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Speculation is harder than investing: Why Deng Yongping's words are especially applicable in the crypto world!

Deng Yongping once said, “Value investing is difficult; in fact, speculation is even more difficult,” which at first glance seems contradictory but actually reveals the root cause of retail investors’ losses. In the highly volatile crypto market, this statement warrants deeper reflection.

So-called “speculation” involves chasing short-term price differences amid market fluctuations, attempting to buy low and sell high. It seems simple and straightforward but is actually very unfriendly to retail investors. The cryptocurrency market operates 24/7, lacks regulation, and features highly asymmetric information, with professional players like project teams, market makers, and whales dominating. Retail investors often follow emotions to buy high and sell low, becoming the “harvested leek vegetables” (a Chinese idiom meaning being exploited).

The core of value investing is “buying a company is equivalent to buying the present value of its future cash flows”—when applied to the crypto space, it means conducting in-depth research based on the project's long-term value, team background, technological feasibility, and ecosystem development. This requires patience to learn blockchain knowledge, analyze economic models, and evaluate community governance. While challenging, it is a path that can be accumulated and replicated.

Two common types of losses in the crypto market directly confirm Deng Yongping’s viewpoint:

· The difficulty of speculation: blindly chasing meme coins, trusting “insider information,” or getting liquidated on leveraged contracts—all essentially involve competing with professional institutions and algorithms on short-term judgments, with extremely low success rates.
· The ease of investing: although understanding Bitcoin’s underlying logic and Ethereum’s ecosystem applications takes time, once a cognitive framework is established, it can help avoid emotional trading and weather market booms and busts.

The real “difficulty” and “ease” are thus reversed: speculation requires continuously outperforming the market, while value investing only needs independent judgment and patience. In the crypto market, which acts like a magnifying glass, a “simple strategy” of long-term holding and regular dollar-cost averaging often outperforms complex frequent trading.

Therefore, retail investors should avoid mistaking “speculation” for a “shortcut.” As Deng Yongping implied—acknowledging that you cannot predict short-term fluctuations and focusing on value might be the most pragmatic survival strategy for ordinary people in the crypto space.

Investing makes you a friend of time; speculation makes you an opponent of time. In the crypto world—where the future has already arrived but is still chaotic—choosing to be a friend often leads to more stability and longer-term success than choosing to be an opponent.