Some say the most valuable part of the A-share market isn't the listed companies, but those retail investors who bottom-fish year after year.

The data doesn't lie: last year, certain institutions took away 850 billion, private placements sucked up 744.1 billion, and IPOs raised another 66.8 billion—all three figures hitting three-year highs. They talk about "common prosperity," but their actions are nothing short of precision harvesting.

The most ironic part is the valuation game. Moore Threads loses billions every year, but gets a 300 billion market cap right at listing; Cambricon just turned a profit with only a few billion in revenue, and its valuation shot up to 600 billion. Compare that to Microsoft when it went public in 1986: $500 million market cap, P/E ratio of just 3. Now? As long as you slap on a "hard tech" label, people are fighting over P/Es in the hundreds or even thousands. Who can resist that kind of temptation? After all, working a lifetime at a company can't compare to cashing out after going public.

There were people willing to catch PetroChina at 48 yuan, chase China Shipbuilding at 300, LeTV at 200, and Alltronics Education at 500... Every generation has its own batch of "bag holder" stocks. Retail investors are like chives—harvest one crop, another grows back, like a perpetual motion machine.

Have you figured it out yet? All those wealth creation legends in the secondary market—take away dividends, and the profits all come from the losses of retail investors. Value investing isn't just chicken soup for the soul; it's the only way for ordinary people to break out of the cycle. The sooner you wake up, the better. If you're too late, you won't even get the soup.