07/26: Walk with Kings, Serve Dabov Coffee
Portfolio Update. On returning £1.6m in capital, orchestrating public and private deals, dealing with red tape and building a project on my own terms.
Want more context? Track the journey so far here.
Index
Portfolio Overview (both Public and Private)
Briefing
This 26th edition is, by far, the one where I’m the most liberated. I’m going to talk about the dark side of the money management industry, how the system pushes down young, ambitious entrepreneurs, show you the road ahead with complete transparency, lay out the portfolio details, and update you on our next steps both for the public and private portfolios.
Sometimes the biggest hurdle in finance isn’t reading the markets… it’s navigating the administrative jungle.
After months of wrestling with compliance hurdles, institutional friction, and open-ended overhead, I’ve made the call to reset.
While building out this setup meant eating significant personal costs behind the scenes, my clients’ capital was returned entirely intact and profitable.
Moving forward, I’m trading in comfortable spreadsheet abstraction for an owner-operator model. I want to step back from corporate BS to actively direct business operations.
As for our public strategy, we are doubling down on an even more disciplined blueprint, anchored by cash preservation and a tailored All-Weather setup, while keeping our eyes focused on high-conviction micro-cap plays that we’re so good at identifying.
For info on the All-Weather framework:
You won’t see complex accounting gymnastics here, just total, aggregated transparency into our holdings and transactions as they unfold. This update is about closing one noisy chapter to open a much simpler, sharper one.
One built exclusively for long-term partners who value patience, operational integrity, and getting back to fundamentals investing.
For context: Unlike other letters where I write using ‘we’ to represent an organization, this one feels far more personal… so expect a lot of ‘me, myself, and I’.
Staying Honest in a Dishonest Game
As a money manager, you actually have three jobs: research, fundraising, and dealing with paperwork.
We all deal with admin, but over the last few months, health issues and mischievous actors piled up to the point of no return.
Ever since selling our cybersecurity company in July 2023, I’ve been building towards what I thought was my dream:
A publicly traded parent company with multiple operating subsidiaries.
Along the way, I’ve made unbelievable mistakes. Most of these spin out of good faith and trying to offer the best setup for clients and shareholders.
Here’s a short list (non-exhaustive):
Setting AUM fees near 0%: Great in theory but zero margin for overhead, legal friction, or market downturns.
Trusting banks implicitly: Assuming custodians move on your timeline; compliance delays and institutional inertia/incompetence can stall you for months.
Over-complicating legal structures early: Designing complex entity setups before reaching scale adds massive regulatory friction and fixed cost.
Underestimating audit and compliance costs: Legal fees, tax filings, and reporting almost always cost twice the initial estimates.
Assuming performance speaks for itself: Relying solely on stock selection while ignoring distribution and storytelling.
Not capping service provider budgets: Letting external lawyers and advisors bill open-ended hourly rates without explicit cost caps.
Taking service providers at face value: Skimping on due diligence for administrators and colleagues.
Prioritizing tax efficiency over simplicity: Over-optimizing tax structures when a simpler setup saves tenfold in administrative sanity.
Expecting regulatory best-case timelines: Planning around strict launch calendars instead of building massive time buffers.
Handling non-investment work solo: Delaying delegation, leading to operational bottlenecks and burnout. And publishing/editing this work.
Letting admin noise eat up research time: Allowing legal/compliance fires to steal 80% of your daily focus away from core fundamental research. Sometimes even being unable to sleep thanks to these guys.
The Price of Integrity
With all of this in mind, the only consistent thing I’ve done is lose money for myself. Not a single one of my clients can complain about the same fact, though.
Everyone who has participated with me has made money. EVERYONE.
But people don’t see what happens as ChatGPT would put it “under the hood”. Here is where I’ve lost money, so you can start to see what it actually feels like:
That’s about -€135,000 in ~2 years. For what exactly? I don’t know.
