Here's the thing nobody tells you about surviving bear markets: the goal isn't to manage the pain of a 40% drawdown. The goal is to have no pain to begin with.
That sounds like a motivational poster. It's actually an operational design principle — and it's the foundation of everything I do with my own capital.
I've spent my career in and around financial markets — building data infrastructure for banks and insurers, then as CFO for a global family office. Along the way I've navigated or watched others navigate every flavour of crisis: the dot-com bust, the GFC, the European debt crisis, COVID, the 2022 China panic, the 2025 tariff chaos. Every single one looked terrifying in the moment. Every single one was, in retrospect, an obvious buying opportunity.
The trick is that it's only obvious if you've done the homework beforehand and if your portfolio structure doesn't force you to sell.
In 2024, I quit that world to become what I call the CIO of my own life — betting my livelihood on the ideas I write about on Cohong Lane. What follows is the operating system I use to allocate capital. Not stock picks. Not hot tips. Just the methodology — the repeatable part.
Why does structure matter?
Holding power is the one structural advantage an independent investor has over professional money managers. I don't have clients calling to redeem. I don't have a Sharpe ratio mandate forcing me to reduce volatility. I don't have a career at risk if I'm down 30% for two quarters.
Professionals cannot buy during maximum fear because their clients won't let them. I can. That's the edge. But it only works if I've structured my portfolio so that drawdowns are an opportunity, not a crisis — and if I've trained myself to feel no pain when the red numbers pile up.
None of this comes naturally. I'm still learning. A mentor told me it takes about five major drawdowns before your subconscious mind stops reacting. The first one is torture. By the fifth, it barely registers. The work is in internalising, truly internalising, that price does not hurt. Only value does. If I own a company generating reliable cash flows at a price I know is cheap, a 30% paper loss doesn't change anything about that company. It just means I get to buy more at an even better price.
How is the portfolio structured?
My portfolio is built around two core buckets — Income and Growth — with a small, emerging allocation to asymmetric Venture bets. The assets span multiple geographies — Europe, the US, Singapore, Greater China — but this site focuses on where I do my own research: China and the companies shaped by its industrial policy. Each bucket serves a different purpose with a different risk tolerance and holding period. The separation isn't about diversification for its own sake. It's about cognitive clarity and eliminating forced selling.
Income exists for one reason: to generate enough cash flow that I never have to sell anything I don't want to sell. If my dividend and coupon income covers baseline expenses, every other decision becomes optional. I can hold Growth positions through multi-year drawdowns without being a forced seller. That changes everything.
The principles are straightforward: yield must be real and sustainable, tiered by risk — from European and US corporate bonds to Singapore REITs. When high-quality income assets sell off alongside garbage during dislocations, I rotate up the quality ladder. Once this bucket is set up, I spend maybe 20% of my investment time here. The real intellectual work happens elsewhere.
Growth is where I concentrate on my highest-conviction opportunities — businesses I understand deeply, where I believe the market is materially mispricing the long-term trajectory. I hold growth positions across Asia and the US, but my concentrated bets are in Greater China. Concentration, not diversification. I don't want to own 50 growth stocks. I want a tight core of deep-conviction positions where I have genuine edge — through on-the-ground insight, deep industry knowledge, or simply the willingness to hold through volatility that scares away less committed investors.
Valuation still matters here. Growth investing isn't about paying any price for a good story. I model fair value ranges and size positions based on the gap between current price and my estimate. Even the best business is a bad investment at the wrong price. And if my thesis is about where a company will be in five years, I need to be prepared to hold for five years — including through substantial drawdowns along the way.
There's also an emerging third allocation: Venture. These are small, high-risk bets on structural discontinuities — new technologies, new competitive dynamics — where the potential payoff is asymmetric. I size every Venture position for total loss. It's deliberately small, deliberately early. If any of these bets work, they'll earn a deeper treatment in a future piece.
What does fair value actually mean?
