Huadong Wang: Hunting Life

Most people chase the thrill of the "shot" in the game of markets. But Peng Wang, Chief Investment Officer at Inatai Foundation, chooses to stage his life's "hunt" at the crossroads of wilderness and markets.

From physics student to CIO of a multi-billion-dollar portfolio, Wang has built a deeply personal operating system. He once sat for five days in 40-mile-per-hour Alaskan gales, waiting for a brown bear to appear. In 2023, amid deafening market pessimism, he held onto a 20% contrarian position. For him, heavy lifting, polar hunting, and complex investment decisions are all iterations of the same practice: "training the nervous system." Only through extreme physical and psychological suffering — filtering out the seductive but mediocre signals through aesthetics and discipline — can one calmly pull the trigger when facing "The Deer."

In this conversation, we try to understand how a professional investor builds his mental architecture. Wang shares the "hunting aesthetics" he learned in extreme environments: to find opportunities that truly meet your standards, you must have the stomach for long stretches of zero returns. In an era when intelligence is increasingly delegated to AI, he insists on the pursuit of Why and the burden of Accountability — the final, insurmountable moat for human beings.

In an age of noise, Wang offers a way of being: iterate and grow within a system of your own design.

If you have any thoughts you'd like to share, feel free to leave a comment below.

The original podcast transcript runs approximately 28,000 Chinese characters; this edited version is roughly 11,000 words.

Enjoy

Oasis Capital: You studied physics, and now you're in investing, managing many portfolios. Others might think they need to train their planning skills, or their modeling abilities. But the first thing you emphasize is "the ability to be present."

Why is "being present" so important to you?

Wang: I think investing is more art than science. Art requires aesthetics. What's important in investing is aesthetics, discipline, and not being arrogant — not having ego. Being present and meditation all improve your cognition in these three areas.

Oasis: You're a science and engineering student, but what you just said sounds very un-STEM. Where did these perspectives come from?

Wang: Science and art ultimately converge. The idea of "one thing, one way" — I don't think they're contradictory.

Oasis: Not contradictory for you — it's just a thin window pane. But for many people, they can't break through, and it's painful. These two languages feel in conflict to them.

Wang: Physics and math use equations to describe many things, but the meaning of those equations can be expressed through language and art. It depends on what level you're at. Sometimes you need specific formulas to calculate things; sometimes you just need to grasp the bigger truth. Your starting point matters.

Wang: Look up the "American wild turkey" — it's an excellent conservation case study. Farmers used to hate them because they'd steal feed and cause damage, so for a while wild turkeys were nearly extinct. In the U.S., there's an organization called NWTF (The National Wild Turkey Federation). They launched many initiatives, and every region has strict hunting regulations. Even when you buy ammunition, something like 20% gets taxed for conservation. Because turkeys have commercial value, people invest time in managing and cultivating habitats that support their growth and reproduction.

Oasis: This fits the American market-economy approach perfectly — using market mechanisms to save a species.

Wang: Right, it's a classic case. Elk were the same — nearly extinct before. You say "protect them," but no one actually protects them. Really, no one. Now that they have value, demand creates supply. So hunting is actually one of the most important factors in American conservation success, but many people don't know this.

Oasis: Because when most people first hear the word "hunting," they immediately associate it with killing animals. Their first reaction is a judgment made with limited information. But after hearing you explain it last time, I realized there's actually something quite virtuous about it.

Wang: You have to look at species change holistically. This is absolutely a high-merit endeavor.

Wang: I often think that not getting your prey actually improves your self-knowledge more than succeeding. Like the problems you can't solve, the mistakes you make — those might be more helpful for your growth. That time, I became a better hunter. It depends on your ultimate purpose. Part of it is to get the prey; another part is that I want to become a better hunter. To become a better hunter, it's often these failures and experiences that let you grow faster.

Oasis: What did you learn from that particular failure?

Wang: On the surface: once a turkey starts to turn around, shoot immediately.

Oasis: So now you have a principle.

Wang: Right, a principle. But second, you need deeper understanding of animal behavior. Don't solidify, don't have a preassumption about how things will go. Your plans will never keep up with changes. You must have the resolve to adapt.

Wang: You only enjoy after you suffer.

Have you watched Ikkyū-san? It says: hungry, eating bran tastes sweet as honey. Only after you've truly suffered does the final victory feel real, feel more enjoyable.

Oasis: You enjoy that process of waiting, anxiety, frustration — what we'd call emotions? You see this as enriching?

Wang: It's like climbing a mountain. Only after climbing a very high mountain do you feel accomplishment, that you've done something significant. Climb a small hill, and it feels like nothing. Same principle. Only through that suffering, that painful process, do you genuinely feel accomplishment.

Oasis: Many people actually reject suffering. When they see it, their instinct is to run. For example, when most people talk about vacation or rest, they don't choose hunting or going through some suffering — they choose what's physically comfortable. When did you realize the importance of suffering, of things most people emotionally flee from?

Wang: I think dopamine is a very important driver in human progress. Some might think dopamine is about happiness, but it's not. Dopamine is a drive that makes you act, to achieve your goals. I might just have a bit more dopamine, haha — always wanting to act, to pursue something, which brings me more pleasure.

Wang: As I said at the beginning: first, aesthetics; second, discipline and patience. Take deer — Americans' favorite game animal, especially whitetail. Once you have experience, you develop cognition and aesthetics about antlers, standards and requirements. You don't shoot at every deer you see. My goal isn't to shoot A deer. My goal is to shoot The deer.

