/learn
Depth the book cannot carry
The book keeps the judgment. These notes keep the working parts: the levers, the methods, orders and sizing, selling, behaviour under pressure, the Australian plumbing, and the trades that went wrong. Some are long reads, some are short explainers. General information. Not a product pitch.
Foundations 8
The Four Levers Are Filters, Not Scores
The levers do not rank you. They filter which methods you can actually execute. A high score on one cannot cancel a mismatch on another.
7 min · 2026-10-13 · high
Copying Buffett Without Buffett’s Levers
Permanent capital, insurance float, a multi-decade horizon and no redemptions are part of the method. Most readers do not have them. Copying the slogans without the structure is not the same investment.
5 min · 2026-10-13 · high
Every Method Works for Someone. None Works Without an Edge and Discipline
Fit makes a process more executable. It cannot make a weak idea profitable. For active decisions, evidence of an edge matters. For indexing, suitable exposure and cost control do a different job.
5 min · 2026-10-13 · high
Life Bandwidth Reality Check
Every method needs a minimum number of honest hours. Fall below it and the method doesn't stop, it just degrades into something you never chose. The bands below are a framework for checking that, not a rule.
3 min · 2026-10-13 · medium
Time Horizon vs Patience Horizon
Your calendar can say twenty years. Your patience can run out in eighteen months. The second clock is the one that decides whether a method works for you.
6 min · 2026-10-13 · high
Wealth Stage Transitions
The method that built the money can become the method that damages it. Wealth stage is about which way the cash is flowing and how replaceable the capital is, which is why age is a poor guide to it.
4 min · 2026-10-13 · medium
What You Actually Did in the Last Drawdown
The questionnaire measures what you hope you would do. Your last sale measures what you did. Build for the second one.
6 min · 2026-10-13 · high
Why Someone Else’s Method Feels Safer Than Your Own
An experienced investor can help you understand a process. Their reputation cannot supply your cash reserves, spare hours or patience.
5 min · 2026-10-13 · high
Framework 3
Combining Methods: Core, Satellite, and the Rules That Stop the Drift
Purists ride the full cycle of one method, good and bad. Pragmatists use a stable core and limited satellites so no single mismatch can sink the portfolio. The rules matter more than the mix.
7 min · 2026-10-13 · high
No Hard Rules at Selection, Discipline at Execution
The book attacks dogma when you are choosing a method. It demands rigour once you have chosen. The two never meet, and confusing them is how both drift and fanaticism start.
6 min · 2026-10-13 · high
No Hard Rules at Selection. Discipline at Execution. The Filter in Practice
The freedom is in choosing the method that fits your levers. Once chosen, the rules of that method are not optional. Most people invert the two and call the result flexibility.
6 min · 2026-10-13 · high
Method workshop 12
Active Trading Selects for Skill. Most People Do Not Have It
Trading can make money. The data say the overwhelming majority of people who try it lose money, often persistently. The difference is not effort. It is evidence of edge plus the temperament to keep losses small.
8 min · 2026-10-13 · high
Charting for Long-term Investors Who Never Trade
You don't have to be a trader to get value from a price chart. Used modestly, it can tell you when to review a holding and help you define what "wrong" looks like. It cannot tell you what a business is worth.
2 min · 2026-10-13 · simple
Dividend Growth vs High Yield
Both are income strategies. One buys a bigger cheque today, the other buys a cheque that grows. They fail in different ways, and the right mix depends on when you need the money.
2 min · 2026-10-13 · simple
Expectancy, Win Rate and R-multiples
A high win rate feels like skill. It can still lose money if the losses are bigger than the wins. Expectancy combines both, and R-multiples make it easy to measure. The examples here are hypothetical.
2 min · 2026-10-13 · simple
Growth vs Momentum: Why Blurring Them Gets Expensive
They often own the same shares for a while. They are still different methods with different evidence, different exits and different ways of failing. Mixing the rules is how a good position becomes a bad story.
