart, that I think are saying the same thing.

The first half is a long Father’s Day monologue. He starts from an asymmetry: it has become social consensus that you don’t get careless with a Mother’s Day gift, while Father’s Day passes with nobody celebrating. He talks about how Asian upbringing turned male vulnerability into a kind of disqualification; about getting no money from home after graduating and finding Taipei property prices absurd; about the moments he thought about simply checking out of this world — and how none of that could be said out loud to family at the time.

The second half returns to markets. Taiwan’s index has stalled after reaching its quarterly moving average, the internet has started calling for a crash, and he thinks a real crash is unlikely — but direction isn’t the point. He reframes July’s drawdown as a rehearsal: nothing in the industry broke, and yet crowded positioning and leverage alone were enough to take the small-cap index down about a third, with plenty of individual names cut in half or worse. So what about the day fundamentals really do turn? Following that thread, he talks seriously about risk control and allocation for the first time on the show — prompted by a mentor telling him bluntly, “your risk control could be better.”

The main points

1. What fatherhood lacks is a language. He borrows an observation from his fitness coach: his grandfather’s generation greeted each other with “have you eaten?”, because in those years eating was the problem. His father’s generation asked “are you making money?”, because money was everything and companionship wasn’t considered important. His own generation asks “what are you doing for your kid’s birthday?” The same care took two generations to grow a form that could actually be heard — so when you look back as an adult and find your father’s expression clumsy, that may be a generational limit on expression rather than an absence of feeling. Then comes the line I found most honest: the culture is finally encouraging men to speak about what they carry, and yet “I still don’t tell my family about any of it. I hide it as long as I can. And I know that isn’t a good thing.” He doesn’t write himself up as a model. He just puts the contradiction on the table.

2. July was a rehearsal, not a disaster. This is the most fully reasoned stretch of the episode, and the intermediate steps are worth keeping. Step one: go back and check the industry — component price increases, spec-driven ASP gains, generational upgrades. From June to now, not one of them has shown signs of turning. Step two: if fundamentals didn’t change, what fell? Crowded positioning and stretched leverage got flushed. Step three, the actual inference: if overheated positioning alone can produce a drawdown of that size, then the day fundamentals genuinely change — and he is explicit that “AI capex can’t be infinite; there will be a pause” — the damage will be several times this. So the correct use of July isn’t complaint, it’s calibration: you took X of damage this time, so work out how many multiples of X the next one implies, and adjust now.

3. The people hurt worst were often the fastest to switch. This is the most counterintuitive point here. Intuitively, whoever bails earliest into defensive names should be hurt least. In practice, no. His explanation: April and May trained a reflex — you buy and it limits up the next day, and one green candle isn’t enough — so “find the strongest and buy it” became muscle memory. When the tape turned, the fastest hands did rotate immediately, but what they rotated into was whatever was strongest at that moment, which is to say the shelter everyone had already identified. And the final step of a correction is the shelter catching down. Fast doesn’t save you if fast points toward where the crowd already is. His own description: nobody escaped, you only chose between falling early and falling late.

4. From “earn the most” to “don’t lose first.” After the mentor’s comment he checked with a friend he trades with, who said his risk control is actually fine — spread out, rotating toward the steadiest names under stress, not levering up with futures. But he started thinking further out: that mentor runs quantitative strategies, and is used to pairing a long in one name with a short in a comparable one, neutralizing the market-driven part so that what’s left is the verdict on his own view. What does that give up? When the market rallies, the short side bites. What does it buy? When the market falls unconditionally, part of your book is defending you. He says that a few years ago he genuinely did not understand why such funds existed — most don’t beat the index after fees, so why buy them — until his own family stage changed and his assets reached a new level, and he understood that for some people preserving capital outranks compounding it. He puts it concretely: it’s not that the index is bad, it’s that “I’d rather my five- or ten-year return be lower than someone fully invested, if my drawdowns are smaller, my suffering is smaller, and I don’t have to downgrade the family trip because the market had a bad month.” Trading some upside for less volatility is a rational deal at that stage of life.

