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There are hundreds of investing blogs and newsletters. Some recommend stocks, crypto, ETFs, or quant strategies; others share insights or market commentary. Some blogs provide in-depth write-ups on under-followed stocks. Others recommend sophisticated, algorithmic strategies. Finally, there are others that preach the virtues of a well-balanced portfolio of major asset classes. These might be great resources, but they miss the most important part of the puzzle—establishing an investing framework that ties everything together. How should those recommendations fit into a well-constructed portfolio? How should one decide whether such quant strategies warrant inclusion in a portfolio? How should one select the assets and exposures that meet one’s needs?
Investing well is a multi-step process, involving asset selection, portfolio construction, execution, and monitoring. The steps don't need to be overly sophisticated. But at each step, why one chooses x and not y should be supported by evidence. If you're an individual managing his or her portfolio—a self-directed investor—then you need to develop rules for how you will approach each step. And you'll need to test those rules to confirm they make sense, are likely to be successful in the real world, and can be reproduced and implemented with reasonable ease. This blog will show you how to do all that using the tools of data science, finance theory, and, most of all, common sense.
Hi! I'm Nils. I worked on Wall St. for over a decade providing detailed investment recommendations to institutional investors running multi-billion dollar portfolios in the US and Europe. I earned the Best Stock Picker Award from Thomson/Reuters in my coverage universe even though I never tried to be a stockpicker per se. I also spent time as a data scientist, and built a consulting business that provides investment backtesting and portfolio analysis. I believe investing success is defined by knowing what you're investing for and by developing a testable process that you feel comfortable executing. Once you've built those two pillars, the rest is decoration.
If you have solid experience investing, subscribing to this blog will teach you how to build a holistic system to analyze, automate, and refine your investing process using the tools of programming and the standards of data science. If you're a skilled programmer, subscribing to this blog will give the key finance tools to test your investment ideas in a rigorous fashion and to build and monitor an end-to-end investing process.
My promise to you is to provide useful and insightful content with reproducible code that will help you succeed as an investor by developing your own investing framework and process. And by reproducible code I mean you should get similar results as I show on the blog. If not, I'll fix it.
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