The Portfolio

This is the Primary Portfolio—80% of total capital. Below it, the Secondary Portfolio (10%) holds positions chosen for delight and weighted by base-36 gematria. The SDR Cash Position (10%) holds a basket of fiat currencies. Together: 80 / 10 / 10.

The Primary Portfolio viewed by asset class rather than by column.

Half equities, a third crypto, a fifth metals. More conventional than it looks—equities are the single largest asset class by a wide margin. The crypto and metals are flanking positions that express a specific worldview on top of a fundamentally sound equity core.

Every investor carries two impulses. The first is analytical: a desire to understand where value will accrue in the world and to position capital accordingly. The second is aesthetic: an attachment to certain companies, products, stories, and objects that has nothing to do with expected returns and everything to do with who the investor is as a person. Most portfolios pretend the second impulse doesn't exist, or else they let both impulses contaminate each other without either being fully honored. A position entered for tax reasons sits next to a position entered because someone saw a headline. A conviction bet and a sentimental favorite share the same account with the same weighting logic, which is to say no logic at all.

The deeper problem is quantitative. Even when an investor knows what they believe in, they are paralyzed by the question of how much. Why fifteen percent rather than fourteen or sixteen? Any specific number feels indefensible, because it is. There is no analytical framework that converts conviction into a percentage with any precision. The result is either agonized guessing or, more commonly, a flat allocation across everything—which encodes the lie that you believe in all your positions equally.

This system refuses both confusions. It separates the analytical from the aesthetic into sovereign realms, gives each its own laws and its own budget, and then solves the quantitative problem through arithmetic rules that generate magnitudes from orderings. You make the qualitative judgment. The system makes the quantitative one.

The Primary Portfolio is where you argue with the market. It is the domain of conviction, of thesis, of your best guess about where value will accrue in the world over the coming years and decades. It receives eighty percent of total capital and is organized into three columns, each representing a different mode of conviction with its own allocation rule.

The beauty of arithmetic descent is that it transforms the arbitrary into the inevitable. You do not have to justify why your top position is fifteen percent rather than fourteen or sixteen. Fifteen is simply what comes first in a sequence that descends by three. The conviction is encoded in the ordering—which position sits above which—and the magnitude follows automatically. You make the qualitative judgment; the system makes the quantitative one.

The first column contains the highest-conviction positions. Its allocations descend by three percentage points: 15, 12, 9, 6, 3. The ordering encodes the conviction—whatever sits at the top, you believe in most—and the arithmetic generates the magnitude. The column totals forty-five percent and traces a path from programmable settlement to broad diversification.

15% ETH — Ethereum

The single largest position in the portfolio. This is not a bet on cryptocurrency as an asset class, or not only that—it is a bet on Ethereum specifically as a global settlement layer, a programmable foundation for a new financial and contractual infrastructure. The man who wrote the smart contracts that power MakerDAO—hand-crafted in hexadecimal on the Ethereum Virtual Machine because he did not trust the Solidity compiler to handle other people's money—does not hold Ethereum because someone told him it might go up. He holds it because he helped build what runs on it, and because he believes the world will increasingly run on programmable settlement layers or something very like them. At fifteen percent this is a monumental declaration, the kind of position that defines a portfolio rather than merely inhabiting it.

12% ASML — ASML Holding NV

A Dutch company in Veldhoven that manufactures the extreme ultraviolet lithography machines without which no advanced semiconductor can be fabricated. There is exactly one company on earth that makes EUV machines. ASML is it. Every cutting-edge chip from every fab on the planet—TSMC, Samsung, Intel—is printed on ASML equipment. This is a bet on the inevitability of advanced computing itself: regardless of which company designs the winning chip, regardless of which AI company captures the most value, regardless of which nation dominates the technology landscape, all roads pass through Veldhoven. The portfolio gives ASML a larger allocation than Google and Nvidia combined, because those companies compete with each other while ASML supplies them all.

9% XAG — Silver

The ancient metal that serves simultaneously as a monetary asset and an industrial input. Silver is unique among precious metals in that roughly half its annual demand comes from industrial applications—solar panels, electronics, medical devices, water purification—while the other half comes from investment and jewelry. This dual nature means silver benefits from both monetary debasement (the same tailwind that lifts gold) and from the continued expansion of physical-world manufacturing. It is a hedge against inflation and a bet on the idea that the physical world continues to matter, that not everything dissolves into software. Silver outweighs gold in this portfolio, which is a deliberate choice: gold is purer as a monetary asset, but silver has the industrial demand angle that makes it responsive to a wider range of futures.

