Will Duan Yongping’s Pop Mart purchase turn out to be his biggest mistake? My view: it won’t be a mistake — and Pop Mart’s structural flaw is real. These two claims must be kept apart.
The flaw first. Pop Mart is essentially a marketing company. Labubu is genuinely nothing, manufactured into something. Compare Nintendo: decades of seriously made games, IP accumulated over generations, real liquidation value. Labubu’s liquidation value approximates fashion itself — when the wind stops, it’s gone. In the AI era this sharpens: short on IP? IP is generated by the second now. Scarcity is the foundation of this business — and the foundation is tidal.
Now Duan’s side. This late-career buy looks more like cognitive expansion: understanding emotional consumption — why people pay for small, certain joys. And his discipline is intact: staged entries, selling puts, no leverage, no all-in. What actually kills investors is leverage plus full position plus not understanding. He ticks none of those boxes.
Someone will say emotional consumption sits outside the value-investing framework — the old master doesn’t understand it. Maybe. But “doesn’t understand” and “will lose” are different things: position discipline caps the loss of not understanding.
So judge any investment by splitting it in two: how many points for the asset’s structure, how many for the discipline of the bet. A hole in structure can be patched by discipline. A hole in discipline can’t be patched by anything.
