Welcome!

You know what the world really needs? Yep—another random guy writing about investments. Sounds thrilling, right?

But wait, it gets better: I’m not here to write about revolutionary companies changing the world or the latest AI-powered rocketship to the moon. Nope. I write about conservative portfolio management. Because I’ve spent my whole career as one type of credit analyst or another and I’ve seen entirely too many businesses and speculators blow their brains out with too much debt.

And over the decades I’ve learned, and internalized, some very fundamental truths:

• Time in market beats constantly trying to time the market.

• Survivorship bias makes YOLO bettors into heroes.

• An extra 1% return over decades is eye-popping for terminal wealth.

• Tax efficiency matters, especially when the numbers get bigger.

• Simplicity beats complexity for 99 percent of regular folk.

All of these fundamental truths have informed how I manage my personal portfolio. So the purpose of this newsletter is to show you opportunities in real-time, put out interesting ideas, and have a philosophical discussion on some of the things I’m seeing in the markets and in the economy, all within the context of a conservatively managed portfolio.

First things first: you probably shouldn’t pick stocks.

Most people aren’t well-suited to picking individual stocks from the long side, let alone going both long and short. My advice to pretty much everyone reading this, and the advice I take for all of my retirement accounts, is to keep it stupidly simple.

Stupidly simple is something like the Avantis Moderate Allocation ETF. It’s a fund-of-funds portfolio that leverages Avantis’s value and profitability factor equity and fixed income portfolios into one portfolio. It has a target allocation of ~65 percent global equities and ~35 percent global fixed income.

One ETF, global exposure with a value tilt that’s roughly the stock and bond allocation that I want. Literally does not get any more simple. If you take nothing else away from this newsletter, putting the bulk of your savings in something like this and then forgetting about it is probably some of the best investment advice you will ever receive.

Kinda sounds familiar to those fundamental truths I listed out up above, no?

Boring AF.

But now for the fun stuff.

You could probably stop reading here and know everything you need to know about investing. And beat ~99 percent of investors over the long-term. But you’re here because you don’t want to dump all your savings into a lifecycle fund or a target-allocation ETF.

You want to do better than the market.

So do I.

So I regularly target companies that appear to have a good reward to risk both on the long and the short side.

For the shorts, these ideally aren’t crowded shorts - it’s best if no one has heard of the companies and no one is talking about them. They’re definitely not going to be on any “Top 100 Most-Shorted Stocks” list. Nobody wants to end up like Melvin Capital.

Think melting ice cube vs activist fraud accusation takedown.

For the longs, I’m looking for growth at a reasonable price sort of situations. Preferably they’re on the smaller side so they have a long potential runway for growth, they do something useful regardless of economic environment, and they have a management team that seems to have the ability to either do accretive M&A or have a penchant for buying back stock.

Whenever I find a good opportunity, I peel off a couple bucks from AVMA and buy it.

But just remember: don’t go big on these longs and shorts. Make sure the portfolio survives while focusing on what even an extra 1 percent per year does for the ultimate size of the portfolio.

A final word.

I don’t expect to end up on any performance leaderboard—but that’s not the goal. My goal is to build a thoughtful, diversified portfolio that works for me, that survives all market environments, and provides a comfortable amount of income to live off of if I ever finally decide to call it quits managing a team that manages $3B+ in credit exposure.

You might wonder why someone with my day job would write one of these. And I’ll tell you why: it’s fun. At work I only get to play in the long-only senior parts of the capital stack, but I love all the innovation and opportunity that exists in every part of the capital markets and the real economy. And this is a creative outlet for me to have fun with—a way to blow off steam, especially after days spent dealing with compliance folk and regulators.

If you find this useful—or at least entertaining—then mission accomplished.