Tiger Woman on Wall Street: Winning Business Strategies from Shanghai to New York and Back

CHAPTER 14The Power of Investigative Research

BY NOW, ALMOST EVERYONE KNOWS THAT REPORTED DATA COMing out of China are not to be trusted, for various reasons. Investing solely based on official figures—whether put out by the government or companies—is a sure way to get burned.

For a long while, I had been strategizing how to develop a proprietary system to acquire and collect more accurate data and information for investment purposes. I had met with a few data suppliers, but none quite fit the bill. Many of them were founded and run by Westerners, mostly former American journalists. They were typically small outfits whose primary research methodology was journalistic investigation—sneaking into warehouses to count inventory, interviewing the ...