Author: Jaleel +6, BlockBeats
"Now, let me say, I am the richest and most cash-flow-rich post-2000s generation on Zhihu, and anyone opposed to that?"
This was Vida's provocative self-introduction, claiming to be the current richest post-2000s Zhihu user, with at least 7 million US dollars in idle cash (about 51 million RMB), because of his fast trading speed and overly profitable gains, having received investigation notices from Binance's risk control department five times.
Seeing this, many people would think this is another attention-seeking statement from a Zhihu show-off. But what if all this is true?
On November 11, Binance listed two low-cap tokens, ACT and PNUT. According to on-chain data monitoring platform LookIntoChain, within just 2 seconds after Binance's announcement of ACT listing, an address swiftly bought 10.9 million ACT with $320,000. After ACT's rapid surge, the profit from this investment quickly soared to $3.4 million (about 24 million RMB).
The purchase time of this address was even 7 seconds faster than the release of the Binance Chinese listing announcement, the buy speed was too fast, and the profit was immense, causing immediate user suspicion of "insider trading" and "wash trading."
Just as the discussion was escalating, the "Formula News" team issued a statement claiming ownership of this address. Their trading relied on the English announcement, which was 7 seconds ahead of the Chinese announcement. The speed of this transaction was due to the precision and speed of programmatic news trading, with Vida being the mastermind behind it.
$3 million, 21 million RMB, to this "post-2000s rich generation" Vida, only took 2 seconds.
After a stunning performance, Vida was dubbed by netizens as the most powerful programmatic trader in this bull market cycle. Vida himself also responded to users' questions, claiming that his net worth has now approached 130 million RMB.
Vida's rapid rise to fame has attracted the attention of countless people. Not only because of his rapidly accumulated wealth and astonishing trading abilities, but also because of his background, growth experience, and investment philosophy, which are quite legendary. From the subjective content on his Zhihu account and public information, BlockBeats has pieced together the story of Vida, the post-2000s genius trader.
IQ 70, Always at the Bottom
Vida's starting point in life is at odds with the label he now receives from netizens as a "genius trader."
He was born in 2000 into a middle-class family in Jiangsu, and although his living conditions were not difficult, his academic record was somewhat concerning.
Starting from elementary and middle school, Vida's foundation in science subjects was very weak, with his math grades consistently at the bottom, coupled with scoring 70 on an IQ test, which cemented the impression of him as a "dullard" in the minds of teachers and classmates.
In China's public education system, which heavily emphasizes science over humanities, such performance made it hard for him to excel. "If I stayed in public school, I would even be worse off than the local problem set doers. At least they know how to do problems, but I know nothing," he said.
The year of the high school entrance examination, Vida handed in a perfunctory answer sheet, scoring only 194 points in total, marking his complete break from traditional education. In hindsight, Vida is very grateful that he did not continue in the public education system but instead found his strengths and maximized their value.
Vida's talent in language, especially his outstanding English proficiency, was particularly remarkable. The potential suppressed in the traditional education system was finally unleashed after he entered an international high school.
"My strength lies in lateral thinking, rich imagination, and a keen ability to spot business opportunities," this is how Vida describes himself. He found that he excelled in seizing information asymmetry between people in a free and relaxed environment, profiting from it. This financial intelligence became the core of his future success.
A significant part of Vida's transformation is attributed to his family education. Vida's father played a significant role in his enlightenment. Starting in 1996, Vida's father entered the Chinese stock market, being a disciple of Buffett-style value investing, and also having his unique method of investing in the Chinese stock market. Having survived the peaks of 2007 and 2015, bought houses in 2000, 2008, and 2015, Vida's father transformed from a purchasing manager in a foreign company to an early retired, frequent traveler enjoying leisure.
At 16, His First Pot of Gold
This realization also dawned on Vida that the latest speculative business acumen is something that schools will never teach. One needs to engage in business personally and experience the market fluctuations to learn. If one's pursuit is money, then learning and practicing speculation are more effective than studying textbooks.
“Spending a few years learning and practicing speculation may be more effective than studying for 100 years.”
Therefore, he hardly reads books but instead spends his time on Twitter and YouTube, mingling in high-caliber English communities where the average asset per person exceeds 2 million US dollars. He only pays attention to the statements of the most outstanding traders, drawing experiences and wisdom from them. He prefers to describe himself as a “Grassroots General”: “I am like Li Yunlong, a general born in the grasslands. I haven’t read many military classics, but I know how to wage commercial warfare.”