Every investment decision I make ends with the same question: what is this asset worth?
I don't calculate before I understand. First comes the industry analysis, the competitive position, the technology edge, the operational reality. Only then do I have enough context to estimate fair value. The number is the final checkpoint, not the starting gate.
For income assets, that means estimating a fair yield given the risk. For growth assets, it means building cash flow models with explicit assumptions I can stress-test. The output is always a range, not a single number — because I'm not that precise and neither is reality.
The point of doing this work is not the number itself. It's having a pre-built shopping list ready before the crash arrives. When prices collapse and everyone is panicking, I don't want to be making emotional decisions. I want to be executing against fair value estimates I've already pressure-tested in calm weather. The time to decide what to buy in a crisis is not during the crisis.
One discipline worth highlighting because it trips up nearly everyone: my P&L on a position has zero relevance to what I should do next. If I'm sitting on a 50% loss, that's irrelevant. The only question is whether, at the current price and my current fair value estimate, I should buy more, hold, or sell. The past is sunk. Acting on it is the single most common mistake I see investors make — and it applies equally to gains. If a position has doubled and is now at or above fair value, the fact that I'm "up 100%" doesn't mean I should hold. It means I should evaluate it as if I were buying fresh today.
Why does this matter for China?
China's market is shaped by forces that most investment frameworks don't account for — and that's exactly why I'm writing from Hong Kong instead of London. I've been investing my own capital in Chinese equities since 2018, and the longer I do it, the more I'm convinced that industrial policy isn't background noise here. It's a primary driver of capital allocation at massive scale. When Beijing sets binding targets for factory automation or EV adoption, that creates something I think of as captive demand: procurement that happens regardless of market sentiment. The money gets spent because a provincial official's career depends on hitting the KPI — and that policy commitment creates demand visibility that market-driven economies simply can't match. Understanding the transmission mechanism from a Five-Year Plan target to a company's order book is where much of my Growth research begins. When the 15th Five-Year Plan set binding factory automation targets, the procurement pipeline for companies in that chain was effectively locked in for years — regardless of what the macro headlines said. Tracing those mandates to specific order books is the work I publish on this site.
Then there's the information problem. Western mainstream media defaults to "China is in structural decline." Local media defaults to "China's rise is inevitable." The possibility that reality might be somewhere in between — messy, sector-specific, and actually quite interesting if you look at the numbers — that's somehow never on the menu. Sell-side research is conflicted by design — banks won't publish contrarian China views when IPO mandates are at stake. So you end up with a dangerous context gap: investors have data but lack the nuance to distinguish structural risk from cyclical opportunity.
That's why I'm here. Not because walking into a NIO showroom in Shenzhen gives me statistically significant data — it doesn't. My sample of one showroom visit is not going to hold up in a peer review. But it gives me calibration. When I read a bearish report claiming Chinese consumers have stopped spending, I can check that against what I see in Shenzhen malls on a Saturday. It's not proof. It's a filter for obvious nonsense — and in China coverage, there is a lot of obvious nonsense to filter.
The combination of holding power, fair value discipline, and physical presence in the Greater Bay Area is the operating system. The homework I share on Cohong Lane — the policy analysis, the valuation work, the ground-truth checks — is how I keep that system honest.
What comes next?
This piece is an overview, not a manual. In the years ahead I'll be publishing the research that puts this approach into practice: tracing specific policy mandates to specific companies, walking through actual valuation work, and sharing the positions I'm taking with my own capital.
If I had to tape a few lines to my monitor, they'd be these:
- No pain to begin with. Structure so drawdowns are opportunity, not crisis.
- Income buys freedom. Cash flow means never being a forced seller.
- Fair value is the compass. Know what things are worth. Buy below, hold at, sell above.
- Turn off the noise. The market's job is to make me emotional. My job is to not be.
The rest is homework — and the homework is what Cohong Lane is for.
Sharing what I learn on my own journey to becoming CIO in my own life….
