Choose the problem, not the format
A research library organized around decisions.
I build a study when I need to understand a problem and a tool when I need to repeat the check. Most started with something uncomfortable in my own account: too much thematic exposure, a leveraged fund behaving nothing like “two times,” or a valuation that only worked because I liked the company. Numbers come from named public sources and the portfolio’s own record. Nothing here is investment advice.
New · From the mosque workshops
Finance before stocks.
The teaching did not begin with an earnings model. It began with the things people actually meet first: checking versus savings, what a credit-card statement is asking you to pay, why the minimum is not the target, what affects a credit score, how mortgages and bonds work, and where Roth IRAs and index funds fit. Halal investing is the final lens, not the first vocabulary test.
Start the learning path- 01Store and move moneyChecking, savings, deposits, cash flow
- 02Borrow without guessingStatements, minimums, APR, credit scores
- 03Understand long-term debtMortgages, bonds, total cost
- 04Invest with a structureRoth IRAs, index funds, diversification
- 05Apply the halal lensBusiness activity, debt, income, purification
Current research
The AI Demand Evidence Ladder
A framework for separating a narrative shock from actual changes in budget, deployment, utilization, and supplier economics. The September 14 AI selloff is the case study; the five-layer test is meant to be reused.
The Concentration Premium
AEA's HHI of 492 says the book is unconcentrated — equivalent to ~20 equally-weighted positions. The book's own real correlation matrix says something sharper: within-theme positions correlate nearly triple the book-wide average. An interactive look at what a diversification score can't see, using AEA's own published data.
The Risk X-Ray
Paste any portfolio; it flags leveraged ETFs, single-name concentration, and hidden double-exposure — holding a leveraged fund and its underlying. The check I wish I'd run on my own book, before I ran it. Runs entirely in your browser.
Do 2× Single-Stock ETFs Actually Deliver 2×?
Twelve months of real daily closes across seven leveraged ETF / underlying pairs. The 2× NBIS fund I hold fell 4.5% while NBIS rose 51%. Why daily-reset leverage decays — and the one case that beat its target.
Studies
Long-form analysisThe AI Demand Evidence Ladder
Five layers of evidence — narrative, budget, deployment, utilization, and supplier economics — for testing whether an AI market move has actually changed the underlying demand thesis.
The Concentration Premium
AEA's HHI says the book is unconcentrated. The book's own real correlation matrix says something sharper. An interactive look at what HHI can't see, using AEA's own published data.
Return Concentration: Where the Gains Actually Came From
Six positions account for roughly two-thirds of this book's simplified return contribution — four of them a tightly correlated semiconductor cluster, plus a second correlated cluster hiding lower in the list. The same finding as The Concentration Premium, reached from the returns side instead of the position-sizing side.
Data Center Alley
Mapping Northern Virginia's data-center corridor — the world's largest — to the public companies that profit across the stack, several of which I hold. The local edge, tied back to the book's own thematic concentration.
The AI Capex Reality Check
$725B in combined 2026 hyperscaler capex, up 77% year over year — and free cash flow isn't keeping pace. The demand-side companion to Data Center Alley, built around GOOGL and META's own real Q1 2026 numbers.
The NAND Supercycle
NAND flash contract prices are up roughly 246% since the start of 2025, and Micron can fill only 55–60% of core demand. What's actually behind SNDK's and MU's blowout quarters, and how a commodity cycle this steep usually ends.
Inside PJM's Capacity Crunch
PJM's capacity auction cleared at $329.17/MW-day for 2026/27, up 1,038% from two years earlier — and hit the regulatory price cap. The grid bottleneck behind TLN, VST, and VRT's earnings this quarter, mapped in full.
Do 2× Single-Stock ETFs Actually Deliver 2×?
Twelve months of real daily closes across seven leveraged ETF / underlying pairs. The 2× NBIS fund I hold fell 4.5% while NBIS rose 51%. Why daily-reset leverage decays — and the one case that beat its target.
Tools
Interactive · client-sideThe Risk X-Ray
Paste any portfolio; it flags leveraged ETFs, single-name concentration, and hidden double-exposure — holding a leveraged fund and its underlying. The check I wish I'd run on my own book. Runs entirely in your browser.
The Position Sizing Calculator
Size a position so a real, measured adverse move costs a fixed share of the account — using each holding's actual daily volatility, then checked against AEA's own 10% concentration cap.
The Sharpe & Sortino Ratio Calculator
Return alone doesn't say much without the volatility it took to get there. Real risk-adjusted return ratios for any of AEA's 31 real holdings, computed from actual daily closes.
The Monte Carlo Path Simulator
2,000 simulated forward price paths, built by bootstrap-resampling a stock's own real historical daily returns — not a fitted normal distribution, so real skew and fat tails carry through.
The Volatility & Correlation Engine
Pick any two of AEA's 31 real holdings and compute real annualized volatility and pairwise correlation on demand, from the same real daily closes that power each position's own price chart and the published Holdings correlation matrix.
The Rebalance Visualizer
Today's actual weight in each of the book's 5 real IPS buckets, checked against the written policy caps — plus a slider to simulate a trim or add before it happens.
Financial Foundations & Halal Investing
Checking accounts through credit scores and retirement accounts, then the halal screen: business activity, debt, income, purification, a ratio calculator, quiz, and ticker checker.
AEA Halal Growth 50
A hypothetical equal-weight index of 50 Sharia-screened U.S. companies across nine sectors, with a deliberate technology tilt, published rules, and downloadable holdings.
The Options Lab
A full Black-Scholes pricer with the Greeks and a payoff-at-expiration diagram, built from scratch. AEA doesn't trade options — the IPS is long-only — but understanding the instrument precisely is worth doing anyway.
The Reverse DCF Calculator
Solve backward from a real market price for the free-cash-flow growth rate a two-stage DCF needs to justify it — the sell-side technique for reading what a price is already assuming, instead of laundering an assumption into a target.
Methodology & sources
Market data is from Massive Market Data; fundamentals are from company filings and the models published under Holdings. Computed studies commit their reproducibility script and dataset so the analysis is auditable and re-runnable — the leverage study's script and data are linked from its methodology note. Full sourcing conventions are on the Sources & Research Log and Disclosures pages. None of this is investment advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any security.