The financial industry is all about paid knowledge content.

Author: Shen Hui, Yuanchuan Investment Commentary

Hong Hao’s Knowledge Planet has officially announced a price increase, now priced at 1499 RMB/year, equivalent to a bottle of Moutai.

The previous year’s fee was 899 RMB. Based on 14,000 people recharging, in just two months, Hong Hao’s GMV on Knowledge Planet reached 12.586 million RMB.

Coincidentally, Hong Hao’s friend Li Bei also started paid knowledge services. With 200 spots, a course valued at 12,888 RMB sold out in two days. In other words, in just two days, Li Bei’s course sales revenue reached 2.57 million RMB.

It is well known that media is a notoriously bad business. From the 31 first-level industries of Shenwan, the media sector has consistently ranked at the bottom, making this conclusion easy to draw. But in this sunset track, private domain and course sales are considered anomalies, attracting countless financial professionals to compete fiercely.

Former Guohai Fixed Income Chief Jin Yi’s Douyin account “Bainian Talks Politics and Economics” gained 1.6 million followers in three months, with a monthly fee of 4,283 RMB for one-on-one consulting services; Tan Jun is about to launch “Industry Decision Makers Insider Circle,” limited to 30 seats, priced at 159,880 RMB; a seemingly more high-end “Bull and Bear Beast Club,” where paying members can not only listen to Fu Peng’s financial literacy courses but also ski with him at Changbai Mountain.

Americans, as fellow financial consumers, have a stronger willingness to pay. Big short Michael Burry simply shut down his hedge fund and launched an annual subscription newsletter on Substack for $379, attracting 187,000 subscribers in two months. Shorting Nvidia—how easy is it to make that kind of money?

Suddenly, financial tycoons are entering the scene one after another. Is it because they have more investment ideas, or because they have more subscribers? Is it because earning money from investments is too hard, or because the business of building a following is too easy?

Three Types of Leverage

Silicon Valley investor Naval once said that to achieve financial freedom, you need to use three types of leverage:

• The first is labor leverage—being the boss and having others work for you;
• The second is capital leverage—like Buffett using capital to amplify influence, making money with money;
• The third, which he considers the most important—“copying products with zero marginal cost,” mainly including code and media.

In Naval’s view, the wealth of the new generation of billionaires is created through code and media.

Joe Rogan earns between $50 million and $100 million annually from his podcast[1]. Using this new type of leverage, simply increasing paid memberships and online course sales can magnify labor results hundreds or thousands of times. Its advantage is that the copying cost is nearly zero; anyone with a computer and internet access can easily earn passive income.

And Hong Hao and Li Bei happen to possess all three types of leverage.

Li Bei founded Bansha in 2017, reaching a scale of over 10 billion RMB by 2022. She has long achieved wealth freedom through labor and capital leverage, as she herself said, not lacking in the tens of millions of RMB annually from paid knowledge. But it’s also undeniable that these tens of millions are far more certain than waiting for China’s real estate market to turn around in the short term.

Compared to Li Bei’s colorful life of baking, gardening, and tennis, Hong Hao’s recent experiences seem more turbulent.

Early on, Hong Hao was Chief Global Strategist at CICC and worked at Citibank and Morgan Stanley. In 2022, after leaving CMB International, he jumped between buy-side and sell-side, working at Sire Group, Huafu International, and now serving as Managing Partner and CIO at Lianhua Capital.

But Hong Hao’s performance has always been a mystery.

In August 2023, he launched Lotus-AAA Fund with Sire and Lianhua Capital. Apart from a sharp 8.98% net value surge in September 2024, its previous performance was lukewarm. Perhaps due to the short operation time, he also included backtests simulating performance from September 2002. At least the chart shows that Hong Hao seems to have achieved a cumulative return of 718.77% over 20 years.

You may question Hong Hao’s actual performance, but you cannot doubt his charting ability.

Hong Hao and Li Bei are skilled at creating IP and generating traffic. Their mastery of the third leverage makes their knowledge paid offerings more attractive than peers in attracting funds.

In terms of track selection, the macro tracks they operate in naturally reach more people. Not everyone cares about what the open-source VLA model Nvidia released is called, but everyone cares whether gold will continue to rise, or whether the stock market in the Year of the Red Horse and Red Sheep will have great luck with the purple fire.

In expression, compared to the vague opinions of roundtable economic sages that make people sleepy, people prefer to listen with shining eyes as Hong Hao predicts the fifth wave of the bull market, or Li Bei analyzes fleeing from micro-accounts’ fire scenes. Even if they are vague, they can unexpectedly gain artistic expression like “MaiMaiMai”—anyway, winning means buy buy buy, losing means sell sell sell.

In content development, Hong Hao excels at mixing classical Chinese obscure characters into macro analysis, making profound references that give a sense of incomprehensibility yet震撼 (stunning). Hong Hao explained that the best articles sound like nonsense but have some unexpected consequences[2]. Li Bei, on the other hand, cleverly combines her emotional journey into macro analysis, occasionally posting matchmaking ads and low-threshold topics.

Because people love macro literature that mixes “fortune-telling” and “gossip,” Hong Hao and Li Bei have taken on huge traffic in the finance circle and created broader entry points for transitioning into paid knowledge.

