felix/august

Notes

Small notes for Felix and August.

This is the beginning of the written record: why I started, what I was seeing in the world, and what I hope the two of you will someday take from it.

Note one

I love you both.

This little site is not really about stock picking. It is about leaving you something to hold onto one day, and leaving behind a record of how I tried to think while building it.

I wanted a place where you could see that the money was only one part of it. The other part was attention, patience, and love.

Dad

Note two

Why I started when I did.

I was finishing grad school in 2022 and watching ChatGPT evolve in real time. It felt obvious to me that the world was about to change, even if the exact winners and losers were still unclear.

So I started small. I bought what I could, when I could. Then I kept reading about the infrastructure behind it all: chips, memory, data centers, power demand, capital spending, supply chains, and the deflationary questions that would follow if intelligence became cheaper to produce.

I did not start with a huge pile of money. I started with curiosity, conviction, and the habit of putting a little to work whenever I could.

Note three

What I hope you learn from this.

  • Small amounts matter when they are paired with time.
  • Ownership can be a way of learning, not just earning.
  • Reading deeply is often more valuable than reacting quickly.
  • Technology changes the world, but character still matters most.

Note four

The order of money.

One day you will have a bad month. The car will need brakes, the dog will need surgery, rent will go up — sometimes all at once. When that happens, there is an order to where the money comes from, and the order matters more than the amount.

  • Spend from income first. Life's expenses come out of what you earn this month. If they don't fit, the first move is trimming expenses, not raiding accounts.
  • Then the emergency fund. Keep three to six months of expenses in boring cash. Its job is not to grow — its job is to stand between a bad month and your investments. Refill it when the storm passes.
  • Investments come last, and almost never. The accounts on this site are the engine, and the engine only works if it stays running. Selling early doesn't just cost you the shares — it costs you every year of compounding those shares had left, plus taxes on the way out.

The discipline is not about being cheap. It is about protecting the machine that buys your future freedom. Savings touched first is savings that never compounds. Let the buffer take the hit; that is what it is for.

Dad

Transaction trail

What the thinkorswim export already shows.

The first recorded transfer in the account history is from November 24, 2025. By May 19, 2026, the export shows 26 MoneyLink transfers totaling $1,300.00.

That is what I find cool about it: this was not one dramatic swing. It was a steady habit. The ledger shows small deposits showing up week after week, then a handful of deliberate buys layered on top.

  • 26 transfers totaling $1,300.00.
  • 7 recorded buy tickets across 5 symbols.
  • $34.33 already showing up in dividends and capital-gain distributions.
  • The heaviest early buying went into CHAT, followed by BTX, MXL, and DRAM.

Fidelity trail

What the Fidelity history adds.

The Fidelity export reaches back one week earlier, to November 17, 2025. It shows 27 electronic fund transfers totaling $2,700.00 by May 18, 2026.

It also shows a different style of investing: much broader accumulation. The file contains 58 buy records across 53 symbols, which makes it feel less like a tactical sleeve and more like a steady build-out of a wider basket.

  • The largest Fidelity buys so far were SMCI, PLTR, MU, AAPL, and DRAM.
  • The export already shows dividend income beginning to appear there too, even if it is still small.
  • Taken together, the two accounts show a documented $4,000.00 of transfers across 53 events in the imported history so far.

What is cool

Why this matters more than it looks.

It is easy to dismiss small investing as too slow to matter. But this export already says something better: the habit existed before the payoff did. The account was being fed before it was impressive.

That is a lesson worth keeping. Before there is scale, there is consistency. Before there is a big result, there is a long string of ordinary decisions that nobody claps for at the time.

Research note

A note I want to add about GPT.

One of the future entries here should be about what it felt like to watch GPT systems move from novelty to infrastructure. I want that note to explain not just what the models could do, but why they changed how I thought about compute, labor, interfaces, and long-run capital allocation.

Data note

What the site still needs next.

The current contribution view reflects the routine I tried to follow, but the better version is a full transfer history from Fidelity and thinkorswim so the timeline shows what actually happened since the beginning.

That would let the journal tell a truer story: not just what the household owns now, but how the habit was built over time.