0628 Late Night Essay

The mountains and rivers shift, the tide turns—there has never been an exception...

[Tao Gu Ba]

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For over a decade since leaving home for college and then working, I’ve formed a habit—every weekend I must call home and chat a bit to feel at ease. Today, while talking to my mother, who runs a stall in my hometown, I casually asked how business was recently.

Her tone was helpless. She said business is nowhere near what it used to be. Nowadays, only old folks come to buy vegetables, a sparse few. There are more sellers than buyers.

I was a bit puzzled and asked her back: Isn’t our stall right in the core of the old western district? When I was a kid, that area was the most prosperous part of Tianmen, where the richest people lived. It was the real city center. How did it become like this?

Mother said: That’s right! Most of those people are old now. The capable young folks have gone to Hankou, Shenzhen, or even abroad. The remaining young people all hang out at North Lake Park instead…

North Lake Park? The name felt familiar yet strange. Familiar because I see livestreams from some hometown influencers there every day—the night market is bustling with crowds. Strange because, in my memory, wasn’t that just a wasteland? How did things completely flip?

After hanging up, I felt a bit dazed. I sat in my rented room for a long time and thought deeply. Suddenly, I seemed to grasp something. Then a flood of ideas rushed out like spring water—I finally understood the reason…

The old town has a good location and expensive land, but its shortcomings are obvious. Early planning was outdated: narrow roads, messy buildings, aging facilities, and worsening living conditions. Most of the wealthy original residents have moved away—to Wuhan, Shenzhen, or even settled abroad.

Those left behind are mostly old neighborhood folks unwilling to move. Without young people flowing in or new consumer groups, only an aging permanent population remains. No matter how central the location, without fresh blood, prosperity cannot be sustained.

The North Lake area is just the opposite. The government found it too costly to demolish and renovate the old town, so they directly developed suburban wasteland. Wide roads, new neighborhoods, orderly planning—living conditions far surpass the old town.

Although most local old-timers don’t favor it and don’t move there, young people from surrounding towns who have built their careers—for marriage, settling down, and getting household registration—mostly choose to buy homes and settle here.

Over a few years, the population continuously poured in, living facilities gradually improved, and a suburban wasteland was forcibly transformed into the city’s most vibrant and economically active new core.

Watching the old and new shift within a single city, I felt deeply moved. It’s exactly the same logic as the current A-share market.

There has always been a clear opposition in the market: the old guard of traditional consumer and real estate stocks, and the young upstarts of tech growth.

Many old-time stock investors hold the ingrained belief that traditional consumer stocks have heritage, history, and stable earnings—they are orthodox value investments. They are deeply convinced that these old staples are true value and true backbone. (No hostility intended.)

Meanwhile, those emerging tech small-caps and growth tracks, in their eyes, are all bubbles, hype, unworthy speculation that never make the big stage. (No praise intended.)

But many overlook the greatest fate of our times: constant rotation, never static.

Traditional consumer stocks are like the declining old town—once glorious, enjoying decades of dividends, rich in heritage. But the problem now is that growth space has peaked, industries have become solidified, lacking new imagination and growth momentum.

People still cling to past glories and old valuation systems, self-comforting with the belief that "old equals value." But in reality, people, capital, and trends have long quietly withdrawn.

New tech tracks are like the rising North Lake New Town.

They lack deep historical deposits, years of stable trends to back them up. They are volatile, controversial, and often criticized as severely bubbly. But they hit the mainstream theme of the current era—with real logic of industrial upgrades, policy support, and technological breakthroughs. They better match current market capital preferences and development trends.

So-called value is never about accumulated seniority or past glory, but about whether it fits the current era and can continuously generate new growth vitality.

Those clinging to old logic, old cognition, and old tracks are like the old folks stubbornly staying in the old town, immersed in past prosperity, unwilling to accept change, looking down on new things.

But trends never stop for human stubbornness.

Old towns decline; new towns rise. Old tracks weaken; new tracks take over. The shifting of urban prosperity and the rise and fall of capital markets are essentially replacements of old forces by new forces.

There is no eternal core; only a core that fits the era.

Human life, the ebb and flow of tides. The same for cities, the same for markets, the same for everything. All self-righteous "value beliefs" that stand still will eventually be reshaped by the tide of the times. All undervalued new forces will, over time, build new mountains and rivers.

The mountains and rivers shift, the tide turns—there has never been an exception.

So-called investment cognition, in the end, is about understanding the migration of the era and acknowledging the rotation of fate. Do not use past glory to deny current trends, and do not use outdated cognition to fight against a brand-new era.