| Author’s Note

On the road of investing, many people inevitably take countless detours through the fog of technical analysis, insider tips, and emotion. As the editor of this book, I too was once like most retail investors: I traded highly leveraged futures, was misled by insider tips, and even watched a huge sum of principal evaporate in the gambling den of cryptocurrency contracts.

That detour was concrete and real. In 2015, the first thing I traded was futures, and I quickly could not stand the violent swings and cut my losses to exit. In 2018, I returned to the market and switched to stocks, but in a friend’s LINE group I chased “insider tips” and the hot picks recommended by a supposed mentor, doing short-term trades that made money one moment and lost it the next. My most painful loss came in 2019: egged on by a stranger from a dating app, I used sub-brokerage to buy a Hong Kong stock, which crashed more than 50% that very day, wiping out nearly half my principal in an instant. During that same period I also threw myself headlong into the crypto world, putting about NT$1 million, some 80% of my total assets at the time, into a small-cap cryptocurrency. Then, hit by the LUNA collapse and a string of other bad news, and repeatedly addicted to leveraged contracts, I saw my assets evaporate by 30% to 40%. Finally, in 2023, I recognized that I was nothing more than a “leek” to be harvested in the eyes of the market, and I withdrew in dejection.

After exiting the crypto world, I did not immediately find the answer. Instead I first walked what seemed like the most orthodox path: following Taiwanese passive-index educators such as Xiaofan and Qingliu Jun to learn passive indexing, running a Boglehead-style VTI + VXUS + BND portfolio, then adding emerging markets and small-cap value, and rolling out a return of about 12% between 2022 and 2024. Still not satisfied, I took out a personal loan, moved to an overseas brokerage, and dug into factor investing and lifecycle investing (the whole five-factor combination of AVUV, QMOM, and the rest), only to see my return fall rather than rise, down to 6.4%. Only after personally trying both passive indexing and factor investing did I truly see clearly: a method can be very complex, but whether you can survive long and hold on is what decides the outcome.

It was not until I encountered Teacher James’s investment philosophy that I first deeply realized that investing is not a game of prediction, but a war of systemic survival over who can live longest and walk steadiest. So in the end I chose to return to the simplest and most thorough approach of all, CLEC’s “Buy, Borrow, Die” (never sell — borrow against assets, pass on at stepped-up basis): move the assets back to Taiwan, roll the assets forward with low-interest personal loans, never sell no matter what, borrow against pledged stock in retirement, fade out of the market, and focus on my main career.

From Labor to System, the Awakening of an Asset Owner

Teacher James is a practitioner of long-term asset-allocation systems and a selfless promoter of education, whose core teachings span from macroeconomics to the concrete mechanics of rules-based rebalancing. He worked in the tech industry for a long time and came to understand deeply the ceiling of labor income, and so he turned his energy toward building an “asset snowball” grounded in mathematical win-rates and extreme discipline.

He advocates an infrastructure mindset of “availability first, then optimization,” and the asset-owner framework of “Buy, Borrow, Die.” This philosophy has successfully guided countless retail investors to break out of the preset exploitation of inflation, and to turn toward a long-term compounding system centered on high-quality broad-market indices such as QQQ and 00662.

This system firmly believes that “wealth is a gift, and happiness is a human right.” Through the spirit of “wu-wei investing” (investing through non-action) and “investing requires meditative stillness,” Teacher James teaches the public how to fight against human nature using the simplest three steps: buy an index fund, hold for the long term, and never sell no matter what. This is not merely a slogan but a profound discipline, one that lets an investor spend less than ten minutes a year managing assets, yet ride out market storms with peace of mind. He teaches us to replace emotion with strategy, to replace luck with system, and in the end to trade financial design for the rhythm of life restored.

The Translator’s Original Intent, Distilling Chaos into Order

As a data engineer, my specialty lies in transforming vast quantities of unstructured information into executable, systematized knowledge. In this book, I serve in the role of “knowledge translator,” responsible for taking the essence of Teacher James’s lectures, video content, and casual notes accumulated over many years, and carrying out deep alignment, deduplication, and structuring of it all.