In 2015, at the age of 16, Vida first attempted to put his theory into practice. He engaged in low-asset arbitrage taking advantage of information asymmetry and accumulated his first pot of gold of 1 million RMB in less than four years.
The low-asset, low-cost, high-efficiency arbitrage model has always been his core strategy. It profits from information asymmetry between markets and individuals. This model is not only low-cost and efficient but also highly fault-tolerant. He admits that the success rate of the ideas he tries is only 10%-20%, but the investment in each idea does not exceed 1% of the total assets. This low-cost trial-and-error approach allows him to take risks, even if he fails, it will not cause substantial damage, but once successful, the return is often multiple times or even dozens of times.
At that stage, his trading intuition and market sensitivity began to show their edge. While his peers were still anxious about exams, this first pot of gold had become his capital accumulation and a source of confidence, as well as the starting capital for his later macro investments.
Around 2018, Vida chose not to take the national college entrance examination (Gaokao) but instead opted to enter a 3+1 overseas university.
There, he met peers from all over the world and shifted his focus to a larger market—macro investment. He began to make investment decisions based on his precise judgment of macroeconomics and market trends. At this stage, his wealth grew from 1 million to 7 million RMB.
However, he soon realized that traditional manual trading methods could no longer meet his needs. The market changes rapidly, and relying solely on intuition and manual operations makes it difficult to stay ahead in a competitive environment. Therefore, Vida began to study quantitative trading, exploring how to use programs and algorithms to automate and refine his trading model.
He Knows Resource Allocation Better Than Trading and Coding
“I don’t need to personally grasp every detail; I just need to know the implementation principles and objectives, then supervise the team's execution to ensure that the results meet my expectations.”
When it comes to automated trading, many netizens may think that Vida is very good at coding and digital encoding. However, as mentioned earlier, Vida is not good at science and doesn't really understand code. What he is actually good at is resource allocation and continuous optimization of that allocation.
Vida assembled a small team, including programmers and quantitative analysts, to transform his ideas into automated trading strategies. "I am responsible for providing the ideas, and the team is responsible for execution. This way, I can allocate resources to the most critical areas."
He is not willing to see himself simply as a trader but prefers to see himself as "Xiang Yu" — an entrepreneur who charges into battle and understands rear command. "As a manager, I don't need to personally write every line of code, but I need to ensure that my trading strategy is accurately implemented."
With this resource allocation ability, in March 2021, Vida officially incorporated quantitative trading into his investment system. He began testing how to integrate macro investment strategies into quantitative algorithms, attempting to use technology to optimize trading efficiency. Initially, his understanding of quant was only at a theoretical level, but after months of practice, the potential of quantitative trading gradually emerged.
By the end of 2021, his quantitative strategy had helped him gain over 10 million yuan in profits. More importantly, he finally saw the possibility of fully automated trading — transforming trading decisions from "manual mode" to "algorithm-driven" to outperform other competitors in the market in terms of speed and accuracy.
Vida also often openly shares some of his trading strategies on Zhihu because he knows that his moat is not these trading strategies but rather the complexity and execution difficulty of these strategies, which 99.99% of people in the market find hard to replicate.
"Many people find my way of trading jarring and even repulsive, but that's exactly what I want to see," Vida wrote. "Because it proves that I am making money in a niche field with almost no competitors, and the cake in this field is temporarily all mine."
Millisecond-Level Arbitrage Art
By 2022, Vida had already established himself in the market through quantitative trading. However, like every successful entrepreneur, success brought not satisfaction but greater anxiety.
That year, he met a French peer who earned millions of dollars through a news trading strategy, then made tens of millions of dollars through arbitrage trading via Coinbase's technical loophole in just a few months. This rapid wealth accumulation pattern made Vida feel "both admiring and anxious." He realized that there are people in the market who are faster and more agile than him.
This sense of crisis drove him to continuously optimize his strategy and reaffirmed his rethink of trading philosophy: speed is everything.
“Find a way to obtain intelligence before others and place buy orders ahead of them. Then, when others want to buy in later, sell to them.” Driven by this mindset, he began to focus on news trading and keenly observed that domestic news media in China usually lagged behind the market pace, which was not conducive to trading.
Therefore, in his first year after graduating from university, Vida launched a crypto media news formula targeting the overseas Chinese market, considering compliance reasons, and only broadcasted on TG, Twitter, and Discord platforms.
