August 2020, Tokyo, Four Seasons Hotel.
Executives from Japan's five major trading companies, like iron filings drawn by some ancient magnetism, took turns entering that quiet reception room.
Outside the door is global panic under the shadow of the pandemic, and inside is a nodding 'uh-huh' from an old man over 90 years old.
Wall Street was busy mocking at that time.
Analysts are nailing the coffin of the Japanese stock market tightly: aging population, thirty years of deflation, and rigid corporate governance.
The PPT pages turned one after another, and the conclusion is only one - whoever invests in Japan is a fool.
Buffett didn't turn on the TV, didn't look at the K-line charts, and might not even know how much Bitcoin had risen at that time. He simply borrowed a sum of money at an interest rate nearly free, to buy five companies that sell iron ore, grain, and energy.
Four years later, the one that rose the slowest in this 'fool's investment' increased by 2.8 times. The fastest one increased by 8 times.
40 billion dollars flowed into Berkshire's account like breathing.
Two kinds of line drawing hands.
Nation-building also draws lines.
In the first week of 2025 after he returned to the White House, a tweet caused a certain shell company to double; a gust of policy sent the dollar soaring and plummeting. The line he drew is called 'electrocardiogram,' sustained entirely by adrenaline.
But once he finished drawing, it was done. The line would fall.
The line drawn by Buffett is called a 'topographic map.'
He never touches the mouse and cannot even distinguish between daily and weekly charts.
But sitting on that couch at the Four Seasons Hotel in Tokyo, a nod from him rewrote the main upward wave of the Japanese stock market for the next five years.
This is not trading.
This is a reformatting of an era through cognition.
The one they laughed at back then for being 'unintelligible.'
What kind of goods were Japanese trading companies in 2020?
The stock price is below the net asset value, and the dividend yield is higher than keeping it in the bank, but no one wants it.
Global capital is chasing Tesla, Zoom, and everything associated with the word 'technology'.
Businesses like trading iron, beans, and pipelines have been left in the corner gathering dust.
But Buffett saw the bottom that three layers of Wall Street did not see:
In the first layer, valuation is a gift. Buying a one-dollar asset for fifty cents is a game he has played for a lifetime.
In the second layer, the money is borrowed, and the interest is 0.1%. He issued yen bonds in Japan, and the financing cost was low enough to be almost free. Using other people's money to buy one's own tickets is the clean version of leverage.
In the third layer, in the era of inflation, physical resources are the only hard currency. Food, minerals, energy—these things do not 'kill valuations' like tech stocks; they only quietly increase in price.
These three layers combined form a compound interest engine that does not experience explosive growth but never flips.
Four years later, the old man who was laughed at answered all the ridicule with an 800% increase.
Trump made tens of billions, while Buffett made four hundred billion.
No disrespect intended towards nation-building.
In 2025, he indeed relied on the expectations of ZC and Twitter calls to double related assets within days, with paper profits in the tens of billions.
This is predatory short-term profit, like a sharp dinner knife, capable of quickly slicing the cake, but once the knife is withdrawn, the cake closes up.
What Buffett earns is a different kind of money: interest-style money.
He did not 'do' anything; he was just there.
His credit is interest, his holdings are consensus, and his name is trend.
When he bought into Japan, he was not buying stocks; he was sending signals to fund managers worldwide: this place is safe, this place is undervalued, and this place is worth moving your money from the U.S.
The remaining rise will be completed by the market.
This is the highest realm of 'line drawing': you do not need to take action; your name is the ruler.
That eternally erupting cash volcano.
Many are learning what Buffett buys, but overlooking his greatest moat:
Berkshire always has hundreds of billions in cash lying around.
This is not for defense. This is to have the pricing power to rewrite candlesticks when everyone else is afraid.
When he bought Japan in 2020, the market was treating Japanese assets like a hot potato. He could take them because he had endless ammunition.
And what about you and me? When we chased Trump concept stocks in 2025, we used next month's rent.
This is not investing; this is being a supporting actor in someone else's script.
Two kinds of time perception.
Trump's unit of time is days, even hours.
Buffett's unit of time is five years, is a cycle, is the time to develop a generation's consumption habits.
Our era is too obsessed with the first kind of time perception. New 'nation-building concept stocks' emerge every day, and myths of getting rich quickly circulate in groups daily. We search for food in the seams of candlesticks, mistaking the adrenaline rush for the joy of making money.
But true compound interest never exists in the flicker of the screen.
It was in the quiet reception room of the Four Seasons Hotel in Tokyo in August 2020, at the moment when a 90-year-old man nodded, at the tip of his pen when he signed for that 0.1% interest yen bond.
That moment had no candlestick. But in the following five years, every candlestick of the Nikkei Index was drawn by that pen.
The line drawn by nation-building on X will be wiped away at dawn.
The line drawn by Buffett has grown into the mountains of Japan for the next five years.
Do you want to chase that line that will disappear at dawn, or do you want to learn how to become that line itself?
I am still learning.
But at least now I know which direction to look up.
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