From the era when coal reigned to the era when traffic reigned, what happened in between? Over forty years, the market economy has worn four faces. Each change of face moves the main track of wealth wholesale; those who miss it keep hunting for growth on the old track.
Four Faces
There is a framework that turns this history into a model: the four stages of the market economy.
Stage 1.0: material scarcity, when the means of production reigned. In those years, whoever held capacity was the protagonist — early coal and nonferrous metals stood exactly there. The phrase is literal: goods sold themselves, and whoever held the mines and factories held the say.
Stage 2.0: channel premium. Goods gradually stopped being scarce; the route into people’s hands became the scarcity. Distributors and brick-and-mortar department stores held the route and collected tolls.
Stage 3.0: traffic and branding. Attention became the new scarcity, and consumer companies and internet platforms took the throne. The route was no longer scarce; the little time in people’s hands was.
Stage 4.0: AI automation. Computing power, robotics, and high-end manufacturing take over — not a prediction but a form already written into the current five-year plan’s main line.
In plain words: forty years have been one game — find whatever is scarcest right now. When goods were scarce, the means of production decided. When goods stopped being scarce, the channel decided. When the channel stopped being scarce, attention decided. Now that repetitive labor is depreciating, automation decides. Whoever reigns in each era decides what belongs in the track pool. The big winners grow on the new king’s turf; the old king’s land yields a business but no increment — that line is not a stock-picking trick, it is the first screening rule of the track pool.
The Face Changed; the Old King Remains
The first objection says: the four stages are not a replacement relationship — department stores are still open, coal is still being mined, so where is the change of face?
Coexistence is real, and so is the migration of dominance. Department stores still open their doors, coal still ships, but neither sits where the incremental premium is. Allocation follows dominance, not survival — being alive is not the same as deserving a position. The question is not who is still alive; it is who is taking the increment. Survival says the business model still turns; dominance says who holds the premium. Between the two sits an entire era.
Verification, Not Divination
The second objection says: 4.0 is an imagination about the future, and prediction is mysticism.
4.0 is not a prediction; it is the present tense. The five-year plan’s main line is in black and white; computing power, robotics, and high-end manufacturing are already happening. What the framework verifies is that the form has occurred, not whether it will occur — verify, don’t forecast. Divination guesses the future; this checks the present against the record. The hat of mysticism does not fit the present tense. Those who treat 4.0 as a prediction guess dates; treating it as the present tense means one task — checking where the form has landed.
The Old King Still Rises, but the Rise Is a Different Metal
The third objection says: stage 3.0 traffic brands can still rise, so why leave?
The old king certainly still has a business, but the incremental premium sits with the new face. Once the face has changed, the old king’s rise is a zero-sum scramble for shares; the new face’s rise is a form dividend, the pie itself growing. Both rise. The metal is different.
Where It Does Not Apply
Draw the boundary yourself: this model describes the shape of an era, not today’s valuations — computing power, robotics, and high-end manufacturing appear here only as illustrations of the 4.0 form, no trading advice; the same goes for early coal and nonferrous metals, cited only to show what 1.0 looked like. This framework and the nested economic-cycle model run on two different coordinate systems — one the clock of cycles, one the morphological history of the market — never mixed. Its purpose is in its positioning: industry screening, matched to the stage and the main line, locking down the track pool.
So the question was never where the next bull stock hides. It is another question: right now, who reigns? Whatever the answer, that is what the track pool should hold.