5 min · 2026-10-13 · high
Income Investing: Sustainable Cash Flow, Not Headline Yield
A yield number tells you what was paid, divided by today's price. It says almost nothing about whether the payment will continue. Income investing done properly is a total-return discipline with an income tilt.
4 min · 2026-10-13 · high
Passive Inside Super, and the Problem with Index Hoppers
Most working Australians already run a hands-off, diversified strategy through their super, whether they chose it or not. Switching between index products or investment options after a bad year is still active decision-making, just with fewer clicks.
2 min · 2026-10-13 · simple
Passive Is Easy to Understand and Hard to Live Through
Index investing has some of the strongest evidence of any method. The catch is that you own every drawdown in full, and the long-run numbers only count if you are still holding when they finish.
4 min · 2026-10-13 · high
Technical Analysis Is a Risk Framework, Not a Crystal Ball
Charts do not predict the future. They let you write the exit before you enter, so the market cannot rewrite the plan while your money is already on the line.
7 min · 2026-10-13 · high
Value Investing: Strengths, Weaknesses & When It Actually Works
A low share price is not a valuation. Value investing compares price with a defensible estimate of business worth, then leaves room for that estimate to be wrong.
6 min · 2026-10-13 · high
Value Traps: Cheap for a Reason Is Not the Same as Undervalued
A low multiple tells you the price. It does not tell you whether the business can still generate the cash the multiple implies. Most cartoon value screens stop at the first observation.
5 min · 2026-10-13 · medium
Volume, Breadth and Multiple Timeframes
Three common additions to a price chart. Each answers a specific question. Each also becomes noise if you use it to answer questions it can't.
2 min · 2026-10-13 · simple
Execution 10
Decide Before the Pressure Hits
Most investors do not lose because they chose the wrong method. They lose because they make the hard decisions after the position is live and the blood is up.
7 min · 2026-10-13 · high
Selling
The industry is obsessed with buying. Selling is the decision that actually determines whether the return stays in the portfolio.
7 min · 2026-10-13 · high
Being Early Is the Same as Being Wrong
Being early is dangerous when time, financing or other people’s patience runs out. It is not literally the same as being wrong in every investment. The first paragraph is the limit.
5 min · 2026-10-13 · high
Phrases That Sound Flexible but Licence Drift
Flexibility belongs at the selection stage. Once a position is open, some very reasonable-sounding phrases are really permission slips to abandon the plan. Here's a watch list and some cleaner alternatives.
3 min · 2026-10-13 · simple
Position Sizing: Fractional Kelly and Why Full Kelly Ruins People
The elegant formula maximises long-run growth on paper. Estimation error turns it into a path to ruin. Survivors use a fraction.
6 min · 2026-10-13 · high
Risk Management
Risk is the job. Returns are the by-product of surviving long enough, at the right size, to collect them.
8 min · 2026-10-13 · high
Sentiment and Being Early
Crowds can keep a price moving long after the argument looks stretched. Sentiment helps explain that behaviour. It does not tell you when it will end.
5 min · 2026-10-13 · high
Sequence-of-Returns Risk for Australian Retirees
The same 30 per cent decline does different damage depending on whether it arrives in year one of retirement or year five. Withdrawals make the order matter more than the average.
7 min · 2026-10-13 · high
The Disposition Effect
Investors sell winners too early and hold losers too long. The pattern is robust, expensive, and mostly invisible to the person doing it.
6 min · 2026-10-13 · high
The Trade Plan as a Ulysses Pact
Ulysses had himself tied to the mast so he could hear the Sirens and still not steer into the rocks. A written plan is the same idea applied to a position.
6 min · 2026-10-13 · high
Skills 15
Accumulation vs Retirement-phase Super
The account phase changes access, payments and tax treatment. It does not remove investment risk or automatically choose the portfolio for you.
3 min · 2026-10-13 · simple
ASX and Overseas Markets: Currency, Trading Hours and Administration
Buying overseas adds an operating system as well as an investment. Currency, session rules, custody and records can matter as much as the ticker.
