Our toolkit
What we actually use.
We get asked often what’s behind the portfolios — this page is the honest answer. Everything here earns its place because we use it, not because it pays us. Affiliate links are marked plainly; if we ever stop using something, it comes off this page.
None of this is required. These are the tools that fit how we work — none is needed to follow the portfolios, and none is a substitute for your own judgment.
Read each honest take, not just the description. Where a link earns us a commission we say so; signing up through it costs you nothing extra.
GuruFocus
Affiliate · 10% discountWhere much of the quantitative spadework happens: long-run financials, valuation history, and earnings-call transcripts. Three decades of data in one place saves hours otherwise spent stitching together filings.
It’s a data and screening tool, not a place that tells you what to buy. If you don’t enjoy digging through numbers and reading a lot, you won’t get your money’s worth — the premium tiers aren’t cheap, so it earns its keep only with regular use.
Surfshark VPN
No affiliate arrangementThis one is about protecting yourself, not picking stocks. On hotel or airport Wi-Fi, we run Surfshark before checking a bank balance or logging into a brokerage — public networks are exactly where you don’t want login traffic exposed.
A VPN is one layer, not a force field — strong, unique passwords and two-factor authentication matter more. But for the specific habit of checking financial accounts away from home, it’s a cheap, sensible precaution. We link it because we actually use it.
testfol.io
No affiliate arrangementThe cleanest free tool we’ve found for seeing how a portfolio or allocation would have behaved over time. We use it to sanity-check ideas about weighting and drawdown before they ever reach a memo.
A backtest describes the past, and the past is a poor guarantee of the future. A good test tells you how something behaved — not how it will behave. Linked because it’s genuinely useful, and free.
SEC EDGAR
Free · no affiliate programBefore trusting anyone’s summary of a company’s numbers, go to the source. EDGAR is the SEC’s own database of every public filing — 10-Ks, 10-Qs, 8-Ks, proxies, and fund reports — where we confirm figures or pull highlights straight from an audited filing.
How to use it: for a stock, search the name or ticker directly. Funds file under the fund family’s CIK rather than the ticker — Google the ticker plus “CIK,” then search that number on EDGAR to reach the full filing history, including the N-CSR reports where actual distributions and return-of-capital breakdowns live.
Filings are dense and not written for easy reading — this is the slowest tool on the page, not the friendliest. But if you want the real number instead of someone’s paraphrase of it, this is where it lives.
Disclosure. Some links above are affiliate links, marked accordingly. If you subscribe or purchase through one, we may receive a commission at no additional cost to you. We only list tools we actively use and would recommend regardless of compensation — our editorial views are not for sale. This page is general information, not investment, legal, or tax advice. See our Disclosure Policy for more.
The tools are the easy part.
The memos are the work — three model portfolios, every position change explained in writing, every month.