Learn the why. Not just the what.
Investing fundamentals, market logic, and the discipline behind good decisions.
Index Rebalancing: The Invisible Money in Motion
Every quarter, indices from S&P 500 to MSCI global benchmarks reconfigure their constituents. Trillions in passive assets follow mechanically. Understanding the mechanism explains a lot of otherwise-inexplicable price moves.
ADX and the Question of Trend Strength
A look at the Average Directional Index, what it actually quantifies, and why strength and direction are two separate questions.
Volume: The Cross-Check for Every Move
Volume is the second dimension of every price chart. A move without confirming volume tells you something different from the same move on heavy participation.
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.
The Dot-Com Bust: Growth Without Cash Flow
The 2000–2003 tech bear market erased 78% of the Nasdaq. The mechanism was specific: valuations that required cash flow that never arrived, in a rate environment that turned unforgiving.
Herd Behavior and the FOMO Cycle
Individually rational participants often produce collectively irrational outcomes. Understanding the mechanism of herd behaviour — and specifically how FOMO cycles unfold — is one of the more important behavioural lessons in investing.
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.
Silver Thursday and the Danger of Cornering Markets
How the Hunt brothers' attempt to corner the silver market in 1980 collapsed in a single session, illustrating the risks of leverage and concentration.
Market Makers, Spreads, and Why Zero-Commission Isn't Free
Retail brokerages stopped charging trading commissions in 2019. The trade did not become free — the cost simply moved to a different, less visible place in the market structure.
Home Bias and the Comfort of the Familiar
Why investors overweight what feels familiar—domestic markets, employer stock, known brands—and how this quiet bias undermines diversification.
Bollinger Bands and the Volatility Envelope
Bollinger Bands describe the volatility envelope around a moving average. A price touching the upper band is not a sell; a price at the lower band is not a buy. The bands are a picture of range, not a decision rule.
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.
Black Monday 1987: A Structural Cascade
The Dow lost 22.6% in a single day on October 19, 1987 — the largest single-day decline in the exchange's history. The mechanism was less about news and more about interacting market structures under stress.
Anchoring: The Reference Price Trap
The price at which you first considered a stock, or the price at which you bought it, becomes a mental anchor that distorts every subsequent decision. Understanding the mechanism is a partial defence.
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.
Order Flow: The Real Structure Behind Every Trade
Every trade is the meeting of a buyer and a seller at a specific price. The structure of the orders behind those meetings — the order flow — shapes what the price does next in ways the chart does not show.
MACD as a Momentum Description
MACD describes the changing pace of a market — the second derivative of price action. It does not tell you when to act; it tells you what the pace is currently doing.
The Nifty Fifty: When Blue Chips Became a Bubble
In the early 1970s, a small group of large-cap growth stocks was widely believed to be a one-decision holding — buy and never sell. The unwinding that followed is one of the most instructive episodes in modern equity history.
Confirmation Bias in a Portfolio
You read the analysis that supports your holdings and dismiss the analysis that questions them. This is not a moral failing; it is a documented pattern, and it is the most portfolio-corrupting bias most investors carry.
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.
How ETF Creation and Redemption Actually Works
The reason ETFs trade close to their net asset value is a specific arbitrage mechanism — creation and redemption — that runs in the background every day.
Moving Averages: Frames, Not Prophecies
Moving averages describe time-frames visually; they do not predict where price is going. Understanding what they actually are is the first step to reading them correctly.
The Great Depression: Deflation and the Debt Spiral
The 1929–1932 collapse is the reference episode for every modern central bank. Understanding what actually broke — and what didn't — is the key to reading policy responses today.
Loss Aversion: Why Losses Weigh Twice
Kahneman and Tversky's central finding — that a loss is felt roughly twice as strongly as an equivalent gain — shapes almost every consequential decision an investor makes.