Why I'm Open-Sourcing My Portfolio

Historical context — October 11, 2026: This is my April 20 investing account and publication plan, not a recommendation to replace diversified investing with my positions. A complete public portfolio ledger and a continuing quarterly-review service are not established by this article or the current publication. For related decision guides, use the current resource library; this essay remains a dated investing account.

What active thesis investing actually looks like — and why I'll publish every bet I make.

Two months in.

In February 2026, I sold every index fund I owned.

I wrote about why in the previous piece. The short version: the gospel was built for a world where wages tracked housing and the table didn't change.

Those were the assumptions I was questioning in April; my experience does not establish that index investing fails for young people.

Questioning my own index allocation was only half of my personal decision.

The other half is what you do instead.

This is what I've been doing for the two months since.

Active thesis, not active trading.

The framework is simple.

I make bets on theses I can defend, in companies and assets I can explain.

Multiple theses at a time is fine.

I might hold three or five active theses, each with its own positions.

I review the theses monthly. I adjust quarterly. I don't trade daily.

This is "active" in the sense that I'm choosing what to own.

It is not "active" in the sense that I'm trying to time the market every Tuesday.

The distinction matters because the word "active" has been hijacked by the day-trading economy.

Active doesn't have to mean obsessive. It can mean thoughtful and adjustable.

Why thesis matters: the Figma case.

My reason for reviewing a long-term thesis is that competitive conditions can change; this does not show that active investing outperforms a diversified index.

In April 2026, Figma — which had integrated Claude as its AI assistant — got the bad news in stages.

On Monday, Anthropic's Chief Product Officer resigned from Figma's board.

The same day, reports surfaced that Anthropic was building design tools.

The next day, Anthropic launched Claude Design. A direct Figma competitor.

I reported a 7% move in an hour, but did not supply a timestamped price series or a calculation here. The embedded post records what I was saying then; it does not independently verify that market result.

If your investment thesis was "Figma is the dominant design platform of the next decade," the announcement would be a reason to re-examine that thesis, not proof that the business or the investment had ceased to have value.

That isn't a freak event. That's the rate at which platform shifts happen now.

AI labs are eating the application layer of the companies that integrated them. Cloud providers are competing with the SaaS built on top of them.

Open-source weights are commoditizing entire model categories every quarter.

If your portfolio doesn't have a thesis behind each position, you can't even tell when one of them breaks.

That's the case for active thesis.

The four rules I follow.

1. Each position has a thesis.

If I can't write a paragraph explaining why I own it, I don't own it. This filter alone removes most of what people put in their portfolios.

2. Multiple theses, no obsession.

I hold several active theses at any time.

Diversification by thesis, not by ticker count. Each thesis gets reviewed monthly, adjusted quarterly. Nothing gets touched daily.

3. Long-term lens, technology-aware.

I'm investing on a 5-10 year horizon, not 30. That's long enough to capture compounding, but short enough that I have to actually pay attention to whether the world is still the world I bet on.

4. When the thesis breaks, the position goes.

Not when the price moves. When the thesis breaks. These are different events, and confusing them is how people lose money.

What this isn't.

This isn't day trading. I don't have charts open. I don't watch tickers. I don't refresh prices.

This isn't macro betting. I don't have a view on Fed cuts or where the 10-year yield is going next quarter.

This isn't a stock-picking course.

I have no edge that scales. I'm small enough that my "edge" is just the freedom to think for myself — which, as I learned in quant, isn't really an edge at all.

I'm just someone with a 5-10 year horizon, several theses I can defend in writing, and the patience to ignore the daily noise.

Open-sourcing the portfolio.

Here's the part most "active investors" won't do.

I'm going to publish my portfolio. Wins and losses. Public-record honest.

I've been publishing my portfolio since last year.

Going forward, I'm going to publish the theses behind it too — the actual reasoning, the actual positions, the actual quarterly reviews.

No course. No paid community. No premium tier. No sponsored newsletters. No "DM me for the strategy."

If you do better than me, great.

If I do better, the receipts will be there.

If I'm wrong about a thesis, the post-mortem will be there too.

Most personal finance creators reach a point where they monetize the audience.

Course, community, ads, sponsored picks, paid newsletter, fund.

I have no incentive to do any of that. I make my money from operating businesses, not from selling investing advice.

That means I can publish what I'm doing without the corruption of having to also sell it.

That's the moat, if you want to call it that. Honesty subsidized by a different revenue stream.

Receipts, not courses.

Ten years from now, I want to look back and see something close to what a public company puts out — quarterly investing reviews with real numbers, real positions, real wins and losses.

A personal record would still need clear dates, position changes, cash flows and honest comparisons; it would not carry the assurance of audited financial reporting.

Just an honest paper trail of what I did with my money, why I did it, and how it worked out.

That was the publication I intended to build; this essay is a record of that intention, not a guarantee of an active portfolio service.

If "open-source your investing" sounds like a small commitment, consider how few people who talk publicly about money actually do it.

The reason it sounds small is that almost nobody does it.

I'm betting it compounds.

Not in dollars. In the kind of credibility you can't buy and can't fake.

That's the third thing I've changed my mind about in markets.

The first was that the algorithm was the edge. It wasn't.

The second was that the index was the answer for every part of my own capital allocation. I no longer believed that for my situation.

The third is what most people get wrong when they try to talk publicly about investing. They monetize the audience instead of doing the work in public.

I'd rather just show the receipts.

Part of a series on what I've unlearned about investing. Previous: Why I Sold My Index Funds in February. Earlier: The Lie Every $997 Trading Course Sells You.