The Only Investment Checklist You Need

News is designed to make you trade; data is designed to make you wealthy. This visual guide sets out a complete rules-based system for DIY investors that replaces headlines and hunches with objective, repeatable steps.

It covers how a quantitative filter narrows thousands of global stocks to a shortlist, the four tests used to select companies, the structural rules for sizing and diversifying a portfolio, a monthly trend filter for index funds and ETFs, and four unemotional execution rules.

Key findings

• The quantitative filter starts from 10,000 global listed equities and isolates the top 200, eliminating 98% of the noise.
• The stock selection checklist has four tests: value and growth, income and cash flow, CROCI (cash return on capital invested) and the Sortino ratio.
• Portfolio architecture rules: hold 20 to 40 stocks, allocate 2.5% to 5% of capital to each position, and hold a cash buffer linked to your age and risk tolerance.
• For broader index funds and ETFs, the monthly MACD is used as a macro trend filter, not a day-trading strategy.
• Execution rules: buy in tranches over three months, ignore the noise, hold for 12 months and rebalance annually, bringing extreme winners back to a 2.5% to 5% allocation.

What the paper covers

1. Your job is not to predict the future
2. The narrative trap versus the data reality
3. Three paths: bull, base and bear cases
4. The quantitative filter
5. The stock selection checklist
6. True diversification
7. The structural rules of portfolio architecture
8. Why DIY investors have an advantage
9. The monthly MACD trend filter
10. Panic and boredom: the two destroyers of wealth
11. The exponential reality of compounding
12. The unemotional execution rules