About
One student, one book, one written standard.
I am a NOVA student who researches the companies, writes the memos, maintains the site, and has to explain the mistakes when the plan and my behavior part ways. A written Investment Policy Statement keeps that last part from becoming optional.
AEA Capital Research is an independent research initiative founded and managed by one person. There is no team, no fund, no outside capital. The name is a banner for a personal research practice, not a firm — stated plainly, on purpose, because the entire point of AEA is to be honest.
Student-Built Project
A research practice, built and owned by its author.
What I do myself
I run AEA Capital Research end to end: selecting questions worth investigating, reading filings and source material, forming and revising investment theses, writing each research note, and managing the site as a living record. The work asks for an integrated view of a business — strategy, operating execution, capital allocation, competitive position, and risk — rather than a ticker-first conclusion. Market-data feeds and other public tools help keep the factual record current, but the judgments, explanations, and responsibility for what is published are mine.
I definitely do not have investing figured out—and four years is nowhere near long enough to pretend otherwise. This is my public practice ground: document the evidence, say what I am unsure about, test the idea against the strongest counterargument, make a decision, and own the revision when the facts change.
- Research: filings, industry sources, competing cases, valuation work
- Decisions: thesis, sizing, risk limits, and every revision
- Writing: security pages, letters, explainers, and post-mortems
- Build: structure, design choices, data checks, and site maintenance
Tools help me code, organize, and check the work. They do not get to own the judgment—or the error.
Meet Aydin · One-minute read
A student building better habits before bigger responsibilities.
I'm Aydin Ali, a business student at Northern Virginia Community College. I began AEA in 2022 because I wanted my curiosity about companies to produce something more durable than private notes and confident opinions.
I research the companies, write the analysis, maintain the decision record, and publish the corrections. The project has taught me that being prepared is not the same as being certain—and that a serious idea gets better when someone else can question it.
Outside this work, I spend time around cars, golf, the gym, soccer, and financial-literacy conversations at my mosque. I want my next learning community to make this less solitary: more debate, more collaboration, and more usefulness to other people.
- NOVA business student
- Project started in 2022
- Research + writing + web
- Northern Virginia
I'm a business student at Northern Virginia Community College (NOVA). AEA Capital Research is where I turn classroom frameworks into a durable practice: asking sharper questions about a business, weighing competing priorities, making my reasoning legible, and revising it when the evidence changes. It started in 2022 and is built to remain useful wherever my education and career take me.
Where I Am Now
Coursework informs the questions; the work has to answer them.
Introduction to Business gave me the vocabulary to ask how a company creates value and what makes a competitive position durable. Entrepreneurship and Small Business Management made the question more practical: who is the customer, what has to work operationally, and where can execution fail? Composition courses reinforced the complementary discipline of making a claim clearly enough that someone else can challenge it. Those are useful starting points, not credentials; the filings, sources, and counterarguments still have to carry the weight.
That is the standard this site tries to meet. Every position has a written thesis, a risk case, a cross-functional view of the business, and a place in a rules-based sizing structure; when a rule breaks or a view changes, the record is updated rather than quietly rewritten.
Learning in Practice
Three habits carried from the classroom into the work.
Not a course list — a few ways academic frameworks become more useful when tested against real evidence.
| Coursework | What it teaches | Where it's deployed on this site |
|---|---|---|
| BUS 100 Introduction to Business |
Looking past a product story to the customer, competitive position, and economics underneath it. | The business-model and competitive-positioning work in each position's Investment Thesis and Bull/Bear case. |
| BUS 116 & BUS 165 Entrepreneurship and Small Business Management |
Connecting a business idea to operating reality: execution, customers, and the decisions that make growth durable or fragile. | The operating questions behind each thesis, especially where a company needs to convert a market opportunity into repeatable execution. |
| ENG 111 & ENG 112 College Composition |
Writing a claim with evidence, then revising it when the argument does not hold. | The cited research notes, dated theses, and post-mortem record that make changes in view visible. |
What I Want Next
Test the work in a stronger learning community.
At the next undergraduate business program I join, I want to move this practice out of a one-person feedback loop and into a community where ideas are debated, improved, and held to a higher standard. I hope to contribute research and write-ups to student investment organizations, take on cases where finance intersects with strategy and ethics, and learn alongside peers who see risks and opportunities I may miss.
The goal is not to turn AEA into a credential. I want to become the person on a team who arrives prepared, makes a clear case, listens when someone finds the hole in it, and improves the decision instead of defending my ego. A thesis should survive questions because the evidence is good—not because I talked the longest.
Sharing the Method
Finance is more useful when the basics are shared.
I have helped teach financial literacy at my mosque, and it covered much more than investing. We started with checking and savings accounts, then moved into credit cards: minimum payment versus statement balance, what paying in full means, what happens after a late payment, and why a credit score can affect future borrowing. From there we worked through mortgages, bonds, Roth IRAs, index funds, diversification, and eventually individual investing and halal compliance.
Preparing for those conversations forced me to separate what is essential from what merely sounds sophisticated. If somebody new to finance could not follow the logic, “it is complicated” was not a good enough excuse. I had to make the framework clearer. That experience now shapes the expanded Financial Foundations & Halal Investing Guide.
I want to keep doing this in the next community I join: research with other students, write in a way that invites questions, and turn some of what I learn into tools or workshops that are useful beyond my own portfolio.
Beyond Markets
Life cannot be reduced to a ticker.
