Imagine you’re holding a 10-year wealth ticket, working hard every day, saving without fail every month — the number on the ticket keeps growing.
But when you try to cash it in for the qualification to come ashore — a steel-framed home, a respectable retirement reserve — you find the threshold of the redemption window has long been lifted out of reach. Other people’s tickets can be exchanged for a luxury cruise; yours can’t even buy a small wooden raft.
It’s not that you’re not working hard enough — it’s that the direction of the tide has quietly shifted.
This isn’t fictional anxiety; it’s the real predicament of countless people right now. I’ve seen too many readers like this: their salary rises, their savings grow from several hundred thousand to over a million — yet watching those around them double their assets through investing, their own savings erode like a beach slowly washed away by the tide.
The most vivid example: five years ago, the international gold price was still hovering around US4,200. Five years ago, RMB 1 million could put a down payment on a small unit in the core area of a first-tier city; today, that sum might not even be enough to qualify for a purchase in the surrounding suburbs. Your savings figure hasn’t shrunk — but what it can actually be exchanged for has been completely reshaped by the tides of the times.
This predicament is called the wealth-gap predicament — you haven’t done anything wrong, you haven’t squandered a single cent, but in an era of rapid asset appreciation, you — holding only cash — are being invisibly left behind. People aged 30 to 45 feel this anxiety most acutely: they watched their parents’ generation double their assets through one home and a few blue-chip stocks, while their own 20 years of equal effort has only widened the gap between their salary-and-savings and their elders’ assets.
Today, let’s completely clear the fog: why does this era produce a wealth-gap predicament? How should you actually chase the AI investment风口? How should you position your assets in the 18 months from the second half of 2026 to 2027 to avoid being left behind by the tide? And what are the most dangerous investment traps?
The Most Lethal Behavior in Panic: “If I Don’t Get In Now, It’s Too Late”
In the wealth-gap predicament, what is the most lethal behavior? It’s the obsession with “if I don’t get in now, it’s too late.”
I’ve seen this tragedy play out too many times: someone sees people around them raking in money from a certain asset class, rushes to pour their entire savings in, and the moment they enter they hit the top and lose everything. The most typical case was the new-energy sector a few years ago. In 2021, new-energy vehicles became a nationwide craze. CATL and BYD’s stock prices soared, and even people who knew nothing about investing were buying in, convinced that new energy was the golden赛道 for the next 10 years.
But starting from the second half of 2022, the new-energy sector corrected sharply, with many targets losing more than 60% from their highs. Those who entered at the top not only lost their savings, but ended up in debt.
The crux isn’t that the new-energy thesis was wrong — the trend of new energy replacing traditional energy is indeed irreversible — but the opportunity had already been priced in when everyone was euphoric. By the time everyone knows something is a trend and rushes in, asset prices have already digested the next 5 to 10 years of growth in advance. Even if the actual earnings later turn out well, it’s hard to live up to the market’s excessive expectations.
This is the underlying truth of asset markets: when the wave reaches its crest, even the most gorgeous bubbles eventually burst. If you picture the market as a tidal game, then those who make money are the ones who get off the beach before the tide recedes — or who slip in just as the tide rises; those who lose are the ones who blindly jump into the sea when the tide is fiercest.
The first principle I’ll give you is this: when everyone around you is talking about a certain asset class, when everyone is saying you can make big money from it, that’s exactly the signal for you to step back calmly. It’s not that the asset is bad — it’s that the best time to enter has long passed.
The real investing高手 (masters) never follow the herd into a rally — instead, they find the next风口 before the wave arrives. I started reminding everyone to pay attention to gold back in 2020, when the international gold price was still around US$1,900, and the market’s attention to it was far less than today. Why were we confident enough to recommend it firmly? Not wild guessing — but because we saw through the underlying logic of the macroeconomy: global central banks continuing to loosen, geopolitical conflicts escalating, sovereign debts piling up — all these signals point to gold as a safe haven and store of value that would be repriced.
From 2020 to 2026, the gold price more than doubled — from US4,200. This isn’t luck; it’s the inevitable result of seeing the trend.
If you want to escape the fate of following the herd, the only way is to keep watching global economic changes and find, in the macro structure, trends that haven’t been fully mined by the market yet. This is hard — but once you learn it, you’ll never be led around by the market again.
AI Investing Is Not a Single风口 — It’s a Tech Wave With Four Stages
Next, let’s talk about the most core investment风口 from the second half of 2026 — AI.
Many people are asking now: AI has already risen so much, is it still worth getting on board? The question itself is too one-sided — because AI has never been a single风口, but a tech wave divided into four stages, with the core opportunity in each stage being completely different. Pick the right stage and you make money.
