Disclaimer

General

It is general, and it is impersonal

The research here was measured against reference cases: a US federal individual investor, particular tax brackets, particular account types, particular windows of history. You are not that person. Nothing here knows your income, your tax bracket, your state, your debts, when you plan to stop working, or how you behaved the last time your account fell by a third. Every one of those changes the answer, and several change it more than anything this site has measured.

None of it is a recommendation to buy or sell any security. Naming a fund is a measurement, never a suggestion that you own it. No offer and no solicitation of any kind is being made.

The condition

This site never answers your question about your portfolio

Not by email, not in an issue, not privately, not as a favour, and not with the names changed.

An author who reads your holdings and tells you what to do with them is giving personal investment advice, whatever the page says at the bottom.

Questions about the method, an error in a number, or a source that does not say what a page claims are all welcome. The answer will be a correction rather than a recommendation.

Cadence

It is published on a schedule, and never because the market moved

Pages are revised when new evidence lands, or on a date written into the page in advance. The trend page says it looks again in September 2027, and it will look then whether or not anything exciting has happened by then.

Nothing here will ever be published because the market moved. That is partly the legal condition and partly the project's own finding: a rule reviewed on price cannot be told apart from a rule abandoned in a fall. Reviewing on the calendar is the only review that means anything.

Risk

Investing can lose you everything

All investing carries risk, including the total loss of the money you put in. Past performance tells you what happened. It does not tell you what will happen, and the gap between those two sentences is where most of the damage in this field gets done.

Diversification reduces some risks and creates others. Every portfolio here has spent long stretches behind a plain index fund, and the site says by how much. Cheap US companies ran 54.3% behind the US market across nearly eighteen years and never caught up. International stocks ran 69.0% behind US stocks over a similar stretch. That is the record, not a simulation.

Backtested results are hypothetical

A backtest is what a rule would have produced if somebody had run it, on data chosen after the fact, by someone who already knows how the story ends. It is hindsight with a chart attached. Nobody earned those returns, no fee was paid, no trade was filled, and no investor sat through the fall in the middle without knowing how it ended. Read every backtested number here down for that, on top of the ranges and search counts printed beside it.

Position sizing assumes numbers nobody has

This site is named after the Kelly criterion, which works out the bet size that grows your money fastest over the long run when you know the odds. You do not know the odds, nobody does, and the arithmetic does not fail gently when you are wrong. Overestimate your advantage by a factor of two and the formula that maximised growth now destroys it, with falls along the way most people cannot sit through. So every probability printed here is a best case, and the real chance is lower by an amount nobody can state.

Scope

Tax, jurisdiction and accuracy

The tax arithmetic here assumes a US federal individual investor at particular brackets, and it ignores every state and every local tax. It is not tax advice, and a result that holds in a US taxable account is sometimes exactly backwards elsewhere. Talk to somebody licensed before acting on it.

No warranty is given on any of this: not on the accuracy of a number, not on a source still saying what it said when it was read, and not on the site being available. Data providers restate their own history without notice, and this project has been caught by that. The author accepts no liability for any loss arising from anything on this site, to the fullest extent the law allows.

United Kingdom

This site is not directed at retail consumers in the United Kingdom, and nothing on it is a financial promotion under section 21 of the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000. The author is not authorised or regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority.

And this page is not legal advice either

The same non-lawyer wrote it, and it describes the conditions this project intends to keep rather than a legal opinion that it has kept them. Do not copy it for your own site. Who writes this and what it is paid for are the context.