This treasury is not a theory born out of thin air, but a survival system gradually assembled through real falls in the real market, followed by review and rebuilding. Without discipline, even the best target will be ruined by human nature; without risk control, even the prettiest return does not belong to you. These notes are devoted to organizing the price paid for each lesson learned into essential chapters that let those who come after take fewer detours.

One point needs special clarification: as far as I know, Teacher James has for more than twenty years continued to devote himself to volunteer teaching, never for the purpose of profit, and he himself has not received any economic benefit from the publication of this book. This compilation is purely for the sake of passing on this verifiable order, to help more people walk a steadier, freer road.

An Honest Account of the Sources

I must be honest: about 80% of the backbone of this treasury is inherited from the video, lecture, and book content of CLEC and Teacher James, and this is the unshakable root of the book. The remaining 20% comes from the investment books I have read over these years, the finance channels I have followed for a long time, and the extended observations I internalized after paying my own tuition to the market.

Texts such as the following are all cross-verified against and mutually reinforced with Teacher James’s core framework throughout the book.

• Naval Ravikant’s philosophical reflections on “wealth as freedom”
• Charlie Munger’s sharp reminders about speculative bubbles and life’s trade-offs
• Howard Marks’s insight into risk and the trap of “average water depth”
• Alfred Adler’s boundaries between self and others in the “separation of tasks”
• Thomas Piketty’s structural insight that “the return on capital exceeds economic growth over the long run (r > g)”
• The empirical foundations laid by Jeremy Siegel and Burton Malkiel for “long-term stock holding and passive indexing”
• Ken Fisher’s reminder about “not timing the market and the market’s long-term resilience”
• The research of behavioral-finance scholars such as Richard Thaler on investors’ blind spots (such as the disposition effect and naive diversification)

I do not seek to originate a new theory, but rather hope that through this book readers can see how one and the same truth has been repeatedly verified by wise minds across different fields. If any concept in this book diverges even slightly from the CLEC original canon, please defer in every case to the official CLEC channel; the responsibility for the text of this book rests with me, Blaise, alone.

I must also be honest that in the process of gathering material, planning chapter structure, editing text, and proofreading this book, I made extensive use of AI tools to help handle the enormous volume of content that exceeded my own capacity in time, including Anthropic’s Claude (Claude Code, Claude Opus / Sonnet), Google’s Gemini (NotebookLM / Gemini Pro), OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Codex, and others. AI provided tremendous efficiency in extracting material, comparing across chapters, unifying formatting, and generating first drafts, but AI also has its moments of “talking nonsense with a straight face.” Although all content ultimately passed through my own manual review and cross-verification, it is still impossible to fully rule out the possibility of factual errors, numerical slips, citation deviations, or logical gaps. If a reader discovers any doubtful point, please defer to the official CLEC channel on matters involving philosophy and the original intent of the teaching, and defer to the latest official documents from government agencies, exchanges, fund houses, banks, and brokerages on matters involving tax law, financial systems, ETF data, and loan and brokerage rules. Corrections are welcome, to aid the repair of future editions.

Special Thanks

Precisely because both AI and I can make mistakes, this book has been able to converge step by step to its present precision thanks to a group of readers and administrators willing to hold every word to account.

Special thanks go to senior colleague Chengfeng, who reviewed page by page with the rigor of a quality-assurance professional, and who, from the definition of return rates and Taiwan’s maintenance-ratio ladder to the hands-on strategies in the appendices, offered a great many concrete corrections and authoritative supporting evidence, so that the numbers and institutional details throughout the book could be aligned with the real rules.

Even more thanks go to every fellow practitioner in the 00662 community who, during the proofreading process, pointed out typos, supplemented backtest data, and verified institutional details. Each of your corrections made this book one error fewer and one measure more trustworthy.

Blaise