3 min · 2026-10-13 · simple
Bad Trade Versus Bad System: When to Cut the Position and When to Cut the Method
One loss does not prove the process is broken. A string of losses outside the historical distribution does. Most investors never measure the difference, so they either abandon a working method too early or ride a broken one too long.
6 min · 2026-10-13 · high
Bid–Ask Spreads, Auctions and Market Impact
Brokerage is visible. Trading friction is easier to overlook, particularly when the order is large relative to the available market.
3 min · 2026-10-13 · simple
The Checklist Is a Pre-Commitment Device, Not a Personality Test
Gawande’s surgical checklists cut complications because they forced steps that experts already knew under conditions where stress makes steps easy to skip. The same mechanism applies to entries, size and exits. The list does not create an edge. It protects the one you already have.
5 min · 2026-10-13 · medium
CHESS, Custody and Fractional Shares
Seeing a holding in an app does not explain its legal ownership. Registration, beneficial interests and transfer rights deserve their own check.
3 min · 2026-10-13 · simple
Coupon, Current Yield and Yield to Maturity
A bond’s coupon tells you what it pays on face value. It does not, by itself, tell you the return on the price you pay.
3 min · 2026-10-13 · simple
Direct Bonds, Bond Funds and Maturity-date Funds
An individual bond can have a repayment date. A rolling bond fund usually has no equivalent date for your units, while a maturity-date fund has its own wind-up rules.
3 min · 2026-10-13 · simple
Dividends, DRPs, Ex-dates and Corporate Actions
An income payment, a reinvestment election and a change in share count are different events. None creates a free return merely by appearing in your account.
3 min · 2026-10-13 · simple
Drawdown Tolerance: What You Can Afford Versus What You Will Actually Do
Questionnaires measure what you say in a calm office. Revealed behaviour measures what you did the last time the account was down 25 percent. The second number is the one that sets the portfolio.
6 min · 2026-10-13 · high
Duration, Credit Spreads and Inflation
A bond can keep paying its coupon while its market price falls. Interest-rate sensitivity, credit risk and purchasing power explain different parts of that result.
3 min · 2026-10-13 · simple
Market, Limit and Stop Orders
An order controls how a decision reaches the market. It cannot guarantee both an acceptable price and an immediate exit.
3 min · 2026-10-13 · simple
Sentiment Does Not Time the Market. It Changes Which Method Is Expensive
High sentiment makes speculative growth and momentum look better than they are and value look worse. Low sentiment does the reverse. The practical use is a tilt in attention and size, not an all-in switch.
6 min · 2026-10-13 · medium
Sentiment Proxies Have Information. They Are Not a Timing System
VIX, AAII, put/call, margin debt, IPO pops and magazine covers all contain information about positioning and narrative. None of them reliably tells you when to buy or sell the market. Extremes raise the odds. They do not remove the cost of being early.
8 min · 2026-10-13 · high
Tracking Difference, Tracking Error, Spreads and Fees
The advertised fee is only one part of the result. Separate the fund’s performance against its benchmark from the cost of getting into and out of it.
3 min · 2026-10-13 · simple
Failure modes 4
Archegos: Concentration, Total-Return Swaps, and No Stop at Scale
Bill Hwang’s family office built equity exposure through swaps that kept the aggregate position invisible to any single bank. When the names fell, there was no pre-committed limit that forced a reduction before the capital was gone.
5 min · 2026-10-13 · medium
Druckenmiller 2000: He Knew It Was Crazy. He Bought It Anyway
One of the best macro traders of his generation correctly identified the dot-com excess, shorted it, covered at a loss, and then bought near the top because he could not stand watching others profit. The failure was not analytical.
5 min · 2026-10-13 · medium
Julian Robertson Closed Tiger at the Nasdaq Peak. Being Right Was Not Enough
Tiger had identified the technology excess years earlier and refused to participate. Client withdrawals and relative-performance pressure forced the closure in March 2000, the month the index topped. The subsequent 80 percent decline proved the analysis and arrived too late for the fund.
