My story: two years as a full-time investor
A good year, I've learned, is one where I barely have any losers.
Two years of Treasure Hunting as a paid blog. That also means two years as a full-time investor. First of all, a big thank you to all the paid subscribers who have made this dream possible. I am very grateful that I get to do what I love for a living. To me, investing is the greatest work I could possibly pursue.
To me, investing is not just about money. Money just happens to be the scoreboard we use to assess how well one is playing the game. To me, investing is about going down weird rabbit holes, letting your curiosity run free. Trying to solve the never-ending puzzle, the never-ending psychological warfare against your own biases, the never-ending competition against the greatest opponent there is: the market.
The numbers from the outside look good, but I want to tell the story behind them.
My first contact with the stock market came when I was 17. I had set up an ETF dollar-cost-average plan. However, I quickly realized that investing 50€ per month wouldn’t get me very far. So from age 17 to 23, I was occupied with how to start and grow a business. Later, I founded a marketing agency with a business partner, and we grew it to a handful of employees. Nothing big, but it very much achieved the goal of being able to live a good life off that money, especially for my early 20s.
However, after hitting some of the revenue goals we had worked towards, I quickly realized this was not what I wanted to do for the rest of my life, and that the motivation that got me started on that path was very much external rather than internal.
During Covid I thought to myself: “Wait, my salary is big enough now to actually invest 300-500€ per month. I should get started with that investing thing again.” Days later I picked up One Up On Wall Street, and (while I am not a big reader) boy did I read this book quickly. I read it basically in one go. I will never forget it; it was over Christmas and I was so hooked on it. From that day on, I started to go down the rabbit hole of investing, a bit more every day, and now, five years later, I am still learning something new about it every single day.
After reading Peter Lynch, I also quickly realized that I wouldn’t just pick up where I left off by investing in the MSCI World. No, I wanted to invest in companies, doing proper research. I remember during that time the late Charlie Munger was buying Alibaba, and while all my friends were buying memecoins and NFTs, I was researching Alibaba. Guess who made more money? (Spoiler: They did, but not for long ;))
One day I saw a YouTube video about investing and learned that Buffett, in his early days, invested in something called “microcaps”.
And that was the day that would change my career, and likely my entire life. I quickly came across “Focused Compounding” and the “MicrocapClub.”
Back then X was still called Twitter, and guys like Harris Perlman used to share their best ideas and their returns. It motivated me. It showed me that Buffett’s claim that he could still do 50% per year was not a fantasy. There were actually guys out there doing it.
During that time my goal was clear: to become a successful investor myself. So I bought my first microcap stocks. Defama, Endor, Leatt and Parks! America. In that order.
Defama owns multiple locations that are rented out to supermarkets and other non-discretionary stores. A stable company that is still doing well.
Endor was a Covid darling that went bankrupt.
I bought Leatt almost at the top at US$25; it went down to US$5 over the next few years.
Parks! America was another Covid darling, which I bought at roughly US$0.50 and sold at US$0.30. It was also my first write-up and my first post-mortem.
As you can see, the first stocks I bought were anything but a profitable venture. I pretty much sucked at investing. Of course I did. I had just started, without any education in the subject.
The first winners
It took me until 2023 to finally understand what moves stock prices and to get my first winners. Contrary to an index fund, timing matters much more for individual, small companies, as I had to learn. A lot of people made good money buying Leatt at US$10/share, pre-Covid. Back then I thought that if I bought the same company they did, I should make money too, right? Well, not right.
It also took me until 2023 to really be able to analyze a company through its balance sheet, cash flow statement and income statement.
My first bigger winner was Deufol, which I bought right when news came out that they had won a lawsuit against former employees worth roughly 30% of their market cap at the time. They distributed it to shareholders via a special dividend. On top of that, the shares were trading cheaply regardless.
Later that year, that was also the first AGM I attended (excluding Berkshire, where I went in 2022). It was a fun experience. Most of the shareholders came from the IPO and were elderly folks who had ended up with their shares almost by accident. I was the youngest there by at least 20 years. But I had a lot of fun, and even asked a question (actually a handful of questions). Apparently they were good enough that, coupled with my young age, the CEO came over to talk to me afterwards.
Later that year I also bought Cipher, which was my first really big winner. Since my first buy that year it has become a five-bagger by now. I still hold shares of Cipher.
Despite these first winners in 2023, I ended the year flat. Leatt had cost me a lot of money. But I consider it my first “real” year in the stock market. And after that year, I was determined to make 50% in 2024. It was all I could think about. I wanted it so badly, and this number of 50% was almost like a magical line for me.
And if you want something badly enough, you’ll get it. So I found IVFH at the end of 2023. Ian Cassel had written about it in the MicrocapClub.
Oh yes, by that time I had already joined the MicrocapClub. When my application was approved in early 2023, I felt really proud. To me it meant that I was now officially part of the investor club, among the investors I had looked up to.
But back to IVFH, which was without a doubt the most important stock in my career so far. When I came across it, I knew this was the stock that would propel my 2024 to 50%. I knew it. I was so sure.
