Written by: Jaleel Jialiu , BlockBeats
“Now I say that I am the richest post-00s with the most cash flow, which can be verified on Zhihu. Does anyone object?”
This is Vida's somewhat provocative self-introduction. He claims to be the richest person born in the 2000s on Zhihu, with at least 7 million US dollars in spare money (about 51 million RMB). Because of his fast trading speed and huge profits, he has received five investigation notices from Binance's risk control department.
Seeing this, many people would think that this is another eye-catching statement by a Zhihu pretentious person. But what if all this is true?
On November 11, Binance launched two small-cap tokens, ACT and PNUT. According to the on-chain data monitoring platform Lookonchain, within just 2 seconds after Binance announced the launch of ACT, one address quickly bought 10.9 million ACTs for $320,000. After ACT rose rapidly, the profit of this investment quickly soared to $3.4 million (about RMB 24 million).
The purchase time of this address was even 7 seconds faster than the release time of Binance’s Chinese coin listing announcement. The purchase speed was too fast and the profit was huge, so some users immediately questioned whether this was "rat trading" and insider trading.
As the discussion intensified, the "Formula News" team issued a statement and claimed the address. Their transaction relied on the release of the English announcement, which was 7 seconds earlier than the Chinese announcement. The speed of this transaction was due to the accuracy and speed of programmatic news trading, and the trader behind it was Vida.
3 million US dollars, 21 million RMB, for Vida, a "post-00s rich generation", it only takes 2 seconds.
After becoming a god in one battle, Vida was called the strongest algorithm trading god in this round of bull market by netizens. Vida himself also answered questions from netizens and said that his current net worth is close to 130 million yuan.
Vida's rapid rise to fame has attracted countless people's attention. Not only because of his wealth accumulation speed and astonishing trading ability, but also because of his legendary background, growth experience and investment philosophy . From the subjective content and public information on Vida's Zhihu account , BlockBeats tried to piece together the rise of this post-00s genius trader.
IQ70, always at the bottom
Vida's starting point in life is inconsistent with the label of "genius trader" that netizens now call him.
He was born in 2000 in a middle-class family in Jiangsu. His living conditions were not difficult, but his transcript was somewhat worrying.
Since elementary school and junior high school, Vida's foundation in science was very weak, and his math scores were always at the bottom. In addition, he got a result of 70 in an IQ test, which made his teachers and classmates think of him as a "fool".
In China's public education system, which emphasizes science over liberal arts, such grades make it difficult for him to gain a foothold. "If I continue to stay in public school, I will not be as good as the small town test-taker. They can at least do the test, but I can't do anything."
In the year of the high school entrance examination, Vida submitted a perfunctory answer sheet with a total score of only 194 points, which completely announced his break with traditional education. In later memories, Vida was very glad that he did not continue to stay in the public education system, but found his own advantages and realized the maximum value.
Vida has an outstanding talent in languages, especially in English. Her potential, which was suppressed in the traditional education system, was finally released after she entered an international high school.
"My strengths are my quick thinking, rich imagination, and my ability to spot business opportunities." This is how Vida describes himself. He found that he was good at seizing the information gap between people in a free and relaxed environment and profiting from it. This "financial intelligence" became the core gene for his future success.
Vida's transformation is largely due to his family education. Vida's father has done a lot of enlightenment for him. Since 1996, Vida's father has entered the Chinese stock market. He is a disciple of Buffett's value investment school and has his own unique method of investing in the Chinese stock market. He escaped the peaks in 2007 and 2015, bought houses in 2000, 2008 and 2015, and relied on investment to transform Vida's father from a purchasing manager of a foreign company into a free man who retires early and travels frequently.
16 years old, first pot of gold
This also made Vida realize that the latest business speculation will never be taught in school, but needs to be practiced by doing business in person and feeling the fluctuations of the financial market. If a person pursues money, then learning and practicing speculation is more efficient than studying hard.
“Spending a few years learning and practicing speculation may be more effective than studying hard for 100 years.”
Therefore, he hardly reads books, but he often browses Twitter and YouTube, hanging out in high-value English communities where the average asset per person exceeds $2 million, and only pays attention to the speeches of the best traders, from whom he draws experience and wisdom. He prefers to describe himself as a "grassroots general": "I am like Li Yunlong, a general born in the grass. I haven't read many military books, but I know how to fight business battles."