All Business

Fund managers are usually cautious in using the third leverage.

Because once fund managers start writing articles or selling courses, they are seen as neglecting their main duties, diverting time from research and investment. Moreover, transitioning into media doesn’t bring more professional recognition—just like people always criticize financial influencers—if their investment ability is strong enough, why spend time teaching others to make money?

Whether Hong Hao runs a planet or Li Bei sells courses, their purpose in entering paid knowledge is not simply a transition into self-media.

Compared to Li Bei, Hong Hao transitioned into investing later, and a three-year continuous net value curve cannot be drawn. Therefore, he needs to constantly market his prediction accuracy on social media to endorse his investment ability.

On November 28 last year, Business Weekly invited Hong Hao, Li Bei, and Fu Peng to a roundtable. When discussing gold, Fu Peng’s view was ambiguous, Li Bei was outright bearish, and only Hong Hao provided detailed selling points—selling all when gold reached $4,500 per ounce.

This drew skepticism because at that time, the main futures contract of Comex gold had never reached $4,500 per ounce. Non-main contracts briefly touched that level, but for an institution like Hong Hao managing large funds, it’s nearly impossible to escape the top at such low liquidity contracts.

Hong Hao did not publicly release detailed gold trading and closing orders, instead marketing on his planet “Witness the miracle of predicting silver,” claiming:

Silver has not finished its move; the deeper the cup, the higher the target. If $4,500 is a fair price for gold, then for other assets, let’s use some imagination—new highs are for buying, and those afraid of heights are doomed.

As “The Crowd” states, mastering the art of influencing the collective imagination is also mastering the art of ruling them.

Hong Hao believes silver has formed a giant “cup and handle” pattern lasting 60 years.

Ultimately, Lianhua Capital is still relatively unknown. Posting positive reviews from fans on the planet, creating expectations of price increases, and selling more “Planet Moutai” can incubate more future private equity clients. Compared to collecting management fees and performance bonuses, short-term economic benefits are higher.

After all, it’s easy to express a “bullish on silver” view—like the two sides of a coin—when prices rise, you can boast; but “heavily betting on silver” involves multi-dimensional game theory involving the market, human nature, rules, and scale.

Compared to Hong Hao, Li Bei’s situation is different. After crossing the 10 billion RMB mark, her performance growth slowed, and she dropped out of the billion RMB private equity camp earlier this year. In an environment where Bridgewater’s China success remains strong and macro quant rivals surround her, the immediate priority is to stabilize old clients and prevent redemptions.

Li Bei’s approach is to give free online courses to all Bansha investors, and offline courses to those holding funds for over 2 years or with over 5 million RMB. Before the course starts on January 24, investors wishing to redeem are given a “cooling-off” period.

In November, Mingxun Macro products sold out immediately upon launch; in December, the 2 billion RMB quota of Two Sigma’s “CTA+Indicator” composite strategy product was snapped up in seconds across three major channels. These multi-strategy quant private funds, in disguise, form a substitute for Li Bei’s macro strategy.

Moreover, the subjective private funds’ distribution channels are gradually declining, and mainstream channels are somewhat avoiding them. In the future, subjective managers will inevitably need to invest more in direct sales.

A clever approach is to first use the 12,888 RMB price to screen paying customers among fans, then promote slogans like “achieve over 10% long-term annualized returns through easy courses,” targeting those dissatisfied with traditional returns and eager to get rich.

Fans with purchasing power and desire, after Li Bei’s offline courses to clarify doubts, can naturally convert into high-value private clients with minimal time investment.

Smart managers not only make good use of the third leverage but also excel at stacking all three together.

Epilogue

When discussing paid knowledge becoming a trend in the asset management industry, many think of two aspects:

• One is the pressure from salary cuts in the financial industry, prompting practitioners to seek other income sources;
• The other is shifting from investment to media, akin to a dimensionality reduction attack. That’s why financial self-media is the first choice for many finance practitioners’ side jobs.

But at a deeper level, this actually stems from dual needs of investors and managers—investors need reliable information sources, managers need long-term clients.

It’s like Jensen Huang’s speech at CES, which the next day was interpreted in dozens of ways favoring different market sectors. While it seems to promote information equality, it actually adds countless noise. The progress of AI makes it easy to produce more noise at low cost. For both investors and managers, attention and trust are the most scarce resources.

Who wouldn’t want to spend a little money to buy a professional fund manager’s knowledge planet, gaining informational advantage or even following their trades? Many know Hong Hao’s predictions often fail, but they don’t buy a 100% win rate—they buy a sense of emotional anchoring and reassurance amid chaotic markets through his repeated analysis and confirmation.

Some subjective fund managers are also realizing that they are no longer the first choice for institutions, distributors, or high-net-worth clients. So they can only work harder to reach more precise clients through private domains and courses. Top subjective private funds have already screened clients into senior executives or industry experts of invested companies—helping clients make money while also obtaining cutting-edge industry information.

I asked why they don’t ask sell-side, and he replied that sell-side can only see their own industry and mislead themselves, while invested clients can tell the most truthful and objective opinions about the industry.

When gold becomes harder to mine and excess shovels appear, owning a mineral map becomes crucial, and those selling maps are the most profitable.