Back then I had far less money than I have now, and, importantly, I was still adding meaningful amounts because my income was high relative to my net worth, but reconstructing it, I must have had 20%+ of the portfolio in the company at cost.
At the end of February, I published the write-up. I knew it was a good idea, and by then I had built a small following, but this write-up reached so many people. It doubled my following over the next months, and even more importantly, it introduced me to other smart investors. I am extremely grateful for that.
During that time I became more and more confident. From the back half of 2023 with Deufol, Cipher and now IVFH, my decisions were finally working out. Cipher and IVFH had a great start to the year — and so did my portfolio.
Taking the leap
At this point I was still running the agency, but mentally I was almost entirely focused on investing. I already enjoyed investing when I was losing money, but once I started making money it got even stronger, almost like an obsession.
During that time, the first Substacks were also going paid. And with my subscriber count rising significantly and my latest ideas starting to work out, I saw a clear path to making this a living.
So I set a rule: “If I reach 2500 free subscribers, I’ll leave the company I had founded and take the leap.”
I figured that in the worst-case scenario I would earn 2000€ and just live in either a smaller city in Colombia or maybe in Asunción, Paraguay. I had already spent 6 months in Medellín in 2022, so I knew that was a very decent “worst case” — after all, much better than staying on the wrong path.
So on April 8th, I told my business partner that I had decided to leave the company. The payout would also give me two years of buffer to figure the Substack thing out.
And now, on June 27th, it is exactly two years. I did not have to move to South America, nor did I have to use much of my savings.
2024 continued to be a fantastic year. I made one great call after another. I bought ETCC at US$0.9 and it went to US$1.8; I bought KLNG at US$0.9 and it went to US$2; Cipher hit CA$18 at its peak; and most importantly, IVFH went to US$2.2.
I ended the year up 124%, overshooting my goal of 50%. Including my contributions to the portfolio, within the span of one year I had almost 4x’d my net worth.
That naturally led to overconfidence.
Going into 2025, I was overconfident. My ego took over. IVFH was supposed to be the stock that would keep performing. I tied my own self-worth as an investor to that name.
It ended badly. I wrote about it here.
2025 was a shitty year. Luckily, I still managed to end it flat.
But it was also the most important year. I am a much better investor now than I was back then.
How I invest now
Now, 2026 is going very well again. But I feel I am in a much more grounded mental state. No overconfidence, no ego attached to any name or outcome. I know that if the facts change, I would sell any security the next day, no hesitation, no false conviction.
While my strategy has mostly stayed similar to what I’d frame as value-with-a-catalyst or inflection investing, and I still invest in microcaps, my portfolio not only looks completely different than it did a year ago; I’d say I also look for different companies now.
In 2024, and especially in 2025, it was mainly growing microcaps. And by microcaps I mean really microcaps, often below 50M in market cap.
The issue with growing nanocaps/microcaps is that it is a fight against gravity, especially for small companies. If they are cheap, a lot of times, there is some “catastrophic” risk (customer concentration, one product, reimbursement risk, potential fraud, etc.), and more likely than not it’ll implode.
To make that strategy work you really have to accept a longer time frame, being very good and selective at finding the one or two standouts that are really good businesses with a long runway for growth.
Of course, if it works, it will likely become a multibagger.
However, I am better at finding and predicting special sits, divestitures, etc., situations with a shorter time frame. I don’t consider myself a “long-term” investor. My preferred timeline is 6-18 months. I am happy to hold longer, but then the IRR mostly gets worse.
More stable companies often give downside protection. True microcaps often don't. Many already rely on alternative funding because banks won't lend to them. So once earnings turn negative (again), they can get caught in a downward spiral: if they can't tap the credit markets, they're forced into a capital raise at a depressed valuation.
A bigger company that at least has access to credit from banks, hard assets it can borrow against, and/or a good balance sheet has much less downside risk. It usually has less upside, too. It most likely won’t be a ten-bagger. But on a risk-adjusted basis, it’s a safer double, in my opinion.
Now, two of my core positions are approaching the 1B EV range, with 100M+ in EBITDA. Those are much more stable and mature businesses than a microcap with 30M in revenue and break-even on the bottom line.
The most important lesson during that time — at least for me — was this:
a good year is a year in which I barely have any losers.
I consider finding new ideas my strong suit, and luckily, since 2023, I’ve always had a stock that increased by 50-100%. I don’t really need to worry about that.
What has separated the good years from the bad ones is how much I lost on the ideas that didn’t work out.
If I can keep losses below 2% of the portfolio on a contribution level per name, I know it’ll be a good year. Whether the year ends at 30%, 50% or 100% mainly depends on how big I sized the winner.
Avoiding losers and sizing potential winners big: that is how you beat the market.
I am very excited for the next few years. I am as motivated as ever, and hopefully I am also a much better investor.
If you want to follow me on my journey, you can become a subscriber here:
Congrats that yor dream is coming true. Really fun to learn what you learned over the years.