Someone asked whether PONS was still worth holding after the gain shrank from 90% to 30%. That question pushed the author back to an old rule they trust: position size has to match conviction.
The author said they had already talked about PONS in two recent articles: a Sept. 8 piece titled PONS Review: Speculation Is Betting on Luck, Investment Is Waiting Until You Can See Clearly, and a Sept. 22 piece titled PONS, Investment vs. Speculation, and a Look Back at UNI. In the author’s view, those two articles had already spelled out the stance.
Large positions require clarity on long-term earnings power
In the first article, the author quoted Duan Yongping and said he only builds a big position after he has truly figured out the target, especially when he can tell it will keep making money for a long time. If he cannot find something like that, or if the price is already too high when he finally does, he would rather let it go than force the buy.
The author said that standard is theirs too.
Using that same lens, the author pointed back to the second article. For a time frame within one year, the author wrote: "If 'what comes next' means a period of less than one year, then I think trying to judge how a project's fundamentals will change from its birth through the following year — things like moat, cash flow, profit model, and other business and financial metrics — is very close to gambling, or at least something where luck carries a huge weight."
The author also wrote: "Looking at today's PONS from that angle, the logic is the same. If you want to judge what its fundamentals will look like one year from now or even further out — for example, whether profits will continue, whether the pullback will continue, whether the team has resilience, or whether the business model has a moat — I think the difficulty is still very high."
So the takeaway was plain. Short horizon or long one, the author said it is very hard, under current conditions, to judge PONS' future profitability. And if profitability cannot be judged, then investment value cannot be judged either. Which means the next investment move cannot be judged with real confidence.
A more important question than whether to hold
Rather than beginning with whether PONS should still be held, the author said the better starting point is simpler: why was it bought at all?
If it was bought just for fun, or as a tiny test, then the position should never have been large. It should have been limited to money the investor could afford to lose. In that case, the author said, what matters more is the experience and the lesson from taking part, not obsessing right away over profit and loss.
If a large amount of capital was put in, then, in the author’s words, that is gambling, not the investment question being discussed here.
And if it was a heavy position, then the investor should keep pushing and ask why that target deserved size in the first place.
Behavior can reveal whether a heavy position was reliable
The author then brought up a July 22 article titled How to Judge Whether Your Heavy Position Is Reliable. That piece listed more than a dozen standards. And according to the author, tripping even one of them is already a red flag that the position may not be reliable.
The author singled out two of those standards:
- "Fifth, after taking a heavy position in a target, you go to all kinds of forums and ask people in the comments whether they are also bullish on it."
- "Ninth, the price of the target in which you hold a heavy position falls, and you immediately panic and start wondering whether you should sell."
The author said that even if someone checks those standards and finds none of those problems showed up when the position was built, that still does not prove the trade was 100% reliable. But it does suggest they would be less likely to ask the kind of question raised here.
On the flip side, if any of those warning signs did show up, then the original decision to go heavy was probably not very reliable. Put bluntly, it would count as a mistake.
Correcting mistakes can be painful
The author wrote that everybody makes mistakes. The real issue is not whether mistakes exist. It is whether someone acts after seeing them clearly.
As for what correction looks like in real life, the author recommended Duan Yongping’s investment Q&A collection. In that material, the author said, Duan Yongping repeatedly talked from personal experience about how painful it was to correct mistakes, even when those choices later turned out to be right.
The article closed with one last contrast. If an investor buys something they do not actually understand, then even buying Bitcoin and Ether at $10 would not guarantee big profits in the end.
But if the investor buys something they truly do understand, then even if it only doubles, the money is earned with more peace of mind and more stability.
A disclaimer at the end said markets carry risk and investors should stay cautious. The article is not investment advice, and readers should judge for themselves whether any opinion, view, or conclusion in the piece fits their own situation before making investment decisions at their own risk.