“I make money from retail traders' delayed information and from market makers who are not fast enough in canceling orders due to slow information channels. Retail traders often rely on a few slow news media sources or word-of-mouth in communities. Their reaction time to a piece of news often takes several minutes, so as long as you buy faster than the retail crowd, there is profit to be made.” Vida wrote on Zhihu.
In hindsight, Vida felt that this was one of the wisest decisions he made in 2022, completing a thorough transformation from timing trading to fully automated trading. Through automated news trading and latency arbitrage, he elevated his trading speed to the industry's top level.
That year, the global financial market was sluggish, leaving most investors at a loss, but Vida accurately held a large amount of US dollars and relied on latency arbitrage and high-frequency strategies on platforms like Binance to turn 8 million yuan into 20 million yuan.
By 2023 and 2024, as the market gradually recovered, Vida's trading model had essentially achieved true automation, and his fully automated news trading system could fetch news content and immediately execute trades. His millisecond-level response speed allowed him to take full advantage during a strong bull market.
As a result, Vida's net worth experienced explosive growth, soaring from 30 million yuan to 100 million yuan.
It is unimaginable that at this point with a net worth of hundreds of millions, Vida had just graduated from university two or three years ago, still in control of three main business lines, each of which could be further subdivided into a dozen or more niche business lines.
Looking ahead, Vida hopes to grow his assets to over $100 million within 3 years and establish his own hedge fund in Singapore or Dubai.
On long-term visions, Vida has shown more “idealism” and “heroic qualities”: he hopes to create a myth similar to Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg, possessing a large amount of wealth at a young age and aims to document the entire process, so that when he grows older, he can slowly reminisce about his youthful vigor and provide a reference for those who wish to learn from his journey.
「I shouldn't be retiring within 5 years. If I do retire, I'd like to become a marine biologist, just like Cameron, or become a YouTuber who gives away money similar to MrBeast.」 This is how Vida envisions his post-retirement life.
Rejecting Fatalism
「Fate is random, but randomness does not mean you cannot control it.」 Not believing in fate may be Vida's biggest personality trait.
Whether in high school or college, most of the classmates Vida encountered came from wealthy families. Back then, within the second-generation circle, he often heard a voice saying, 「Some things you are born with, some things you are not.」 Vida strongly opposes this mindset and scoffs at it.
At the age of 16, a foreign teacher asked students to write a letter to their future selves. In the letter, Vida wrote: 「At 26, I will definitely become a big boss.」 He wanted to use his own experience to prove that the saying 「Children of humble origins find it hard to become important」 is a lie.
In Vida's view, pessimistic people believe randomness is fate, while optimistic people use randomness to create opportunities: 「Good luck favors those who try enough. The difference often lies in who fights for more opportunities to try.」
Some believe that the money he is making now is a gift from God, but Vida has a completely different view. 「I know exactly where every penny I earn comes from: either from greedy retail investors or from slow-to-react market makers, not from some ethereal trend or heavenly reward.」
From October 2022 to October 2024, Vida's live trading odds have been a very steep straight line, which makes him even more disbelieve in any mystical geomancy or predestination; he only believes in himself.
「The way I make money relies on self-awareness + computer technology + resource allocation and team management + understanding retail investor psychology + having a large enough fund to manipulate the market in a short time.」
「Crypto is the Playground of the Intelligent」
If you have less than 100,000 RMB in capital, how should you get started?
In Vida's opinion, the answer is not to fantasize about getting rich through financial investments but to start with two things:
First, hone a specific skill. Choose a niche field, become an expert in that field, and use selling part of your time to exchange for money.
Second, mine the information gap between people. Seize online business opportunities by arbitraging goods or becoming a risk-free arbitrager between individuals, taking full advantage of asymmetric information for profit.
Over the past 20 years, China's wealthy elite has shifted from the real estate and mining industries to the internet, new energy, and cross-border trade, with more new models and industries set to emerge in the future. Opportunities are always abundant, the key is whether one can be the first to rush in and seize the opportunity.
And cryptocurrency is a new beachhead.
"To news traders, bots, arbitrators, market makers, and rebate farmers: if you don't strive in such favorable market conditions, you will regret it in the next four years. Capitalize on the abundant liquidity, squeeze out as much USD as possible. Long live the wealth transfer." This is Vida's latest statement on Twitter.
The cryptocurrency market is a playground for smart people, and Vida is one such smart person. He does not hide his love for the crypto industry, seeing it as a rare global stage where smart people can stand out.
"The biggest role of the cryptocurrency market is to transfer wealth from 95% of the grassroots retail investors to the 5% elite." This is how Vida wrote about it on his Zhihu page.
