How does a business make money?And why does it?

The posts here come from years spent across equity research, trading desks, founder calls, and cultural collisions—from Tokyo to Tribeca, from Zurich to Beijing. They’re shaped by the quiet joy of distilling complexity into clarity, and the frustration of working with people who sound smart but think in loops.

And as much as I love hanging out with my finance bros, I’ve learned something sobering: even professionals are often just repeating sell-side soundbites—while dunking on those very same reports, as buy-side tradition demands—without ever connecting a business to actual common sense.

Can an analyst covering consumer discretionary really explain why E.L.F. Beauty took off the way it did—better than a Gen Z consumer who just gets it at Sephora? Can a Chinese investor intuitively grasp why Sweetgreen has bled money for years despite its cult status?

The hardest questions are the simplest ones: How does this business make money? Why does it make money?

This blog follows the Global Industry Classification Standard (GICS), which organizes companies into 11 broad sectors based on their primary lines of business. Each post is tagged by GICS sector to help readers explore across industries with clarity and context. There are also discussions on interesting business models and products.

Little by litte, as what Thomas Kuhn's puts, scientific revolutions are here taken to be those non-cumulative developmental episodes in which an older paradigm is replaced in whole or in part by an incompatible new one.

With a multicultural background rooted in East Asia and shaped by North America, I’ve long been drawn to the intersection of markets, power, and foreign policy. I grew up reading Henry Kissinger, and later expanded to thinkers like Zbigniew Brzezinski, Fareed Zakaria, and Parag Khanna—each offering different lenses into how states compete, collaborate, and posture in the long arc of history. Geopolitics remains a personal interest and often helps me parse a news headline with a deeper, more structural lens. I follow developments in Taiwan and North Korea closely not just as regional flashpoints, but as case studies in narrative, leverage, and asymmetry.

I share observations and analytical frameworks here on the blog, as an extension of how investment thinking overlaps with global strategy.

Outside of work, I travel frequently and live with a wide appetite for life. I enjoy golf, F1, basketball, and follow football with a respectable level of understanding. I spend time in the gym, behind a camera, in movie theaters, and with books that help me think more clearly—or at least differently. Whether I’m watching a game, browsing a gallery, or walking into a boutique, I can’t help but wonder: What’s the business model behind this moment?

Why does a fine jewelry piece from Mio Harutaka command a $20,000+ price tag? What drives the campaign strategies of luxury watch groups? How do high-performance sports brands monetize identity? In this corner of the blog, I share thoughts from a millennial’s point of view where lifestyle and business intertwine.

Like many in my generation, I started using AI tools out of curiosity then luckily never really stopped. At this point, I’ve outsourced about 95% of my cognitive labor (say, corporate job without giving out the confidential information) to AI through prompt engineering, thought scaffolding, and a lot of back-and-forth refinement. It doesn’t mean I’ve stopped thinking. It means I’ve stopped wasting time on bad drafts, broken frameworks, inbox-induced brain fog, or meaningless conversations with incapable managers.

I don’t believe AI replaces thinking. But it does reward people who think in systems, who ask better questions, and who want to build faster with fewer excuses. That includes me.

As someone who always has too much on the plate, I am (healthily) obsessed with exploring efficiency tools as a way to work smart.

Here, I also share tools, workflows, or reflections from using AI in daily work—whether in financial research, writing, or building Ferghanat. It’s part of the same exercise: work smart, stay curious, and keep getting better.