Outside the research, I am usually around cars, on a golf course, in the gym, or watching and playing soccer. Cars feed the same curiosity that makes me open a filing: I want to know what is happening underneath the surface. Golf is a weekly reminder that confidence and competence are not always the same thing—especially after a drive finds the trees. The gym rewards consistency, soccer rewards awareness of the whole field, and both keep a bad market day from feeling like the end of the world. AEA matters a lot to me, but it is not my whole personality.
Behind the Process
What is handwritten, what is automated, and what I check.
The site is a static HTML, CSS, and JavaScript project. I choose each research question, read the filings and source material, form the thesis, write the analysis, and decide when the public record needs a correction. Small scripts update repeatable factual fields such as prices, returns, ranges, and search entries; they do not decide what I believe about a company.
- Handwritten judgment: thesis, counterargument, scenario framing, conviction, sizing rationale, and post-mortem.
- Automated support: market-data refreshes, derived portfolio tables, search indexing, and repeatable page checks.
- Verification: figures are checked against filings, company materials, the linked brokerage record, or the named data provider before publication.
- AI and digital tools: I use coding and editing tools to help implement, organize, and quality-check the site. I remain responsible for the research question, source selection, claims, final wording, and every published error.
One correction in practice: the homepage once carried a portfolio-bucket percentage from an older letter while Holdings showed the newer live snapshot. I reconciled the figures, placed the date beside the homepage numbers, and now treat date labels as part of the number rather than optional context.
Why I Built This
$500, a written policy, and a decision to run it in public.
It began in 2022 with $500 of saved earnings and gift money. I've run it actively ever since. The goal was never to show off returns — plenty of people post their winners and quietly delete their losers. The goal is discipline and self-awareness: to build a track record I can't edit after the fact, where the reasoning is written down before the outcome is known. See the Founding Note for the fuller account of that period, including an honest note on the limits of reconstructing it from memory years later, or the Start Here page for the under-400-word version of this same idea.
What I Believe
Four ideas the whole site is built around.
Rules beat willpower. The decisions that matter are made under pressure. A written Investment Policy Statement, set before the moment of temptation, is worth more than good intentions in the moment.
Position sizing is the real risk decision. Being right about a company matters less than being honest about how much of the book depends on it. Most of my mistakes have been sizing mistakes, not stock-picking mistakes.
Say the risk out loud. Every position gets a bear case, and every rule break gets reported — including the position currently right at its policy cap, written up in the July letter's ongoing-risks section.
Beat the index or own the index. If this process can't beat a low-cost S&P 500 fund over time, the honest response is to own more of the index and say so — not to keep taking single-name risk for no edge.
How The Process Works
Four steps, every position, no exceptions.
- Written thesis
What has to be true for a position to work, grounded in primary sources and stated assumptions rather than a headline number.
- Risk case
What breaks it, and the strongest honest case for being wrong — not a disclaimer added after the fact.
- Sizing
Which IPS bucket it belongs in, how much is appropriate, and what existing exposure it adds to the rest of the portfolio.
- Review
A catalyst and a date to re-check, and a monthly letter measuring the whole book against SPY.
Verification
Nothing here is on the honor system.
Holdings are independently verified through Blossom, a portfolio-tracking service linked directly to my brokerage. The percentages, average cost, and returns you see across this site are all pulled from that verified record. Transparency is a core pillar of AEA — I used to withhold more detail, then dropped that policy, because the rigor of the process should hold regardless of account size. Company fundamentals come from Blossom and SEC filings, and price data from a market-data provider — each cited on the page where it appears. The full breakdown of what's cited, how often, and where is on the Sources & Research Log.
For a reader with less time: the Tear Sheet condenses this whole site to one page, and Learning in Practice shows how the habits behind it are developed and tested.
Research Note
An industry whitepaper, written the same way the site is run.
The Physical Limits of Compute
A full-length industry note on the AI-infrastructure cycle — the thesis that the market may be focusing on accelerator design more than the physical constraints underneath it: high-bandwidth memory, advanced packaging, and power. It includes a dedicated section arguing against my own thesis, observable checks for each risk, and a direct-source appendix linking company filings and investor materials.
Questions Worth Answering
Four fair questions, answered plainly.
These are the questions I want the work itself to be able to answer.
"Is this a hobbyist playing with fire?"
I chose to trade with my own capital, not a paper-trading simulation, precisely because it forces me to feel the consequences of a bad decision — something a simulation or a school club can't teach. The dollars are limited; the discipline is the same one I'd apply at a firm. That's the entire point of the Investment Policy Statement: it shows the process is built to scale even though the account isn't large yet.
"Is the site an echo chamber?"
The best evidence against that is the Portfolio Review & Retrospective section every full letter carries — a standing commitment to update a thesis in public when a market event proves it wrong, rather than only publish the calls that worked. Independent research has limits; the next level is having thoughtful peers challenge a thesis before action, not only after.
"The leverage risk"
NBIL, a 2x leveraged daily-reset ETF, is the one position on this site I'd expect the most pushback on — volatility decay on daily-reset leverage is real math, not a minor footnote. It's held as a small, capped tactical position (2.9% of the book against a 5% leveraged-sleeve cap), not a long-term holding, precisely because I understand that math rather than in spite of it. Sizing it small and capping it is the risk control; explaining why is the difference between a risky trade and a quantitatively aware one.
"Is this overshadowing the academics?"
The two aren't separate tracks — coursework at NOVA gives me frameworks to test against real evidence instead of leaving them in a notebook. The project is useful only when it makes a concept more precise, a question more honest, or a conclusion easier to challenge.
The point of AEA isn't to prove investing is already figured out. It's to build discipline in public, on the record, where mistakes can't be quietly edited out.