Before Fink, I was Macrodesiac (some of you may remember).
We taught macro. Central banks, yields, the dollar, the whole lot. And as part of that, we shared trade ideas. Lots of them.
The assumption (mine included) was that the ideas were the product. People were paying to find out what we thought was going to happen next.
Then one afternoon I sat down and went back through the actual results.
And listen, this was uncomfortable.
Because barely any of the trades that made members real money came from the macro calls.
The big picture stuff, the central bank positioning, the yield curve trades, long FX position trades... fine in theory.
Forgettable in practice.
The members who did well had picked up something else entirely. They'd absorbed how we sized positions. How we entered. When we got out. They weren't copying what we bought but they'd picked up how we thought.
That was the moment I realised I'd been focusing on the wrong thing.
The useful part was never telling people what I thought was going to happen but helping them think the way we did, so their own portfolios got better regardless of what happened.
That's why Fink exists.
But the problem is this…
Most investors are doing exactly what I was doing at Macrodesiac.
Spending all their time hunting for the next idea and almost none of their time checking the process that decides whether they are actually managing their SIPP/ISA rather than punting in isolation.
So a winner runs 60% and they give it all back because there was no exit process. Eight months of patience ends up being wiped out in three weeks because of some nonsense oil story or a fund that’s trapped, like Situational Awareness in June.
They're back to breakeven and the only thing that changed is they now feel physically f*cking sick every time they open the app.
Or they cut a position at 5% profit out of pure nerves. They say ‘yeah, good risk management’.
Then they watch that same stock do 200% over the next six months and they can't even talk about it without wanting to go play with traffic.
Or they sit frozen when a position moves against them. No invalidation reasoning. No predetermined point where the view is wrong. Just a slow bleed from £20,000 to £12,517.64 while they refresh the chart and hope to God the pain stops.
The idea was never the problem but the process around it was invisible.
And invisible problems compound until you realise you’ve spent hours with high cortisol over the last year when just shoving it into the SP500 and not looking was the better option (boring, and not going to grow your portfolio in the way you want, but better).
It’s the slow, silent leak across years of trades where the entries were fine and everything else was licking your finger and pointing it into the air to try and gauge the next decision.
So I built a quick way to check yours.
The Process Score is 11 questions about how you actually invest. Takes about four minutes. Your report shows you which of five layers (Filter, Enter, Size, Manage, Exit) is weakest, names the one habit costing you the most with real numbers from real stocks, and gives you one thing to fix this week.
If you'd like to see exactly where your process is leaking money, instead of spending another year wondering why good ideas keep turning into break-even positions...
David
P.S. You can't fix what you can't see. And most people have never looked. Four minutes, 11 questions, one specific fix. We have a call on Thursday at 12pm. We'll talk about hedging UK political nonsense in the stock market, with some Q&A (so bring questions).