About

Who is the Miner?

I write software for a living. I have never been paid to pick a stock, and until recently I hadn't put a dollar into one that trades for less than a used car's worth of volume on a slow day.

Now I'm building a system to research and eventually trade U.S. microcaps: companies worth roughly $50 million to $300 million, the ones too small for most funds and too boring for most analysts. This site is the logbook.

Why a pen name

Because I'm going to publish real dollar amounts, real tickers and real losses, and I'd rather my coworkers and my in-laws not have a live feed of my brokerage account. Everything else here is as honest as I can make it. The name is the only thing I'm hiding behind.

What I'm putting in

$50,000. That's about 5% of what I have invested. The other 95% sits in boring index funds and isn't part of this story. I think of this money as tuition, and the 5% cap is the first and most important risk rule I have. If the whole thing goes to zero, I'll be annoyed and I'll write about it, but nothing else in my life changes.

What I'll share and what I won't

  • I'll share: the trades (ticker, size, entry, exit, dollars), monthly performance against the Russell Microcap benchmark, how the system is built, what broke, and the lessons, especially the expensive ones.
  • I won't share: the exact signals, filters, thresholds and rules that decide what I buy. Partly that's because it's the only edge I might have. Mostly it's because in stocks this thin, a few hundred readers acting on the same idea would move the price and wreck it for everyone, including them.

The house rules

  1. Every post discloses what I hold in any ticker it names, as of the publish date.
  2. I don't trade a ticker I've written about for at least 48 hours after the post goes up.
  3. Losers get the same font size as winners.
  4. No quietly editing history. If I get something wrong, the correction is marked and dated.
  5. Nothing here is advice. I'm one person with a spreadsheet and a lot of log files.

If you want the story in order, start here. If you only care about the numbers, the Ledger is the page for you.