Oasis: When you have standards, that's when you have patience. If you have no demands of yourself, you can't actually enjoy the game.

Wang: We have aesthetic hierarchies among ourselves. If you shoot a very small deer, people will wonder what you're doing.

Oasis: Like if you invested in a company that only reached $1 billion or $100 million — you'd ask what that investor was doing.

Wang: Exactly. You spend a lot of time pursuing greater returns; for us, this is completely normal. Our quality requirements are higher now than before. In the overall portfolio, especially the largest positions — before, there might have been some special situations and quality-in-the-making; but going forward, I want the best trophies.

Actually, going after that biggest deer — the process may be harder, but I'll enjoy it more. The joy and sense of success after getting it will be greater. That's the state we're chasing.

Oasis: In all the years I've known you, you've always struck me as "being held up by a string." The market isn't great right now, there's lots of uncertainty — you can feel some people have just gone with the flow, following their habits, their patterns, their emotions. They may have reached a certain position, a certain age, but even their growth is drifting with the current. Rather than constantly raising the bar for themselves, being pulled forward like a taut line. Every conversation with you gives me that feeling of being held up. How do you maintain this?

Wang: I think it's accumulated through small things. Your habits, the drive behind the most enjoyable processes in life — like the heavy training I mentioned. You can see the numbers slowly increasing. These small things bring positive psychological impact. They make you feel that after effort, things change, and you enjoy that result, that so-called stretch. But you can't set too many goals, or goals too high, or you'll feel defeated.

I may have told you before about climbing Mount Baker, the American volcano. When climbing that mountain, if you keep looking up at the summit, thinking "my goal is to reach the top," the process becomes excruciating. You walk for an hour, two hours, look up — the distance hasn't changed, still so far. Walk five hours, still so far. But if your purpose and mindset become "every step I take, I move forward." Look down, don't look up. Look at each footprint. Think about resting once every hour. Make the goal reaching that place where I can rest within the hour. You'll find you can successfully summit.

This accumulation of small things, this positive feedback, promotes long-term habit formation and mindset. So in daily life and in designing my processes, I factor these in, and that creates a growth mindset.

Oasis: So you use numbers, or the weight you can push, to create this positive feedback loop.

Wang: Right, the nervous system is malleable. People aren't born thinking "I want to be like this." Whether it's your personality, your mindset, your psychological state — all can be adjusted. In daily habits and even the design of hobbies, many things push me in this direction of growth.

Oasis: How did "knowing why" become so important to you?

Wang: How do you distinguish luck from skill? You could say you decided to buy or sell, and the result was good. But if you don't tell me why, I'd think it might just be random, purely luck.

Many people say they added to positions when things dropped. They really did add, but not based on any reason — just a feeling that the world would get better, so they added. They might end up being right. But from an LP's perspective, I wouldn't invest in you. Because the logic of "buy when it drops" might not hold one day. That's why "why" matters so much to me.

Oasis: You need to tell me what your decision basis is. Otherwise it becomes a black box, and overnight it could turn into a black swan.

Wang: Right, you need a basis. Otherwise you have no conviction about what happens next.

Oasis: There's something contradictory in what you're describing, because LPs are very long-term investors. But often people's stereotype of long-term is that its flip side is stubbornness, or conservatism. On the other hand, you started experimenting with AI quite early, building it into your investment decision process. From many people's perspective, these are in conflict or contradiction. Is that how you see it?

Wang: We probably only know how to make long-term money. Our long-term orientation is in portfolio construction — for example, when we like a company, we like its long-term fundamentals. But how do we research companies? The short-term process can be very flexible. But what about medium-term, short-to-medium term?

We have large positions in China. We're long-term investors, but we'll also look at short-term opportunities in China. We look at Korea too. We have large positions in Japan. We look at South America, like Brazil right now. I think this is actually a very flexible strategy.

Let me give you a more interesting example: our asset allocation model is very long-term in its configuration. But we have no mandatory targets for any individual asset class. This is the best combination of short-term flexibility and long-term goals. Many short-term funds will say I'm allocated this much to hedge funds, this much to long-term... We have zero targets. But we look at all portfolio assets comprehensively, requiring that their risk level doesn't exceed our benchmark: a long-term return-risk target. So when constructing portfolios, we can have no bucketing strategy, no mandatory constraints, can do anything — as long as the final aggregated risk doesn't exceed our tolerable range. The purpose of doing this is itself to achieve the best long-term returns.

Oasis: If in the future AI handles everything at an investment institution, from junior analyst to senior analyst, even to CIO — what role can humans still play in the investment process?

Wang: I think it's still decision-making, still making the call.

Oasis: What do you think humans can provide that's special, compared to AI?

Wang: Aesthetics, distance, and patience.

Oasis: Just these three things?

Wang: And accountability. If AI decides to pull the trigger and ends up hitting nothing, you have no accountability. You don't know why, and I think it would be hard to know why. "Knowing why" is still quite important to me.

Oasis: What is your life goal now?

Wang: Learning and growing every day. It brings me a kind of joy. I've configured my entire mindset this way.

Oasis: Because this thing brings you joy, you do it; because you do it, you structure your life, work, and time around it.

Wang: Something like that. In neuroscience, the so-called dopamine rush needs to be satisfied every day through various means. I think a large part of human survival ultimately comes down to this dopamine. You need to go out and explore, to hunt, to discover a new cave, a new territory — these all require people to go out and do them.

Why do you climb that mountain? Because it is there.