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Before 2000, Yongping Duan was well known in China by his company Bubugao Group that manufactures VCD/DVD players. Before that, his legend was rooted in a factory making learning/game machines for kids in China. In 2001, he migrated to US to become an independent investor. In the same year, he invested in Netease at the price of less than $1, which turned out to be fantastic. Although he kept low key in the recent years, in 2006, his winning bid of dining with Warren Buffett on eBay drew a lot of attention.

At June 30, Mr. Duan shared his investment philosophy in one of HYSTA Distinguished Speaker Series by a fireside chat with Jack Xu, VP of Engineering, eBay Inc. Their friendship was traced back when Jack was CTO of Netease.

Here are Mr. Duan’s investment theories:

• Investment means to understand what one plans to invest. Duan did very well in Netease since he has plenty of knowledge in the game industry. But, he missed Apple big time simply because he didn’t play with iPod early enough. He also didn’t do well in FreshChoice since he intended to learn how US corporates operate.
• Investment means to buy cheap. Duan believes in one of Carl Marx’s economic theories that value determines price, and price fluctuates around value. He is definitely a value investor.
• Fast is slow. Mr. Duan is so in belief of this theory that his eBay id is actually fastisslow. Here, slow means to invest and fast means to gamble. It is important to be rich once in one’s life!
• It is always hard to dig the first bucket of gold. Since Mr. Duan has no intention to win Nobel prize, he couldn’t give any tips on how to be rich fast.

Since the whole chat was carried out in Chinese, I am not sure that my understanding was 100% original. However, Duan’s words DID calm me down a little bit in this fast paced Valley where the only dream is to become rich within an extremely short period of time.