I started Finance Foundry because I’d been having the same conversation, over and over.
High-earning professionals who had done everything the personal finance internet told them to. Their 401(k) is maxed out, their investments are automated, and their savings rate is high. They’re doing better than almost everyone they grew up with, they know it, and yet they’re starting to suspect the milestone they always assumed they’d hit is quietly drifting out of reach.
Most of the time the honest answer is they are comfortable, but not wealthy. The conventional playbook isn’t wrong. It has a ceiling, and once you can see the ceiling, the content that got you most of the way there stops being useful. That’s the conversation I’m trying to have here.
I spent two years as an equity research analyst on Wall Street covering diagnostics, lab services, and genomics. If you’ve never seen the job from the inside, it’s an odd one. You build elaborate financial models, sit through earnings calls where management has rehearsed every word, and run channel checks that include things like calling clinics across the country to estimate testing volumes, or getting blood drawn three times in one day at competing labs because that’s what the buy-side actually pays for. I learned more in those two years about how markets work than I had in four years of college, and almost none of it matched what financial media was telling retail investors.
After that I spent nearly a decade in corporate strategy at a Fortune 10 company, and what I noticed there has stuck with me. The people around me were smart and well-paid. They were also, almost without exception, living right up to their income or slightly past it. Million-dollar houses, two luxury cars, enviable vacations, the lifestyle that quietly expands every time the comp letter does. They weren’t reckless. They were risk-averse, in their careers and in their financial lives both, which is part of how they ended up in corporate jobs in the first place. The combination of high income, high spending, and low risk tolerance produces a very specific outcome: comfortable, but trapped. Earning enough to feel successful, not enough to leave. I watched a lot of careers play out that way before I started thinking carefully about whether mine was heading somewhere different.
I’ve been managing my own portfolio for over a decade. Most of it sits in index funds with twice-monthly transfers I haven’t missed in years. The boring engine. A smaller, growing slice goes to individual stocks, where I use the same analytical framework I used in equity research.
When I left Wall Street, I was convinced that index funds were the right answer for 99% of individual investors. I'd watched professionals with every imaginable advantage struggle to beat their benchmarks, and on paper, the math was obvious. Ten years and several multi-baggers later, I've started to suspect the 99% number was too high, and that I might be one of the exceptions.
What I've come around to is that professional investors have specific structural blind spots that individual investors with the right training can actually exploit. Analysts are siloed by sector, so cross-sector trades get missed. Funds have capacity constraints, so entire categories of small and mid-cap opportunities are functionally invisible to them. They have to manage to a benchmark, which forces them to sell at exactly the wrong times. And they have to report quarterly to investors who will pull money if performance is bad, which compresses their effective time horizon no matter what their stated horizon is. An individual investor with the right training has none of these constraints.
Three things you’ll find here.
How Wall Street Works is the inside view. The earnings calls and what’s actually being said on them, the fee structures hiding inside products marketed as free, the difference between the sell-side analysts holding the megaphone and the buy-side investors who actually move prices.
Asymmetric Bets is the analytical framework I now use for almost every financial decision. Where is the downside limited and the upside open, and how do you position yourself for more of those situations and fewer of the symmetric ones? This is where I write about stocks, careers, the math of wealth at different scales, and what I’m noticing as my own portfolio runs into the limits the conventional playbook is built around.
The AI Edge is the newest and least settled. I’ve been testing for close to a year now whether AI can do real investment research, and the answer is more interesting than yes or no. I’ll keep writing about it as the tools change and as I figure out what holds up.
A few things this isn’t. I don’t sell courses. I don’t run a trading service or manage outside money. I’m not affiliated with any financial product. I’m a working professional writing about money on the side, and most of what’s here is me working through questions I’m in the middle of in my own life. If that’s the kind of thing you want to read, I’m glad you’re here.