6% BRK — Berkshire Hathaway

Warren Buffett's conglomerate is the antithesis of speculative technology. It is a fortress of cash flows, insurance float, and compounding that has been assembled over six decades by the most successful capital allocator in history. Berkshire owns railroads, utilities, insurance companies, candy shops, and an absurd cash pile. It is the ballast of the portfolio—the thing that quietly grows book value while everything else lurches between euphoria and despair. In a portfolio heavy on semiconductor monopolies and cryptographic protocols, Berkshire is the reminder that buying wonderful businesses at fair prices and holding them forever is still the most reliable way to compound wealth.

3% QQQ — Invesco QQQ Trust (Nasdaq-100)

The bottom of the first column, the humblest position. QQQ is the Nasdaq-100 index fund—broad exposure to the hundred largest non-financial companies on the Nasdaq, which in practice means heavy technology weighting. It is a concession to the possibility that the specific picks above it might be wrong in ways that the general momentum of the technology sector is not. At three percent it is barely there, a footnote, an acknowledgment that even high conviction leaves room for the market to know things you don't.

The second column follows the same logic with a gentler slope. Its allocations descend by two: 11, 9, 7, 5, 3. The narrower spread between top and bottom means the difference between your favorite and your least favorite is smaller—you are less sure about the internal ordering here, and the shallower descent reflects that by compressing the range. The column totals thirty-five percent.

11% BTC — Bitcoin

The progenitor cryptocurrency, digital gold, the original experiment in cryptographic scarcity. Bitcoin sits in the second column rather than the first not because the conviction is lower in kind but because the thesis is simpler—Bitcoin does one thing (be scarce and decentralized) while Ethereum does many things (settle contracts, run applications, host financial infrastructure). The portfolio holds both because they represent two competing theories of what digital money should be. Bitcoin is the conservative thesis: money should be inert, predictable, resistant to change, and absolutely scarce. Ethereum is the progressive thesis: money should be programmable, composable, and embedded in a computational substrate. At a combined twenty-six percent, cryptocurrency is the second-largest asset class in the Primary Portfolio, behind only equities.

9% TSM — Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company

TSMC is the master craftsman that fabricates the chips ASML's machines make possible. If ASML makes the camera, TSMC takes the photograph. Together they form a pincer on the semiconductor ecosystem—the toolmaker at twelve percent in Column I and the craftsman at nine percent in Column II. The portfolio deliberately distributes the semiconductor thesis across both columns, ensuring that the bet on advanced chip manufacturing survives even if you conclude that one column's ordering was wrong. TSMC fabricates chips for Apple, Nvidia, AMD, Qualcomm, and essentially every other company that designs advanced silicon but doesn't own a fab. The concentration of the world's most advanced chip manufacturing in a single company on a single island is either the greatest industrial achievement or the greatest geopolitical vulnerability of the twenty-first century, and possibly both.

7% XAU — Gold

The ancient benchmark, the ultimate safe haven, the thing that was money before money existed. Gold sits below silver in this portfolio, which reverses the conventional hierarchy and reveals something about the thesis. Gold is the purer monetary asset—its value is almost entirely derived from the collective agreement that it is valuable—but that purity is also a limitation. Silver responds to both monetary and industrial forces; gold responds only to monetary ones. In a future where physical manufacturing expands, silver benefits and gold is indifferent. Gold at seven percent is still a substantial position, and together with silver and the platinum-group metals, the portfolio's total metals exposure is twenty percent of the Primary—a serious hard-asset allocation by any standard.

5% ARKK — ARK Innovation ETF

Cathie Wood's flagship fund, a concentrated bet on disruptive innovation across genomics, autonomous technology, fintech, and next-generation internet. ARKK is the wildcard—the one position that is explicitly a bet on someone else's stock-picking rather than your own. It is an admission that the frontier of technological innovation is vast enough that you want some capital allocated to a team scouring it full-time. The fund has been spectacularly volatile—up five hundred percent in 2020, down seventy-five percent by 2022—and at five percent the portfolio sizes the position to survive that volatility without flinching.

3% VOO — Vanguard S&P 500 ETF

The broadest possible exposure to American large-cap equities. Where QQQ at the bottom of Column I captures the technology-heavy Nasdaq-100, VOO at the bottom of Column II captures the full S&P 500—financials, healthcare, energy, consumer staples, everything. Together these two index positions provide six percent of broad market beta, which is deliberately small. The portfolio's thesis is that specific picks outperform the index, and the index allocation exists only as a concession to humility.

