Why is a company's quality so important? To put it simply, unless you're a pure short-term speculator just looking to make quick money, any strategy that involves earning profits from a company's operational results depends on assessing the company's quality. Whether you're aiming for long-term holding to receive dividends or trying to profit from stock price fluctuations, the money ultimately comes from the same place—the net profit a company earns through its operations.

But here’s the question: what exactly does company quality include? Different investment schools have quite different answers.

Value investors typically use discounted free cash flow methods for valuation, so they care most about how much cash the company can generate over its entire lifecycle. What does this mean? The company needs to survive long enough, have a good business model, and possess a moat so deep that others can't undermine it—that's what is called a "long slope with thick snow." Interestingly, investors like Duan Yongping not only focus on the business model but also emphasize the role of corporate culture. Honestly, companies that meet these conditions are extremely rare. There's also a bigger challenge: you need to truly understand the company and know what it will look like ten years from now. That’s the hardest part of value investing—understanding a company is not easy at all.

There is another branch of value investing called high-dividend strategies. The logic is this: if you control the entire company, the value of all future cash flows of the company's lifecycle is yours. But the vast majority of secondary market investors are minority shareholders and cannot control the company. In this case, dividend yield becomes an important indicator of value.