5 min · 2026-10-13 · medium
LTCM: Two Nobel Laureates and No Pre-Committed Deleveraging Trigger
The models assumed spreads would converge. They did not include the fund’s own size as a risk, nor a written rule for what to do when every position moved against them at once. Intelligence did not substitute for the missing commitment.
6 min · 2026-10-13 · medium
Australian 8
Age Pension Deeming and Investment Choice
For the Age Pension income test, Services Australia generally doesn't count what your investments actually earn. It counts a deemed amount. That has some useful consequences for investment choice, and some myths attached. Rates and thresholds change, so always check the current figures.
2 min · 2026-10-13 · simple
Bank Hybrids After APRA's Phase-out
APRA has decided Australian banks should stop using hybrid securities as regulatory capital. Existing hybrids will mature or be called over the next several years, which leaves holders with a replacement problem. Confirm the current status and timetable with APRA before relying on any date here.
2 min · 2026-10-13 · simple
Four Pillars: The Oligopoly That Became a Portfolio Habit
The policy that stopped the big four banks from merging also trained a generation of Australian investors to treat them as permanent, fully-franked ballast. The structural protection is real. The concentration risk that followed is also real.
6 min · 2026-10-13 · medium
Franking Credits: The Australian Edge and Its Integrity Rules
Franking is a real advantage for many Australian investors, and its value depends on your tax rate and on rules about how long you hold. It cannot turn a weak business into a good investment.
4 min · 2026-10-13 · high
Property as Forced Saving, Not Genius Asset
Australian property has built a lot of household wealth. Much of that came from leverage, compulsory repayments and the fact that a house is hard to panic-sell. Price growth contributed too. Separating the parts tells you what you're really relying on.
4 min · 2026-10-13 · high
Resource-Cycle Thinking: The Habit That Underperformed a Simple Global Index
Australia’s commodity exposure is real. The belief that portfolios should be actively tilted around mining cycles has, for long stretches, cost more than it earned relative to owning the global market and leaving it alone.
5 min · 2026-10-13 · medium
SMSF Property: The Double Exposure Most Trustees Underestimate
A single residential property inside an SMSF is not just an illiquid asset. For most trustees it is also correlated with the employment income that funds the contributions. The concentration is cultural as much as financial.
6 min · 2026-10-13 · medium
Yield Traps and the 2020 Bank Dividend Cuts
A falling price makes a yield look better right up until the dividend is cut. In 2020 the major banks did not all do the same thing, and the differences matter more than the headline.
4 min · 2026-10-13 · high
From the desk 4
Executing for a Bank-Bills Trader
A large bank-bills trader recruited me to execute his trades. What stayed with me was the importance of knowing the risk before the trade, while there was still time to decide calmly.
4 min · 2026-10-13 · high
Seventeen in the SFE Back Office
I started in settlements at the Sydney Futures Exchange in 1990. The first lesson was that a market opinion is only one part of a transaction. Money and ownership still have to move.
4 min · 2026-10-13 · high
The 2015 Sizing Mistake
In 2015, a few hours erased months of gains from my trading. The lesson is about the size of a position and the loss it can create, not about the comfort of a convincing market view. The full scene still needs the details only I can supply.
5 min · 2026-10-13 · high
The Floor
Floor broking taught me to pay attention to what people did with orders, not only what they said about a market. That observation is useful. It is not a substitute for a tested investment process.
4 min · 2026-10-13 · high
Independence 2
General Advice, Personal Advice and Factual Information
Australian law draws lines between information, general advice and personal advice. Knowing where a source sits tells you how much it can know about you, and how much weight its opinion deserves. That includes this site.
3 min · 2026-10-13 · high
When DIY Stops Making Sense
Running your own money is a reasonable choice for many people. It stops being reasonable when the complexity, the stakes or your available time outgrow your process. Knowing the triggers in advance is part of doing it yourself well.
4 min · 2026-10-13 · high