The third column holds five pairs, each receiving a flat four percent split equally at two percent per component. The pairs are bets on themes rather than champions. You believe in a sector or structural force but cannot or will not declare a winner within it. So you hold both sides and let the future decide. The flat allocation across all five pairs means equal confidence in each theme. The internal fifty-fifty split means equal ignorance about which half wins. The column totals twenty percent.

PAIR 1 MKR / SOL — Programmable Money

MakerDAO and Solana, two percent each. The pair with the most biographical weight. MakerDAO is the decentralized lending protocol whose smart contracts were written in part by the portfolio's architect, hand-crafted in hexadecimal on the Ethereum Virtual Machine because he did not trust the Solidity compiler to handle other people's money. Solana took a radically different architectural approach—sacrificing some decentralization for raw throughput. Together they represent the bet that programmable money will matter enormously but that the winning architecture is not yet settled. One is the system you helped build. The other is the system that might prove a different set of tradeoffs was right all along. Holding both is an act of intellectual honesty that most founders could not manage.

PAIR 2 GOOG / NVDA — AI Infrastructure

Alphabet and Nvidia, two percent each. Nvidia makes the GPUs that train the models. Google builds the models, runs the cloud, owns the data pipeline, and designs its own TPU chips. They are simultaneously partners and competitors. The pair captures the AI thesis without requiring you to decide whether the value accrues to the silicon or the platform. At two percent each these are deliberately modest—the portfolio expresses its AI conviction primarily through the semiconductor chokepoints (ASML and TSM) rather than through the companies building on top of them.

PAIR 3 XPT / XPD — Platinum-Group Metals

Platinum and palladium, two percent each. The rarest of the commonly traded precious metals, with supply concentrated in South Africa and Russia—two geographically and politically distant sources, which is itself diversification. Both have critical industrial applications in catalytic converters, hydrogen fuel cells, electronics, and chemical processing. They complete the metals thesis: silver for solar and electronics, gold for monetary purity, platinum-group for automotive and hydrogen infrastructure. Together the four metals positions total twenty percent of the Primary Portfolio.

PAIR 4 MKL / PSH — Concentrated Value Investing

Markel Group and Pershing Square Holdings, two percent each. The Buffett disciples. Markel is the specialty insurer often called "baby Berkshire," using its float to invest in equities and acquire businesses. Pershing Square is Bill Ackman's closed-end fund, an activist investor with a concentrated portfolio of large-cap bets. Together with Berkshire at six percent in Column I, this pair brings the total compounding-machines allocation to ten percent. The portfolio likes the Buffett school enough to hold three practitioners, but distributes them across singular conviction (Berkshire) and a thematic pair (where the question of which disciple compounds best is left to the market).

PAIR 5 VTI / VXUS — Global Equity Exposure

Vanguard Total Stock Market and Vanguard Total International Stock, two percent each. The most humble pair—a simple split between every publicly traded company in the United States and every publicly traded company outside of it. Together with QQQ and VOO, this completes the index exposure at ten percent total: three percent Nasdaq-100, three percent S&P 500, two percent total US, two percent total international. It is the portfolio's way of saying: after all these specific bets, here is four percent that simply owns the world.

A portfolio where every position confirms every other position is just one bet wearing multiple disguises. This portfolio has genuine internal tension, which is what makes it actually balanced rather than merely diversified.

ARKK and BRK are philosophical opposites—speculative disruption versus patient compounding. ETH and XAU are competing theories of what "store of value" means. QQQ and XAG don't agree on whether the future is digital or physical. BTC's thesis (money should be inert and scarce) contradicts MKR's thesis (money should be programmable and composable). ASML and VTI/VXUS disagree about whether concentrated monopoly positions or broad diversification is the right approach.

In most plausible futures, some positions go up while others go down, because the positions are arguing with each other about what the future looks like. That is what balance actually means.

The Secondary Portfolio receives ten percent of total capital and operates according to an entirely different logic. Where the Primary Portfolio is the domain of conviction, the Secondary Portfolio is the domain of delight. It holds positions selected for aesthetic, cultural, or personal reasons—companies that are wonderful to own regardless of their investment merit. This is the gallery where you hang the art you love, the shelf for beloved objects given financial form, the cabinet of curiosities that reflects the soul's affinities rather than the mind's forecasts.