Stage one: The Core Phase — the heart of AI, centered on computing hardware like GPU chips. The absolute star of this stage is NVIDIA. NVIDIA’s stock surged 239% in 2023, then another 170% in 2024, becoming the most stunning tech stock worldwide. But starting from 2025, the gains slowed dramatically — only 2% for the full year, and from the start of 2026 through the end of April, gains were in the single digits and choppy. This means the explosive phase of AI’s first stage is over — chasing NVIDIA blindly now carries more risk than reward.
Stage two: The Infrastructure Expansion Phase. Once AI’s heart is in place, the next step is to build the blood vessels — that is, memory, storage, power supply, data centers, and other infrastructure. The stars of this stage shift from GPU chips to memory manufacturers. From 2025 to early 2026, Micron Technology’s stock surged several-fold, while SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics also saw significant re-rating driven by server demand.
For investors in Taiwan, the opportunity in this stage lies in AI chip foundry and advanced packaging — for example, TSMC’s AI chip foundry business, and packaging-and-testing firms like JCET. But I must warn you: the memory sector’s wild rally has already entered its middle-to-late phase, with risk accumulating. At the end of March 2026, Google announced breakthroughs in AI memory and algorithms; the market interpreted this as some memory demand potentially being compressed, and the memory sector corrected sharply. If you’re only now hearing about Micron’s surge and rushing in, you’ll very likely end up catching a falling knife at the top.
Good assets also have to be bought at the right time.
Stage three: The Software Monetization Phase. This stage is only just beginning to unfold — with both pioneers rising and pioneers falling. The most typical example is the U.S. AI marketing company AppLovin. This company uses AI to analyze user behavior and optimize ad-delivery efficiency, allowing enterprises to achieve several times the conversion from the same ad spend. Traditional ad targeting only hits 1% to 2% accuracy, while AppLovin’s AI system can boost that to 15% to 25% — this ten-fold-plus monetization capability has made it a pioneer in the AI software space. AppLovin’s stock soared 713% in 2024, then another 108% in 2025; from the lows, the cumulative gain is stunning. But after hitting a historical high in December 2025, it began pulling back quickly, dropping more than 40% by February 2026. This is what the AI software monetization stage actually looks like: pioneers will emerge, but they won’t necessarily keep running.
Stage four: The Ecosystem Monopoly Phase. This is the more distant future. When a particular AI software becomes a must-have tool for everyone — like WeChat or Google were in their day — that company will become the hegemon of the era. Imagine if, in the future, everyone depends on one AI tool to write proposals, do reports, and process data — that company’s market cap will far exceed any of today’s tech giants. But this stage requires a killer application to emerge; right now we don’t know whether the eventual winner will be OpenAI, Google, or some yet-to-be-noticed startup.
Back to the question everyone cares about most: can you still get on the AI train now? Yes, but you need to pick the right car. Stage one’s NVIDIA and stage two’s memory sector have both passed the best entry window; stage three’s software monetization is the core opportunity for the next 18 months. The key is to identify the next batch of companies that can truly monetize AI.
The Cruelest Trap: The Stagnation Trap
There’s one more risk in AI investing that demands vigilance — the stagnation trap. Let’s revisit the year 2000 and the internet; the script then was strikingly similar to today’s AI wave:
- Stage one: internet infrastructure company Cisco’s stock soared, becoming one of the highest-market-cap companies in the world;
- Stage two: various server and broadband companies’ stocks skyrocketed;
- Stage three: Google, Amazon, and other internet companies rose to become the hegemons of their era.
But few remember that from the bursting of the internet bubble in 2000 to Google and Amazon’s true rise, there was a full decade in between. And Cisco’s story is even more sobering: in March 2000, Cisco’s stock hit an all-time high of US500 billion; the bubble then burst, and the stock lost more than 80%. For the next 25 years, Cisco kept earning profits and its business kept developing, but the stock price kept oscillating at the lows — it didn’t reclaim US$80 until late 2022.
If you bought Cisco at the top in 2000, you’d only have broken even in 2022. On paper, you got your money back — but in reality, you lost 25 years of opportunity cost. During the same period, the S&P 500 surged dramatically; if you’d put the money in the broad market, your returns would have far exceeded just waiting for Cisco to break even. This is the stagnation trap: the trend is right, the company doesn’t die, but the stock price stagnates for a long time — it takes a generation to break even.