In 2015, 16-year-old Vida tried to put his theory into practice for the first time. He took advantage of information gaps to engage in light asset arbitrage, and in less than four years, he accumulated his first pot of gold of 1 million RMB.
The asset-light, low-cost, high-efficiency arbitrage model has always been his core strategy. He makes profits by taking advantage of information asymmetry between markets and between people. 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 will not exceed 1% of the total assets. This low-cost trial-and-error model allows him to take risks, and even if he fails, he will not suffer any serious consequences. Once he succeeds, the return is often several times or even dozens of times.
At that stage, his trading intuition and market sensitivity began to emerge. When his peers were still anxious about exams, this first pot of gold had become his capital accumulation and source of confidence, and also became the starting capital for his subsequent macro investment stage.
Around 2018, Vida did not take the college entrance examination, but chose to enter a 3+1 overseas university.
There, he met peers from all over the world and also set his sights on a larger market - macro investment. He began to use his accurate judgment of the macro economy and market trends to make investment decisions. During this period, his wealth grew from 1 million yuan to 7 million yuan.
However, he soon realized that traditional manual trading methods could no longer meet his needs. The market was changing rapidly, and it was difficult to stay ahead in a highly competitive environment by relying solely on intuition and manual operations. Therefore, Vida began to delve into quantitative trading and explore how to use programs and algorithms to automate and refine his trading model.
Compared with transactions and codes, he understands resource allocation better
“I don’t need to personally master every detail. I just need to know the principles and goals of the implementation, and 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 code programming and digital coding, but as mentioned before, Vida is not good at science and does not know much about code. What he is good at is actually resource allocation and continuous optimization of the configuration.
Vida has assembled a small team of programmers and quantitative analysts to turn his ideas into automated trading strategies. "I am responsible for providing ideas, and the team is responsible for execution. This way I can use resources in the most critical areas."
He never wanted to see himself as just a trader, but rather as "Xiang Yu" - an entrepreneur who can charge into battle and command from behind. "As a manager, I don't need to write every line of code myself, but I have to make sure that my trading strategy can be accurately implemented."
With such resource allocation capabilities, Vida officially incorporated quantitative trading into his investment system in March 2021. He began to test how to integrate macro investment strategies into quantitative algorithms, trying to use technology to optimize trading efficiency. Initially, his understanding of quantitative trading was only theoretical, but through months of practice, the potential of quantitative trading gradually emerged.
By the end of 2021, his quantitative strategy had helped him earn more than 10 million yuan. More importantly, he finally saw the possibility of fully automated trading - transforming trading decisions from "manual mode" to "algorithm-driven" to beat other competitors in the market with speed and accuracy.
Vida also often shares some of his trading strategies publicly on Zhihu, because he knows that his moat is not these trading strategies, but the complexity and difficulty of execution of these strategies, which are difficult for 99.99% of people in the market to replicate.
“Many people would find my trading method jarring or even offensive, but this is 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 all mine for the time being.”
The Art of Arbitrage in Milliseconds
By 2022, Vida has established a firm foothold in the market through quantitative trading. But like every successful entrepreneur, success does not bring satisfaction, but greater anxiety.
That year, he met a French colleague who made millions of dollars using news trading strategies, and then made tens of millions of dollars in a few months by conducting arbitrage trading through Coinbase's technical loopholes. This model of rapid wealth accumulation made Vida feel "both admiration and anxiety." He realized that there were people in the market who were faster and more perceptive than him.
This sense of crisis drove him to continuously optimize his strategy and determined to rethink his trading philosophy: speed is everything.
“Find a way to get the information before others and place a buy order before others. Then when others want to buy in, sell it to them.” Driven by this kind of thinking, he began to take root in news trading and keenly discovered that domestic news media usually lags behind the market rhythm, which is not conducive to trading.
Therefore, in the first year after graduating from university, Vida opened an encrypted media Formula News for the overseas Chinese market. Considering compliance reasons, it only broadcasts on TG, Twitter and Discord platforms.
"I make money from retail traders who have delayed information and from market makers whose information channels are not fast enough to cancel orders. Retail traders often rely on word of mouth from a few slow news media or social networks to obtain information, and it often takes several minutes for them to react to a piece of news. So as long as you buy faster than retail traders, you can make a profit." Vida wrote on Zhihu.