You choose what enters. You do not choose how much. The weightings are determined by a base-36 gematria system that removes the allocator's hand from the one decision where it would do the most damage.

Every ticker symbol is already a number in disguise. Base-36, also called hexatrigesimal, maps the full alphanumeric sequence: digits 0–9 take their face values, letters A–Z take values 10–35. This is standard—it is how alphanumeric strings are interpreted as numbers in computing. It is what hexadecimal wants to be when it grows up.

Three methods extract numerical essence from each ticker:

METHOD 1 Digit Sum. Add the base-36 values of all characters. NVDA becomes 23 + 31 + 13 + 10 = 77.

METHOD 2 Theosophic Reduction of Digit Sum. Repeatedly sum the digits of the Method 1 result until a single digit remains. 77 → 7 + 7 = 14 → 1 + 4 = 5.

METHOD 3 Positional Reduction. Interpret the ticker as a positional base-36 number (first character × 36³, second × 36², etc.), convert to decimal, then apply theosophic reduction. NVDA as a base-36 positional number ≈ 1,100,000, which reduces to 2.

Each method captures something different. The digit sum is the literal weight. The theosophic reduction is the compressed essence. The positional reduction is the structural weight collapsed to essence.

The three gematria outputs must be combined into a single score. Tickers are divided into two buckets based on their first character. If the first character falls within the hexadecimal range—0 through 9, or A through F—the ticker belongs to the Additive Bucket, and its score is the sum of its three values. If the first character falls outside this range—G through Z—the ticker belongs to the Multiplicative Bucket, and its score is the product.

The hexadecimal boundary marks the edge of the most widely used alphanumeric subsystem—the point where the familiar gives way to the extended. The additive operation is stable and egalitarian: differences between tickers are moderate, no single ticker can dominate. The multiplicative operation is volatile and hierarchical: a ticker with high gematria values can vastly outweigh its competitors. The bucket you fall into determines the rules of your competition, and which bucket you fall into is determined by nothing more than the first character of the name the exchange assigned you.

Within each bucket, scores are normalized to weights summing to one hundred percent. The two buckets are then combined proportionally to the number of tickers each contains. If Additive holds 3 tickers and Multiplicative holds 7, then Additive receives thirty percent of the Secondary Portfolio and Multiplicative gets seventy. Each ticker has roughly equal expected weight before the gematria differentiates them; the differentiation happens within buckets rather than between them.

You curate the museum but the gematria hangs the pictures. You choose what you love; the base-36 math decides how much you love it. The numerological process is a ritual that removes your greedy or fearful hand from the allocation. It transforms what could be a weakness—emotional investing, attachment to stories—into a structured strength. It turns whimsy into a disciplined practice.

Ten percent of total capital, held not in a single currency but in a basket modeled on the IMF's Special Drawing Rights—the "index fund of money." A diversified claim on the major fiat currencies, held because you want liquidity without making a single-currency bet.

The round percentages mean you can rebalance in your head. The overweight to USD and EUR reflects the currencies you actually use—a practical adjustment for someone moving between Europe and Southeast Asia.

The absence of bonds is deliberate. Bonds are denominated in the same currencies you are already holding as cash, plus a promise from a government or corporation that you have no informational advantage in evaluating. Bonds are dollars with extra steps. If you already hold the dollars, the extra steps add complexity without adding diversification. You are not a bond investor, and you are not pretending to be.

Three sovereign domains, each with its own laws, its own selection logic, and its own weighting mechanism. The Primary Portfolio argues with the market through conviction ordered by arithmetic descent. The Secondary Portfolio dances with the market through delight weighted by gematria. The SDR Cash Position sits outside both, a liquidity buffer that is not a bet on anything.

They are unified by a single principle: the separation of qualitative judgment from quantitative allocation. In the Primary, you choose the ordering and the arithmetic generates the percentages. In the Secondary, you choose the contents and the gematria generates the weights. In the SDR position, you choose the currencies and the fixed ratios hold steady. At no point does the investor face the paralyzing question of "how much?"—that question is always answered by a rule, and the rule is always one you can remember without a spreadsheet.

The portfolio looks insane at first glance. Fifteen percent Ethereum, nine percent silver, no bonds, a gematria engine for the fun stocks. But the more you turn it around, the more you arrive at the conclusion that it is surprisingly balanced and surprisingly thought through. Not because it is conventional, but because its internal tensions are genuine, its exposures are broad, and its rules are transparent. It is an opinionated portfolio that arrives at balance through a much more interesting route than the standard one.