Will AI fall into the stagnation trap this time? My judgment: the key is the 18 months from the second half of 2026 to 2027. If in those 18 months, a dozen or twenty companies like AppLovin emerge that can truly monetize AI, then the AI industry can avoid the stagnation trap and keep moving up. But if by the end of 2027 only a handful of companies can actually make money from AI, the risk of the stagnation trap will rise sharply — and the leaders like NVIDIA, TSMC, and Micron are likely to oscillate at the highs for a long time, just like Cisco did.
Why Does This Era Produce a Wealth-Gap Predicament?
Having covered AI, let’s return to the most fundamental question: why does this era produce a wealth-gap predicament? Why could our parents’ generation buy a home and retire by saving diligently, while our generation feels more lost the more we save?
Let me lay out a clear chain of logic in four stages for everyone. Once you see it, you’ll understand where the root of your predicament lies.
Stage one: The global economy enters a low-growth period. Over the past 30 years, the world’s major economies have said goodbye to high-speed growth, with growth in China, the U.S., Europe, and others mostly around 2% to 3%. This means the entire society’s pace of creating new wealth has slowed. But those who own assets are unwilling to accept the shrinking of their assets, so we move to stage two —
Stage two: Asset prices explode. In the low-growth era, central banks keep cutting rates and printing money to stimulate the economy. That capital doesn’t all flow into the real economy; most of it flows into asset markets like stocks and real estate — leading to a strange phenomenon: the real economy’s growth slows, but asset prices keep soaring.
Who does this benefit most? Those who already own assets. If you already owned a home in a first-tier city in 2015, or held blue chips like Apple and Microsoft, then over the past decade your assets likely multiplied several times. But for young people still accumulating wealth, this is the cruelest thing — they save hard for years, hoping to make a down payment on a home, only to find that housing prices and stock prices rise faster than their wages; ten years of effort leaves them further from the goal than when they started.
Stage three: Debt pressure is transferred to the next generation. When this structure of surging asset prices and weak real economy can no longer hold up, governments tend to borrow more and push the problem forward. By early 2026, U.S. government debt as a share of GDP had broken through 120%; Japan was at a stunning 237%; Chinese government debt was also at a reasonably high level. These debts will ultimately have to be borne by someone — and that someone isn’t today’s decision-makers, but our generation of young people and the generation to come.
Stage four: The game of musical chairs is hard to sustain. Every decision-maker hopes the debt crisis won’t blow up on their watch, so they keep printing money and cutting rates, continuing to inflate the asset bubble. U.S. politicians keep pressuring the Fed to cut rates; Europe keeps loosening; Japan maintains low rates long-term — in essence, they’re all delaying the problem.
This is where we stand today: a balloon that’s being blown bigger and bigger; everyone knows there’s a price to be paid eventually, but everyone hopes the price won’t fall on them. And if you hold only cash, every time the bubble gets bigger, your wealth’s purchasing power gets diluted.
This is the core of the wealth-gap predicament: it’s not that you’re not working hard — it’s that the rules of the game have long tilted toward those who own assets. This predicament hurts 20- to 35-year-olds the most — take an example: a 45-year-old might already have NT5 million. But a 25-year-old just starting out, with only NT$500,000 in savings, even if asset prices rise fast, their savings are hard to grow quickly. You’re not losing on ability — you’re losing on entering the game too late.
What’s even more cruel is that by the time you finally save up your first pot of gold, you find the assets you could buy have already risen to the sky.
Four Survival Principles for the Second Half of 2026 Through 2027
For the 18 months from the second half of 2026 to 2027, how should we position our assets to escape the wealth-gap predicament? I’ve summarized four core principles — each one can help you avoid traps and grow steadily.
Principle 1: Never hold 100% cash. If you picture cash as a block of ice under the scorching sun, every day that passes it melts a little. With 2% to 3% annual inflation, plus the expansion of the money supply, your cash’s purchasing power gets slowly eroded. Ten years from now, you’ll find the same amount of money buys far less than today; twenty years from now, that gap will be so large you’ll regret not adjusting sooner. This isn’t an investment choice — it’s a survival choice.
Principle 2: Focus on productive assets. What are productive assets? Assets that continuously generate cash flow and can grow with the times — for example, stocks of quality listed companies, high-grade bonds, rental real estate, and so on. These assets aren’t dead money; they’re tools that make your money work for you. Over the long term, they can keep pace with economic growth and help you hedge against inflation. AI-related investments also count as productive assets — but remember that stage one’s NVIDIA and stage two’s memory sector have both passed the best entry window; the focus should be on stage three’s AI software monetization opportunities.
