If you’ve been around here for more than five minutes, you know we operate about 180 degrees away from the usual finance playbook. It’s the exact reason we’ve always fought to keep our fund’s management fees as close to zero as humanly possible, and why the base tier here sits at the absolute Substack minimum.
The funny thing about human psychology is that we’re wired to equate high price tags with high competence.
If you aren’t aggressively pitching a five-figure VIP mastermind or oozing slick, tailored-suit confidence, people sometimes mistake it for weakness.
But we aren’t here to extract maximum dollar value from your inbox, hype up random ticker tips, or tell you how to gamble your savings away.
Our deal has always been simple from the start. We document what we actually do with our own capital, including the good setups, the brutal mistakes, the operators we meet on the ground, and the hard lessons learned along the way.
Most investing errors don’t come from a lack of data; they come from the shortcuts our brains take when things get… messy. We lean on lazy rules of thumb to make a complex world feel manageable, and in the process, we strip out the nuances that can improve our lives meaningfully.
So, in the spirit of passing along genuine economies of scale (where the only currency that really matters is your attention), we’re trying something new.
Welcome to a brand-new series: 1-on-1 subscriber portfolio breakdowns.
The goal isn’t to judge or play stock-picking guru. It’s an open, constructive audit of your public holdings to dissect decision-making constructively:
Asset Allocation & Structural Balance: How the whole machine is built to survive different regimes.
Security Selection & Thesis Quality: Why each bet earned its place on the roster.
Behavioral Traps & Heuristics: Pinpointing the mental shortcuts and blind spots quietly eating away at returns.
More reps, better decisions, none of that sales pitch. Let’s get into it.
Here is the lowdown on how this is actually going to work.
Our plan is to turn this into a monthly issue, delivered either as a recorded session or a casual live stream.
Before you sweat the public exposure: don’t. You will not be paraded around on camera.
We treat every breakdown as a fully anonymized case study… no names, no faces, no identifying marks. If you want to jump on audio, great; if you’d rather stay completely behind the curtain while we review your books, that works too. Your comfort sets the terms.
If you’d like to throw your hat in the ring, just reply directly to this email. The only prerequisite is an active paid subscription so we can keep the room focused on serious participants.
Hit reply with the following four bullets:
Age
Approximate gross annual income (in € or $)
A screenshot of your current public portfolio (holdings, weightings, cash)
Note: It doesn’t matter whether you have $10k or $10m saved up; this is all about shaping your unique approach.
A few lines on your strategy and framework —how you approach the market, your time horizon, and what you’re trying to achieve
Quick note on size: Whether your savings account sits at $10k or $10m doesn’t make a blind bit of difference here. The math scales, but the approach is identical. This isn't a net-worth flex but rather about shaping your unique framework.
We’ll run a few quick screening chats (10-15 mins) over the coming days to select our first profile and dial in the format. First teardown drops in mid-November.
One final, mandatory house rule before we kick things off: none of this is individualized financial advice.
Yes, we hold official certifications and have slogged through our fair share of financial acronyms (CFA, CAIA, EFA, and the rest of the alphabet soup…. full credentials are on the About page if you want the pedigree check).
But this series is strictly educational: a practical stress-test of thinking frameworks to help you sharpen your own decision-making muscle.
We won’t be handing out cookie-cutter prescriptions like “bump your cash allocation from 20% to 25%.” That’s useless without context.
Instead, we’re going to dig into the why:
Why are you holding 20% in cash right now?
What specific job is that capital supposed to do?
Are the instruments you picked actually the most efficient tool for that mandate?
We’ll share how we tackle similar tradeoffs with our own capital so you have a concrete baseline, but every portfolio lives in a unique reality.
The point isn’t to tell you what to do, but rather to pressure-test the logic so you can make your next move with total clarity and independence.
If you found value in this analysis, please hit the ❤️ button and share your thoughts in the comments. It helps us bring institutional-grade research to a wider audience.
And if you liked this post, we’re confident you’ll love this:
