Learn the why. Not just the what.
Investing fundamentals, market logic, and the discipline behind good decisions.
Systematic vs Discretionary: Two Roads Up
Investment approaches divide broadly between systematic rules-based strategies and discretionary judgment-based approaches. Each has specific advantages and specific limitations worth understanding.
Factor Investing: What 'Smart Beta' Actually Is
Factor investing systematically captures the specific patterns academic finance has identified in cross-sectional returns. Understanding what factors work and why is essential to any coherent view of the approach.
Contrarian Investing: When the Crowd Is Wrong
Contrarian investing — taking positions against prevailing market opinion — is one of the most-discussed approaches in retail investing. Understanding when it works and when it fails is essential to actually applying it effectively.
Trend Following: The Systematic Cousin of Momentum
Trend-following strategies have been implemented systematically for decades in commodity, currency, and futures markets. The long-term record is respectable but volatile, with specific characteristics worth understanding.
Market Timing: What the Data Actually Shows
The empirical record of market timing efforts by retail and professional investors alike is unambiguous — most timing efforts underperform simple buy-and-hold strategies. Understanding the specific reasons is essential to any investor tempted by the practice.
Buy-and-Hold: The Underrated Discipline
Buy-and-hold is treated as a beginner strategy in most retail commentary. The empirical evidence suggests it consistently outperforms more active alternatives — not because it is sophisticated but because it avoids the mistakes active alternatives introduce.
Dollar-Cost Averaging: What It Solves, What It Doesn't
Dollar-cost averaging is one of the most-praised strategies in retail investing. The mathematics say something more nuanced — DCA solves a specific set of behavioural problems and produces a specific set of trade-offs.
Global Macro Investing and the Big Picture
An overview of global macro investing, its top-down instruments, historical record, and the discipline required to trade economic cycles across borders.
Dividend Growth Investing: Compounding Cash Flow
Dividend growth investing is not a yield strategy. It is a specific bet on the compounding of a company's ability to raise its dividend over many years — a discipline with a specific character and a specific set of trade-offs.
Sector Rotation Investing and the Business Cycle
An examination of sector rotation investing — its grounding in the business cycle, its historical record, and the discipline required to apply it.
Growth Investing: When Multiple Expansion Matters
Growth investing is not just about buying fast-growing companies. It is about a specific bet on the durability of that growth and the multiple the market will pay for it.
Event-Driven Investing and Corporate Catalysts
A look at how event-driven investing turns mergers, spin-offs, and restructurings into a distinct, catalyst-based approach to markets.
Value Investing in Modern Markets
Graham's margin-of-safety framework is the oldest disciplined approach to equity investing. Its record in the 2010s and 2020s has raised legitimate questions about whether it still works — and if so, how.
Momentum Investing: Why Strength Tends to Persist
The single most robust anomaly in the academic finance literature is that recent winners keep winning, on average, over horizons of a few months to a year. Understanding why matters more than the pattern itself.
Day Trading vs Swing Trading vs Position Trading
The same market accommodates three very different time-frames. Each requires a different skill, a different psychology, and produces a different pattern of returns.
Position Trading vs. Long-Term Investing
Position trading holds for months on a view about conditions; long-term investing holds for years on a view about businesses. The similarity of their timeframes conceals a fundamental difference in reasoning.
Swing Trading: Understanding It Without Being Seduced by It
Swing trading seeks to capture price movements over days or weeks. It demands genuine discipline, and it is frequently adopted by people who mistake its accessibility for ease.
Day Trading: What the Data Actually Says About the Odds
Studies across multiple countries and decades have found that the large majority of day traders lose money, and that persistent profitability is confined to a very small minority.
Trend Following: A Rules-Based Way to Stay Humble
Trend following is a systematic style that responds to established price movements rather than forecasting them. Its virtue is the abandonment of prediction; its cost is frequent small losses.
Style Drift: How Investors Quietly Abandon Their Own Plan
Style drift is the slow erosion of a stated framework through small, defensible exceptions. It is rarely a decision and almost always the accumulation of many.
Choosing a Style That Fits Your Temperament
A style only works if it is sustained, and sustainability depends on temperament far more than on the theoretical merits of the approach.
Why Copying Someone Else's Style Usually Fails
A style cannot be separated from the circumstances, horizon, and temperament of the person who built it. Copying the visible decisions while lacking the invisible foundation is a recipe for abandonment.
Concentration vs. Diversification as a Style Choice
Concentration expresses confidence in one's analysis; diversification expresses humility about it. The choice between them is a claim about the reliability of one's own judgement.
The Role of Cash in Every Investing Style
Cash serves as reserve, optionality, and psychological ballast. Its cost is real and its function is misunderstood by investors who evaluate it only on the return it fails to produce.