Principle 3: Allocate scarce assets, hedge the risk. Scarce assets are those with limited total supply that can’t easily be replicated — the most typical being gold, quality commodities, and prime-lot real estate in first-tier cities. Why allocate these assets? Because when central banks keep printing and the currency’s purchasing power drops, scarce assets get repriced upward and become your safe haven against currency depreciation. But pay special attention: if all your scarce assets are denominated in RMB, you face exchange-rate risk. If the RMB depreciates against the U.S. dollar in the future, no matter how high the book value of your assets, your global purchasing power will fall. So the allocation of scarce assets should include some USD-denominated assets — for example, U.S. equity ETFs, global gold funds — to achieve global diversification.
Principle 4: Let time be your ally, not your enemy. Time is the most powerful wealth tool. It can help you achieve compounding miracles — but only on the condition that you pick the right direction and keep at it consistently. If you set aside a portion of your salary each month to invest in productive and scarce assets, and stick with it over the long term, the compounding effect will drive your assets to impressive heights. Let me run the numbers for you: if you invest NT3 million. You contributed only NT2.28 million comes from time and compounding. If the annualized return reaches 10%, in 30 years your assets will be around NT$4.5 million. That’s the power of time.
But note: if you over-leverage into investments — especially with high-interest debt — time becomes your enemy. Over the past 30 years, many people made money by borrowing to buy homes because rates kept falling, borrowing costs kept dropping, and rising housing prices multiplied wealth. But over the next 10 years, it’s unlikely rates will return to the zero-rate era. Sovereign debts are high, and central banks have to both control inflation and avoid rates so high they crush fiscal health — a medium-rate era may persist long-term. In such a period, over-leveraging into investments is likely to leave you crushed by interest payments, falling instead into a debt crisis.
Four Local Risks Every Investor Must Avoid
In addition, domestic investors need to be especially alert to local risks. Let me walk you through them one by one — definitely avoid them:
Risk 1: Over-concentration in core assets. For example, Kweichow Moutai carries an extremely high weight in the A-share baijiu sector, and in many broad-based ETFs Moutai’s weight exceeds 5%. If you only hold such ETFs, it looks diversified, but in reality most of your money is on Moutai. Moutai itself is a quality company, but it also faces risks like a slower-than-expected recovery in consumption and intensified industry competition. Once its stock price swings, your entire portfolio gets hit.
Risk 2: Severe overlap among ETF holdings. In recent years, high-dividend ETFs and broad-based ETFs have exploded in China. Many investors think buying multiple ETFs means they’re diversified — but in reality the underlying holdings of these ETFs overlap heavily, mostly concentrated in financials, consumer, electronics, and other sectors. In a bull market, this kind of allocation can make big money, but in a bear market all the ETFs fall together, failing to provide any diversification benefit.
Risk 3: Real estate occupies too high a share of assets. For many middle-class families in China, more than 80% of their assets are tied up in their primary residence. In the era of constantly rising housing prices, this was a “躺赢” (win-by-doing-nothing) allocation, but if housing prices enter a long sideways or downward trend over the next 10 years, your assets will shrink significantly — and you may even face negative equity.
Risk 4: Single-currency denomination risk. If all your assets are denominated in RMB, then when the RMB depreciates against the U.S. dollar, your global purchasing power will keep falling. Even if the A-share market rises 20%, if the RMB depreciates 15% over the same period, your USD-denominated returns will be largely offset. So your asset allocation should include at least some USD-denominated assets to diversify currency risk.
Closing: The Wealth Tide Favors Those Who Read the Rules
Let me sum up the core content of today and highlight the key points:
- 1. The wealth-gap predicament isn’t your fault — it’s the product of our era’s structure. Central banks printing money, governments borrowing, the decoupling of assets from the real economy — these trends together produce “asset-owners get rich, cash-holders get poor.”
- 2. AI investing has four stages; stages one and two have passed the best entry window. Stage three’s software monetization is the core opportunity for the next 18 months — while staying alert to the stagnation trap.
- 3. Survival strategy for the second half of 2026: don’t hold 100% cash, invest in productive assets, allocate scarce assets, make time your ally.
- 4. Domestic investors must avoid four risks: over-concentration in core assets, severe ETF overlap, real estate over-allocation, single-currency denomination risk.
- 5. The most dangerous behavior is panicking and following the herd — rushing in when you see others making money, panicking and selling when you see a crash — that’s the fastest path from the wealth gap to absolute poverty.
Let me leave you with one sentence: the wealth tide doesn’t favor the hardworking, but it definitely favors those who read the rules. The wealth-gap predicament is not a verdict of fate — it’s a warning of the times. It reminds you that the rules of the game have changed; only by actively adjusting can you keep your footing in the tide.
Disclaimer: This article is for viewpoint sharing and financial education only, and does not constitute any investment advice. Investing carries risk; past performance does not represent future returns. Please carefully assess your own risk tolerance before making decisions.
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