Fan Li bought gluts to profit from seasonal reversals

Fan Li served as a minister to King Goujian of Yue during the Spring and Autumn period, helping engineer Yue's eventual defeat of the rival state of Wu. After that victory, rather than staying in politics, he retired to trade — settling in the crossroads region of Tao and building, according to the account preserved in Sima Qian's Records of the Grand Historian, three separate fortunes of a thousand pieces of gold within nineteen years, twice giving most of it away to poorer relatives and friends and starting over.

The trading principle attributed to him and to his teacher Ji Ran runs directly against the instinct to buy what's scarce and sell what's abundant at the moment those conditions are visible: stock up on fur in summer and light cloth in winter, secure boats ahead of drought and carts ahead of flood — buying precisely the goods currently unwanted and cheap, on the expectation that the season or condition creating today's oversupply will reverse.

Bought into the glut itself, holding through the unwanted season on the plain expectation that ordinary seasonal reversal would later create demand.

Gluts drive prices to lows, allowing cheap accumulation.

Seasonal cycles predictably reverse, creating future demand.

Acting early avoids competing with the crowd on visible signals.

Holding through the unwanted period requires discipline, not information.

Trade against the crowd's timing: buy into gluts when reversal is foreseeable, not when shortage is visible.

Sima Qian records that Fan Li amassed a fortune of a thousand pieces of gold three separate times over nineteen years in Tao, redistributing it twice, and that his commercial reputation was durable enough that 'Tao Zhu Gong' (his adopted merchant name) became a byname for a successful businessman used for millennia afterward in Chinese.