Who were the Cohong?
There’s a painting I keep coming back to. It shows a narrow strip of waterfront on the Pearl River, sometime around 1800. Foreign flags — British, American, Dutch — flutter above a row of warehouses called the Thirteen Factories. And standing between those factories and the rest of China were a dozen merchants who controlled every bolt of silk, every chest of tea, and every ounce of silver that moved between East and West.
They were called the Cohong.
The Cohong (gōngháng, 公行) held an official monopoly on foreign trade in Canton from 1757 to 1842. If you wanted to do business with China during the Qing dynasty, you went through them. There was no alternative. Historian Jacques Downs called their world a “golden ghetto” — isolated and lucrative. But the Cohong merchants weren’t just gatekeepers. They were guarantors. Every foreign ship, every person connected with that vessel — the Cohong took full responsibility. Their reputation was their licence.
The most famous of them, Howqua, became one of the richest men in the world — and he got there not through political favour but through what the American consul Samuel Shaw called being an “exact accountant” who valued his “fair character”. Not the colonialism that eventually destroyed the system, but the intellectual integrity that preceded it. That’s the tradition I want to honour.
Why am I here?
In 2024, I quit my job as CFO of a global family office. I’d spent 25 years in and around institutional finance — close enough to the allocation decisions to see how real money moves, and close enough to know that the smartest capital in the room is often the most constrained. In 2025, I moved to Hong Kong — the capital markets gateway to China’s Greater Bay Area — to test a hypothesis: that one serious person, doing the work on the ground with their own money at risk, can sometimes see more clearly than a conflicted institutional machine.
If you’re wondering whether that was a rational decision: so am I, most mornings.
My edge, such as it is, lies in being here — in the same Pearl River Delta where the Cohong operated. Physical proximity doesn’t guarantee insight, but it provides something no desk-based analyst has: the ability to check headlines against reality on the ground. Walking into a BYD showroom in Shenzhen doesn’t give me statistically significant data — my sample of one is not going to hold up in a peer review. But it gives me calibration.
When I read a bearish report on Chinese consumer spending, I can check the claim against what I see on the ground — and the picture is almost always more nuanced, more sector-specific, and more investable than the headline. The filter doesn’t replace the data. It tells me which questions to ask next — and in China coverage, knowing the right question is half the work.
That’s the job I’m trying to do — except instead of a warehouse full of tea, my tools are public filings, policy documents, dealership visits, and the kind of conversations you only have when you’re physically here.
What You’ll Find Here
Cohong Lane is the transparent research process of an independent investor whose bills get paid by the markets. My livelihood depends on getting these investment decisions right. This isn’t a newsletter that happens to mention investing — I call it open-sourcing the workflow.
What I publish falls into three areas. Portfolio & Process — how I structure and manage my own capital, with every position, every sizing choice, and every mistake in the open. You can watch each thesis play out in real time. Investor’s Mindset — the psychology, frameworks, and mental models behind investing independently, because the hardest part of this job isn’t the analysis — it’s the discipline. China Mechanics — tracing how a government mandate becomes a line on a company’s P&L, verified on the ground through dealership visits, city walks, and the kind of checks you can only do from the Greater Bay Area.
If you manage your own money — or you’re building towards it — and you’d rather understand how a serious independent investor actually operates than read another set of tips or hot takes, Cohong Lane might be for you. I don’t have all the answers. But I do the work, I put real money behind it, and I share the whole process so we can figure it out together.
The Cohong merchants earned their monopoly one honest ledger at a time. I don’t have a monopoly on anything — but I do have my own capital on the line and no reason to tell you anything other than what I actually think. That’s the licence I’m betting on.
Next, I walk through the operating system behind my portfolio — two core buckets, a fair value compass, and why I structured everything so that a 40% drawdown changes my mood, not my decisions: No Pain to Begin With.
Cohong Lane is a periodical publication made generally available to the public. Nothing here is a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any securities. Full disclaimer · About Philip.
Philip, thank you for pointing me to this article. I finally had the chance to read it, and I’m glad I did. I especially appreciated the Cohong story. As someone originally from China, I knew the history, but I had never thought about applying those principles—reputation, accountability, and intellectual integrity—to independent investing. That’s a powerful framework. I’m looking forward to following your journey.