Most investing content sells you the next idea. Almost none of it teaches the part that actually decides your returns — how much to put on, when to add, and the rule that makes you cut before it gets expensive. That's what this is.
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Free · Evergreen
The five frameworks behind every idea we publish — written for someone with a brokerage account, not a Bloomberg terminal.
Why evergreen beats timely
A great call has a shelf life of about three weeks. The framework that produced it works for the next thirty years. Everything in the Playbook is deliberately undated — no tickers, no price levels, nothing that goes stale the moment the tape moves. Read it once, use it on every position you take from here.
HOW MOST PEOPLE DECIDE
Find a name you like. Buy an amount that feels right. Hold until it hurts, then either double down out of hope or sell out of exhaustion. The idea might even have been good. The process guaranteed a bad outcome anyway.
HOW A DESK DECIDES
Define what you'd lose and where you'd be wrong. Let that set the size. Write the exit before the entry. When it moves against you, the decision was already made on a calm day — not a red one.
What's inside
The five questions an idea must answer before it earns a position: what the market misunderstands, the catalyst that closes the gap, the timeline, the downside level, and the risk/reward in dollars. Miss one and you have an opinion, not a trade.
→ Most ideas die at question five. That's the point of question five.Conviction translated into a number by rule instead of by feel — the standard band, the high-conviction band, and the hard single-name ceiling that no amount of certainty gets to argue past.
→ Nobody blows up on a bad idea. They blow up on a bad size.Every data release sorted into three tiers, so you know which prints are worth repositioning around, which are worth reading, and which are noise with a timestamp attached.
→ Ten minutes a week on macro? Spend all of it on Tier 1.Bull, base and bear with probabilities that sum to 100 — each carrying the trade that expresses it and what that trade does if it lands. A forecast with no weight attached can't be wrong, so it can't be useful.
→ If your bear case is under 20%, you're rooting, not forecasting.A written record of expensive errors sorted by the kind of error, not the stock — plus the test that keeps entries sharp enough to actually prevent a repeat, and the ten-minute weekly ritual that makes it work.
→ The least glamorous framework here, and the one that compounds hardest.The frameworks run end to end against a position that lost money — showing exactly which question was answered weakly, which one was skipped, and where the loss actually came from.
→ Frameworks make more sense against a trade that cost something.And then
Every issue we publish runs on these five frameworks in public. You'll see the sizing logic, the pre-mortem, and the exit condition applied to real setups, six mornings a week — which is how a framework stops being something you read and becomes something you use.
Free. No card, no upsell, no calls.
Straight talk
This is not a system. There's no black box and no win rate to quote. It's the decision scaffolding a discretionary desk uses, written down plainly.
It won't tell you what to buy. By design. Frameworks that depend on a specific market regime stop working when the regime turns.
It's genuinely free. We'd rather earn the open every morning than charge you once at the door.
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The Desk Playbook, plus six issues a week that put it to work on live markets.
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