Some of my own money is still stuck in the fund and won’t be released until the end of the year. The same thing happened during setup: €1m was locked up as a guarantee, and I couldn’t even put it into a money market fund until the first client came in (~1 year of senseless lock-up).
Note: Out of that locked-up capital, the bank was actually deducting fees during this entire process.
As you can probably imagine, this all heavily dragged on my 2025 returns.
Going All the Way
As you can tell, I don’t exactly half-ass what I do. Vitally (for my conscience), I cover everyone else’s ass by eating these costs personally and passing minimal dues to the people involved.
Fortunately, even though most of this goes unnoticed, I still receive a ton of praise from the people I work with. For that, I thank you.
Though, from time to time, I get some tough love. One of my investors told me last month:
“My child… you are stupid (he used a harsher word). You are very, very stupid. What a terrible salesman you are. Don’t get me wrong, you’re f***ing amazing at the investing part… but you totally suck at sales.”
I’m still unsure about whether I should take that as a compliment or an insult.
Flippin’ the Switch
By the end of the month, something happened that completely flipped my mind. I was already in a delicate place with patience, but this was, as they say, the straw that broke the camel’s back.
Using a very trusted bank, they suddenly decided to go full compliance on me.
Even though I had uploaded all subscription agreements and source-of-wealth data (2025 tax returns) for every shareholder, they decided to close everything out for non-UK/Common Wealth people.
Note that I had this exact conversation in May while negotiating with two other banks, and Wise assured me this would not happen.
They even guaranteed it and assigned me a dedicated agent named Mo from the large transfers department… with whom I’ve had a couple of pleasant conversations.
And yet, without any real warning, they froze all of my accounts (two business and one personal) with zero explanation. I did nothing sketchy, nothing illegal, and nothing even in the grey zone. Everything was legit, and everything had been thoroughly vetted and discussed beforehand.
To give you an idea: I have exchanged exactly 181 emails with them. 10 with Mo, and the rest split across 51 different support and large-account agents. I’m not sure why I need to restart the conversation from scratch every time I talk to support, but... sure. Great. Fantastic customer service.
At the time of the event:
28 people had signed the share subscription agreement, sent over their ID, and source-of-wealth documentation.
16 people had already completed their transfer, totaling £1.6m in the account.
5 transfers were paused on Thursday when this hit, and promptly cancelled on Friday… leaving only 7 people left to finalize their transfers.
The total expected raise ranged from £2.2m–£2.5m.
I was even putting up a lower personal amount than expected just to avoid diluting returns and to boost per-share gains (another one of those things that would have gone unnoticed).
By the time you read this, everyone who sent funds should have received their money back, minus a small fee that went directly toward paying the lawyer and accountant retainers.
Important: If you haven’t received yours yet, please send me an email. It was all sent out, so at worst, it’s currently on its way.
So… What Now?
Over the weekend, I collected my thoughts. I’ve clearly not been happy with how all of these processes have played out.
My overall sentiment is one of intense hard labor that is going nowhere.
That’s a wake-up call for me, so I’m taking some time to think things through.
Doing this for other people has completely unscaled me and destroyed the laser focus I had back in 2021–2023.
Frankly, I’m fed up with it.
Here is Where I'm Doing About It
I’m sharing with you my latest 2025 tax filing below so you can see I’m not bullshitting you like so many other Substack publications.
Keep in mind that I’m 30 years old and still have a long way to go with this.
I’ll break down my exact asset allocation, and you’ll see that the vast majority remains in public markets.
I’ll also explain why I need to spend some time playing “easy mode” as an owner-operator. I’m putting €100k of my own money into a private business to secure a major stake.
I originally intended to do this through Hermit Ventures, but given developments plus how good the deal is, I simply can’t pass it up. I expect a full payback within a year.
Aside from that single private investment, you’ll see how everything else develops over time. And I’ll keep this transparency going for as long as I’m alive.
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None of the following should be construed as investment advice. Please consult a financial advisor before making any investment decision. You will find a full disclaimer at the end of this post.
📊 Portfolio Overview
Returns (Asset-Weighted)
