Legal & Governance

Important Disclosures & Trading Compliance

The formal version of what every page footer says, plus the standing rules that govern how and when trades are actually made — in full, in one place.

Not investment advice

Nothing on AEA Capital Research — including position pages, letters, news writeups, and the newsletter — constitutes investment advice, a research recommendation, or a solicitation to buy or sell any security. This site documents one individual's personal investment decisions and reasoning. It is not personalized to any reader's financial situation, risk tolerance, or goals, and should not be relied upon as the basis for an investment decision.

Who publishes this

AEA Capital Research is operated by one person, Aydin Ali, as a personal, educational project. There is no investment adviser, broker-dealer, fund, or firm behind this site. Aydin Ali is not a licensed financial advisor, and nothing on this site should be interpreted as advisory services under any securities regulation.

Real money, no guarantee it stays that way

The portfolio described on this site is a real, individually-owned brokerage account, independently trackable through Blossom. Past performance shown anywhere on this site — including the home page's blended-index chart, individual position returns, and the account's all-time return — is not indicative of future results. Markets go down as well as up, and a track record of any length is a small sample.

Methodology limits

The home page performance chart is an illustrative construction: today's holdings blended at current weights and indexed to 100 over a fixed historical window, using real price data. It is explicitly not a time-weighted return and does not account for actual purchase dates or deposit timing.
The account's real all-time return (currently +72.14%) is dollar-weighted since a $500 starting balance, not time-weighted, and is not yet benchmarked against a matched-start-date SPY comparison. See the Policy page for the commitment to publish a true time-weighted figure going forward.
Fundamentals (P/E, EPS, dividend yield, market cap) are sourced from Blossom, Massive Market Data, and SEC filings as cited on each page. Where a figure isn't available from a source trusted for this site, the page says so rather than estimating.
The "Market snapshot" ticker at the top of every page shows real prices for eleven liquid ETFs and cryptoassets (SPY, QQQ, DIA, IWM, IEF, USO, GLD, UUP, VXX, BTC, ETH), refreshed automatically once per trading day — not truly live, and not the official index or point values you'd see for the S&P 500, Nasdaq, Dow, or the 10-year Treasury yield themselves. IEF (iShares 7-10 Year Treasury Bond ETF) stands in as a liquid, honestly-labeled proxy for the 10-year Treasury rather than a fabricated yield figure, the same way VXX proxies the VIX and UUP proxies the Dollar Index. This is a static site with no backend, so there's no way to serve a genuinely live intraday feed honestly; a real, once-daily-refreshed snapshot using real proxy-instrument prices is the honest middle ground between faking "live" data and omitting a market snapshot entirely.
Prices, position values, returns, and the "% of book" figures across the ticker bar, Holdings page, and position pages are refreshed automatically once per trading day by a scheduled script (source: scripts/update_daily.py), pulling real quotes from a market-data API rather than being hand-edited. Two things this automation deliberately does not touch: the account's real dollar-weighted all-time return figure (still updated manually against Blossom) and the historical price-chart data on each position page, since silently auto-appending to hand-curated history risks introducing an error nobody would notice. If a scheduled run fails — a holiday, an API outage — the site simply shows the last successful update's numbers, dated, rather than anything fabricated.

Trading Compliance & Ethics

Beyond the position-sizing caps in the Investment Policy Statement, two standing rules govern trade timing, effective July 11, 2026. Both are tracked on the Compliance Ledger.

Rule 1 — The Blackout Rule

No trade — buy or sell — shall be executed in a position within 48 hours prior to that company's scheduled earnings release.

Purpose: to prevent any trade from being, or appearing to be, a bet on the outcome of a known information event rather than an execution of the standing investment thesis.

Rule 2 — The Holding Period

Core-bucket positions shall be subject to a minimum holding period of 30 days from the date of purchase, absent a thesis-breaking event as defined in the Investment Policy Statement's sell discipline.

Purpose: to impose a structural check against reacting to short-term price noise in positions explicitly sized and held for a multi-year thesis.

Verifying adherence to either rule requires exact trade-execution timestamps, which Blossom does not currently export in a form that can be published. Until that data is available, both rules are listed on the Compliance Ledger as not yet verifiable — a real, binding rule without a current means of proving adherence is disclosed as such, not quietly marked compliant.

Forward-looking statements

Bull, base, and bear cases; catalysts; and any other forward-looking language on this site are opinions as of the date published, not guarantees. They are frequently wrong — that is the explicit premise of the Portfolio Review & Retrospective section published in every letter.

External links and data sources

This site cites and links to third-party sources (Blossom, Massive Market Data, SEC filings, news outlets) for factual claims. AEA Capital Research does not control and is not responsible for the content or availability of external sites it links to.