I learned this the expensive way. You don't have to.

Twenty years in the market. Eight of them wasted.

I bought my first shares and managed funds in 2005. Then life got in the way — I stopped paying attention, stopped adding, and let those holdings sit untouched for the better part of eight years. When I finally looked again, the lesson was brutal and simple: the positions I'd forgotten about had quietly compounded, and the money I'd left in cash had quietly shrunk. Underestimating equity returns is the single most expensive mistake I've made.

Since 2018 I've invested deliberately: written theses, real position sizing, documented reviews. That's the seven years that count — and that's the process this course teaches.

I've sat through the drawdowns, not read about them

Anyone can quote “be greedy when others are fearful.” It means something different once you've watched your own balance fall by a third and had to decide, with real money, what to do next. I've now been invested through the 2008 financial crisis, the 2020 COVID crash, the 2022 bear market and every smaller shakeout in between.

Those cycles taught me things no book did: that conviction is easy to claim and hard to hold, that position size determines whether you can sleep, and that most of my worst decisions came from having no written plan to fall back on. Every framework in this course exists because I needed it myself.

Learned by doing — publicly, and in the open

I publish my research and my positions. Not curated highlights — actual notes, in public, before the outcome is known: earnings reviews on Nvidia, valuation work on Microsoft, a three-way comparison of the AI-infrastructure names, my ongoing struggle to use stop-losses properly, and a straight look at my own portfolio including what hasn't worked.

You can read years of it at My Investing Journey and follow the day-to-day on X. I'd rather show you a thesis that aged badly than pretend I only make good calls.

The scoreboard, as at 18 August 2026

Process should show up in results. Here's my SMSF portfolio against the Nasdaq-100 ETF over the last two years, annualised:

Annualised returns over the two years to 18 August 2026, taken from my own portfolio tracker. Two years is a short window and one investor is a sample of one. Past performance is not a reliable indicator of future performance, and you should not expect similar returns.

Why this exists

Most investing content is either jargon written for people who already understand it, or hype written to sell you something. What I needed in 2005 — and didn't have — was someone to show me the whole process end to end, in plain language, with the uncomfortable parts left in. That's what the Foundations Core course is, and the research reports are the same frameworks applied to real companies, free to read.

How the research is produced

Every report runs the same systematic framework — fraud and earnings-quality screens, moat scorecards, scenario-based valuation, management commitment tracking — using public filings and market data providers, with the “as at” date stated on every figure. Same checklist every time, so the analysis doesn't bend to whatever I happen to want the answer to be.

What this is not

Say hello

Questions, feedback, or something I've got wrong — I read everything at the contact page.