Overview & Philosophy

The Market Return

I created this site as a provable track record against 'the market return.' The market return is a concept from college finance textbooks. The idea is that if you own an adequately diversified investment portfolio, you can survive a bad bet and keep playing. You get a theoretical return for taking 'market' risk in excess of the rate of return on US Treasuries - which is considered the risk-free rate, or the rate of return available simply by foregoing consumption for a time.

My view is that when it comes to your savings - money that you don't need for the next three to five years, ideally longer - you can't do better than the so-called market return. And as a proxy for the market return, you can't do better than the S&P 500 Index. By my own logic, I shouldn't be able to beat the market return ... let's see how this works out!

Four portfolios are published here in real time, and performance is tracked against benchmarks.

The books

Portfolio mandates and time horizons

Real capital

IRA

Tax-advantaged retirement account. Because gains here are not subject to capital gains tax, it serves as the vehicle for active, shorter-term positioning — rotating across ETFs and sectors as macro conditions evolve. Higher turnover is free here in a way it isn't elsewhere.

Real capital

LTH

Long-term holds. Individual equities held outside the IRA with a multi-year horizon. Minimal market timing — the underlying view is the same long-term equity optimism as the IRA, expressed with far less rotation. Position sizing is in portfolio weight. Conviction is the primary entry criterion.

Model portfolio

CC ETF Strategy

A systematic, rules-based ETF rotation strategy. Positions are expressed as target weights. Not actually invested capital — tracked as a model to evaluate the strategy's live performance separately from discretionary decisions.

Model portfolio

CC Strategy

A discretionary thematic strategy. Tracks high-conviction macro and thematic ideas with a 6–18 month horizon. Not actually invested capital — maintained as a model to separate idea generation from execution.

Investment philosophy

Whenever someone asks "Which stocks should I invest in?" or "What should I do with my long-term savings?" my answer is: just buy the SPY ETF as and when you have money to allocate to savings, and then chill.

If you can't control yourself and need to invest in individual stocks — it's fun to follow in the same way professional sports or horse betting are! — so be it. But set aside a small portion of savings to do this. The majority of your long-term savings is better off getting "the market return," and the S&P 500 is as good a proxy for this as you need.

Many boomers pay +/- 1% of their assets annually to someone who does this for them.

Cryptographic record integrity

Every trade memo on this site is cryptographically committed to the Bitcoin blockchain via OpenTimestamps. This creates a tamper-evident, independently verifiable record that cannot be backdated or altered without detection.

How it works

01

When a trade is logged, the rationale memo is combined with trade metadata into a canonical string with a precise, deterministic format.

02

That canonical string is SHA-256 hashed. The hash is a unique 64-character fingerprint of the exact memo text at the moment of logging.

03

The hash is submitted to OpenTimestamps Bitcoin calendar servers. These servers aggregate thousands of hashes into a Merkle tree and commit the root into a Bitcoin block — anchoring the hash to the immutable Bitcoin blockchain.

04

Anyone can use the Verify page to independently confirm that a memo's SHA-256 hash was committed to Bitcoin at the stated block height — proving it existed at that time and has not been altered since.

The portfolio inception snapshot (May 5, 2026) was similarly hashed and submitted to Bitcoin, creating a verifiable baseline for all future performance calculations.