In later recollections, Vida felt that this was one of the wisest decisions he had made in 2022. He completed a complete transformation from timing trading to fully automated trading, and through automated news trading and latency arbitrage, he increased trading speed to the top level in the industry.
That year, the global financial market was sluggish and most investors were helpless, but Vida accurately retained a large amount of US dollar cash and relied on latency arbitrage and high-frequency strategies on trading platforms such as Binance to successfully turn 8 million yuan into 20 million yuan.
In 2023 and 2024, the market slowly recovered, and Vida's trading model has basically achieved true automation. His fully automatic news trading system can capture news content and execute transactions immediately. The millisecond-level response speed gives him an advantage in strong market pulls.
As a result, Vida's wealth experienced explosive growth, soaring from 30 million yuan to 100 million yuan.
It is hard to imagine that Vida, who is worth billions at this time, has just graduated from college for two or three years and is still in control of three main business lines, which can be divided into more than a dozen sub-business lines.
As for the next step, Vida hopes to have assets of more than 100 million US dollars in three years and establish his own hedge fund in Singapore or Dubai.
In terms of long-term vision, Vida showed more "idealism" and "heroic temperament": he hopes to create a myth like Bill Gates or Zuckerberg, who has a lot of wealth when he is young, and wants to record the whole process, so that he can slowly recall the vigor and vitality of his youth when he is old, and it can also provide a reference for those who want to learn from his experience.
"I probably won't retire within five years. If I do retire, I want to be a marine life researcher, just like Cameron, or be a money-making up influencer like MrBeast." This is how Vida imagines life after retirement.
Reject fatalism
"Destiny is random, but randomness doesn't mean you can't control it." Never believing in fate may be Vida's biggest character trait.
Whether in high school or college, most of Vida's classmates came from wealthy families. From that time on, in the second-generation circle, he often heard a voice: "Some things you are born with, and some are not born with." Vida was very opposed to this idea and sneered at it.
When he was 16, the foreign teacher asked the students to write a letter to their future selves. Vida wrote in the letter: "I will definitely become a big boss when I am 26 years old." He wanted to use his own practice to prove that the saying "it is difficult for a poor family to produce a noble son" is a lie.
In Vida's view, pessimists believe that randomness is fate, while optimists use randomness to create opportunities: "Good luck will favor those who try enough. The difference often lies in who gives themselves more opportunities to try."
Some people think that the money he has made now is given by God, but Vida has a completely different view. "I know clearly where every penny I make comes from: either greedy retail investors or market makers who don't get information quickly enough, not from some illusory trend or God's gift."
In the three years from October 2022 to October 2024, Vida's actual odds were a very steep straight line, which made him even less believe in metaphysics, feng shui, and destiny. He only believed in himself.
"I make money by having high awareness + computer skills + resource coordination and team management + understanding retail investor psychology + having enough capital to manipulate the market in a short period of time."
“Crypto is a playground for smart people”
If you only have a capital of less than 100,000 yuan, how should you get started?
In Vida's view, the answer is not to fantasize about getting rich through financial investment, but to start with two things:
First, hone a skill. Choose a niche field, train yourself to become an expert in this field, and sell part of your time in exchange for money.
Second, tap into the information gap between people. Through Internet business opportunities, buy and sell goods, or become a risk-free arbitrageur between people, and make full use of information asymmetry to make profits.
In the past 20 years, China's wealthy have shifted from real estate and mineral resources to the Internet, new energy and cross-border trade, and in the future, more new models and industries will emerge. There is no shortage of opportunities, the key is whether you can be the first to rush up and grab the stall.
And encryption is the new beachhead.
"To news traders, robots, arbitrageurs, market makers and rebate farmers: If you don't work hard in such good market conditions, you will regret it in the next four years. Take advantage of the abundant liquidity conditions to complete capitalization and squeeze as much USD as possible. Long live the great transfer of wealth." This is Vida's latest statement on Twitter.
The crypto market is a paradise for smart people, and Vida is such a smart person. He makes no secret of his preference for the crypto industry. In his opinion, this is one of the few stages in the world where smart people can stand out.
"The biggest role of the crypto market is to transfer wealth from the bottom 95% of retail investors to the top 5% of elites," Vida wrote on his Zhihu homepage.