5. His filter for market ghost stories: translate the rumor back into an industry fact. Three worked examples here. First, a rumor that a memory spec was being stepped down to a lower tier, read by some as the end of the cycle — his reading is the opposite: it means supply is genuinely tight and buyers want product sooner, so they compromise. Second, a rumor that silicon capacitors will displace high-end passives — he points out that as data center and server power draw keeps climbing, those passive components are used in greater quantities, both technologies will find new lanes, and some suppliers already make both, so “one rises therefore the other dies” mostly doesn’t apply. Third, he said earlier that memory price increases would moderate in the second half, got flamed for it online, and was later corroborated by a supplier’s guidance — with the crucial rider: a slower rate of price increase is not weakening demand. Decelerating after a 100% run and demand turning down are two different things.

6. Rotation follows an order, but he refuses to chase. He observes a traceable sequence: the group that fell first (optical interconnect) recovered first, the second to fall (thermal management) followed, and only after that might the May–June leaders — the ones driven by price-hike stories — get their turn. In the US, money has visibly returned to software and optical; even the software names the market calls absurdly expensive got bought after earnings. But he sets himself a gate: he won’t push large capital in until some of these groups actually make new all-time highs. The reason is candid — “before a new high, you can’t confirm they’ll keep going” — and a name that really intends to advance usually has tens of percent left after the high. He doesn’t hide the internal tension either: he insists momentum must be mixed with fundamental knowledge, that knowing what you own is relatively cheap is what lets you sit through shakeouts — while admitting optical interconnect is “definitely not cheap.” Growth versus value is the hard part; recent history says the growing thing, expensive as it is, can get more expensive.

7. One market, radically different lived experiences. A listener asked why the mood swung 180 degrees in a single week. His answer is simple: the market contains several distinct populations. Small-cap traders made a fortune in May and June and were slaughtered in July. Index and large-cap holders made nothing in May and June, felt nothing in July, and are now celebrating a new high. The same weeks, two groups describing two different markets — and among those who fell, some vanished, some are nursing wounds, some are back applying for jobs. Then he adds something cold: each wave pushes the last one onto the sand. Nobody pities the ones who didn’t survive a crash, and nobody remembers them, because there is always new money pushing higher.

Going further

1. “Preserve capital first” isn’t turning conservative — your utility function changed

“Preserving capital beats earning more” sounds like something an old man says. This episode offers a sharper frame: the same annualized return has different utility at different stages of life.

At 25, a 50% drawdown costs you time, and you have time. At 45, it may cost a family plan, a stage that doesn’t come back, and the daily psychological load of watching the account bleed while acting fine. His “suffering index” isn’t a figure of speech — if a drawdown will force you to capitulate at the worst price, then your ex-ante expected return was fictional, because realizing it required you to hold.

So the real question isn’t “should I own bonds” or “should I hedge.” It’s where your pain threshold sits — how much drawdown starts producing decisions you’ll later regret. That number is your actual risk tolerance, it’s bound up with age, asset level and family obligations, and it moves over time.

Worth keeping too: the long-one-name-short-a-comparable-one approach he describes is doing one thing — removing what the market gave you and leaving only the verdict on your stock selection. The lesson for a private investor isn’t that you should short; it’s about how you grade yourself. You made 30% last year — if the index made 30%, your selection contributed nothing, you were paid by the market. Conversely, the index fell 20% and you fell 5%: that’s evidence you did something right. Most people never separate the two, so they mistake luck for skill, and sometimes skill for luck.

2. Translating news into industry facts takes three questions

The most directly usable thing in this episode is his rumor filter. I’d formalize it as three questions.

Question one: does this change total demand, or only the queue? Spec step-downs, lead-time changes, order reshuffles are usually the latter. A compromise forced by shortage reads like bad news, but its signal points at “too much demand.”

Question two: is this zero-sum substitution, or is the whole pie growing? “A replaces B” makes a good story, but if the system’s power draw, bandwidth and density are all rising, A and B can both grow in volume. To judge this you first have to ask what drives the total — if that driver is intact, the substitution story usually just reallocates share rather than killing a group.

