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For decades, some of the smartest money on Wall Street made big returns betting against Chinese stocks. Jim Chanos, the guy who called Enron before anyone else, was one of them. And on a recent episode of Prof G Markets, he said that trade has moved on. Meanwhile, right here in Medellin, Colombia, I walk past a BYD dealership almost every day on my way to the gym.
I've ridden in a few. They're nice cars. I'm Edward. This is Money Beyond Borders. For anyone landing on this series for the first time, I started it because I noticed people like Grantham, Galloway, the late Charlie Munger, and Goldman's own Peter Oppenheimer all separately making the same point. There's real opportunity outside the US that most people never even hear about.
That's already what I do for work, finding international investments for a small private investment firm. So, this became the show version of that job. And it's also how I'm growing this YouTube channel, Edward Effect. Subscribe if you want more. Expanding beyond borders along the way. Same reminder every episode, funny money, not real money.
Anything real, go to your actual broker. My goal here is to put more options on the table for people. What anyone does with that is entirely their own call. On the numbers, Oppenheimer's own decade-long forecast has the S&P delivering around 6.5% a year, the worst of any major region, while emerging markets lead at 11%.
And it's already showing up in recent performance, too. Emerging markets are running around 45% in the past year, well ahead of the S&P. Today is a specific version of that China story through the lens of two investors on opposite sides of the trade. Maybe you don't have to forget about Chinatown anymore, Jack.
Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett's long-time right-hand man, was bullish on China as a whole. He said the leading Chinese companies were stronger and better than practically any leading companies anywhere and available at a much cheaper price. He put that thesis to the test twice. Alibaba, he later called the worst trade ever, overhyped in his words, but BYD, this is the one he got spectacularly right.
Munger himself said, "I've never helped do anything at Berkshire that was as good as BYD." Berkshire bought it back in 2008, 230 million for a 10% stake. They started trimming in 2022, and by the third quarter of 2025, they'd fully exited. Same pattern as new holdings a few episodes back. By this time, the number's staggering, somewhere around 9 billion in returns, roughly 39 times their money.
BYD is now the world's largest EV seller. It took that title from Tesla last year. In Europe, BYD's sales are up 159% between January and May of this year, and now it's running 12% ahead of Tesla there, also, after trailing Tesla's own depressed sales just last year. Scott Galloway's put a number on the gap.
BYD is basically 80% of Tesla for 40% the price. He's also called it the Old Navy or the Southwest Airlines of EVs. Not fancy, just a good value. Bloomberg put it bluntly in a recent headline, saying, "BYD is set to crush Tesla again." And BYD's not slowing down. They told analysts they expect sales to hit 1.5 million vehicles sold this year, above their own official 1.3 million target.
That's some real pressure. Tesla actually cut prices on its Model Y and Model 3 by $5,000 each in a move widely reported as a direct response coming from the competition of BYD. And here's my personal angle on this one. BYD isn't some abstract growth story to me. It's been the dominant EV brand in Colombia for years.
You know how it goes. One day they're nowhere, next day they're everywhere. They went from 714 cars sold in 2023 to over 3,900 in 2024. And by last year, it held more than half the entire electric and plug-in hybrid market in this country. An EV or hybrid here doesn't have to follow Pico and Placa laws, which tell you what day per week you can't drive depending on your license plate due to traffic pollution.
The only reason I don't get one yet is because I don't trust the journey out to the finca where there's no charging station and quite a bit of mud. Maybe one day. But the story is changing. Tesla officially launched here in November. I had my first Tesla for an Uber the other day. The ramp-up has been wild.
The Model Y has been the single best-selling car in the entire country, not just among EVs, for multiple months this year. By spring, Tesla had evened out the EV market with BYD. So, I see both of those constantly now. The dealership I walk by always has people in it. BYD's a huge player here and across Latin America.
But Colombia has just turned into one of the more interesting EV battlegrounds on the planet. And it's happening right outside where we're going to the paper portfolio. Okay, now we're taking a look at the paper trade of BYDDY. We want to do BYDDY because that's the American depository of trading the OTC.
There's BYD F, that's a Hong Kong thing, little bit more complicated. So, we'll just keep it with BYDDY. Move out to the 5-year chart. You can see a year ago, the stock was still riding high off of a wild spring, but by September 1st, 2025, the wheels came off. Hong Kong shares fell nearly 8% in a single session after BYD reported a 30% drop in quarterly profit.
That wiped out something like $45 billion in market cap and by somewhere September through the next few months, the stock was down over 30% from its all-time high. Then it kept grinding down from there. By the end of January 2026, Hong Kong shares had slipped under the $100 mark. Then in April, an EU labor investigation into a factory in Hungary added another gut punch.
That's the reason for this steep decline. The bottom came in June here around $9 and uh 20 21 cents 52-week low. Get rid of the ad. At the June shareholder meeting, the chairman Wang Chuanfu, probably butchered the name, sorry, told investors the flat out the stock was undervalued and asked them for patience.
Then July happened. So it looks like people were patient. Q2 numbers came in and they reclaimed the global spot from Tesla. That's when the stock stabilized. Today it's sitting at $11.43. Still well off the high, but you know, away from the bottom. So, today's ad by market order 10,000 paper tokens buys us 43,744 shares of BYDDY.
Executed. All right, quick check of our other stocks. Kaspi is doing well. Meituan is still down. Nio is doing well on their good news of the uh topping a billion dollars for the first time. Grab is down and now we got BYD. So we're building a nice little international emerging market portfolio here.
That's the episode. Next week, a company that owns a game you've probably played, a fintech arm, and an entire marketplace, all under one name most Americans have never heard of. I'm not a financial advisor. Nothing here is personalized financial advice. This research is part of what I do for work. Sharing it publicly doesn't turn it into a recommendation for your money.
Nothing here is a recommendation to buy or sell anything specific. This is research, frameworks, and a paper portfolio. Not real money, not a track record. Talk to a licensed professional before you do anything with your own, and see you next time.
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