Question three: is a slowing price increase weakening demand, or a high base? This is the easiest to misread. From 100 to 200 to 220, the growth rate falls from 100% to 10%, which looks like collapse, while price is still near highs and demand is still there. A second-order change in growth gets read as a first-order change in direction.

The three share something: each requires you to understand the structure of the supply chain — who bottlenecks whom, where the constraint is, what drives the total. Without structural knowledge you can only be carried by the emotion of headlines, because you hold nothing to compare them against.

3. Waiting for a trigger costs you the first leg — and it’s still a good trade

“Wait for a new all-time high before committing large capital” deserves unpacking, because it demonstrates something: converting a subjective judgment into a verifiable trigger condition.

Its virtue is eliminating guesswork. You don’t need to decide whether this bounce is a real turn or an escape rally; you only need to wait for an objective event. He even concedes the cost outright: “you’ll ask why not go in now — I don’t know,” because before the high you simply cannot confirm it. You pay the leg before the high and you buy your way out of gambling.

One guardrail, which he plants himself in the same episode: he uses new highs as the trigger while insisting momentum must be mixed with fundamentals and that knowing you own something relatively cheap is what lets you sit through the wash. Those two fight each other — a name at a new high is, by definition, not cheap. My reading is that they govern different questions. The new high governs when to act; valuation governs whether you can hold when it drops. The first decides entry, the second decides whether you get shaken out. Demanding both at once is often impossible, so you have to know which kind of trade you’re making: if you’re buying momentum, admit it and write your exit in advance. Don’t buy on momentum and then hold on long-term-value grounds.

A longer-run observation: he said memory pricing would moderate, got flamed, and was later corroborated by guidance. That isn’t remarkable in itself. What it points at is a discipline — a judgment’s value doesn’t come from how many people agree at the time, it comes from whether it can be graded later. And to be gradable, it has to be written down beforehand, specifically, with a date attached. Otherwise you’ll only remember the parts you got right.

One honest boundary

There’s a piece of advice here I wouldn’t copy. Asked by a listener with roughly NT$4–5 million saved, a family business in conflict, and a four-year-old, whether to take an easier job with weekends off, he says on one hand that making big money is largely decided by fortune and that character and judgment only set the upper and lower bounds — and on the other, that if it were him he’d push a bit harder and save more. That trade-off involves health, family structure and risk tolerance, and nobody outside it (myself included) can do that arithmetic for another person. His closing line — trust your instinct, and keep the instinct in shape by observing more, listening more, watching more, until you start catching patterns yourself — is the only answer that question admits.

One more thing, from the story about his mother-in-law’s run-in with a stranger abroad: you’ll win in court, but do you cancel the trip, and do you walk out of the market mid-session for a mediation hearing? Winning is sometimes priced above losing. That holds in investing too.

Worth looking at

• Gooaye — the show itself, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and elsewhere. For the full context, support the original
• Zhuangzi, “The Trees of the Mountain” — source of the opening passage. Full text at the Chinese Text Project (ctext.org), public domain
• Taiwan Stock Exchange and Taipei Exchange — institutional net buy/sell and margin balances; the raw data behind “crowded positioning” lives here, free
• Market Observation Post System (Taiwan) — monthly revenue and financial filings. To verify whether price increases are real, actual revenue and gross margin beat any headline
• U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics — payrolls and other primary series, so you’re not reading only secondhand interpretation
• Aswath Damodaran’s data page (NYU Stern) — free industry multiples and cost-of-capital datasets, useful for calibrating what “expensive” even means

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Disclaimer: These are personal listening notes and study material, published as educational content. Nothing here constitutes investment advice, an offer, or a solicitation. No specific security is recommended and no price targets are given. Investing carries risk, past performance does not indicate future results, and you should reach your own conclusions based on your financial situation and risk tolerance, consulting a qualified professional where appropriate. The author may hold positions in the types of assets discussed.

Raw Markdown

This article is an educational discussion of investment method. It is not advice to buy or sell any individual security, offers no target prices, and does not analyze any current holding. Investing carries risk; make your own decisions or consult a qualified professional.