Disclaimer

Educational and reference material only

These are my personal notes on investing and financial markets, written while I was still working things out. They are provided for educational and reference purposes only and are not individualized investment, tax, or legal advice, not a recommendation to buy or sell any security, and not an offer or solicitation of anything.

I'm not a financial professional. Nothing here is written with your particular circumstances, goals, tax situation or risk tolerance in mind — and nothing here has been reviewed by anyone qualified to catch my mistakes. Please don't act on it. Talk to a qualified professional about your own situation first.

Some of this is wrong — I just don't know which parts

That isn't false modesty. These are notes from someone learning, so some of it is simplified past the point of being strictly true, some of it is very likely mistaken outright, and all of it can go stale — figures, fees, fund names, and even how a product is structured can shift after something is written. If I knew which parts were wrong I would have fixed them; the honest position is that I can't know, and neither can you by reading this alone. Verify anything that matters against primary sources: the fund's prospectus, the issuer's own current fund page, or the relevant regulator.

If you find something wrong, please tell me. Corrections get made in public.

Numbers and calculators

Every buffer, cap, fee, and payoff figure on this site is illustrative — chosen to demonstrate mechanics, not quoted from a live product. The calculators model an outcome at the end of a defined period under stated assumptions, before fees and taxes. They deliberately do not model mid-period NAV, option time value, dividends, tracking error, bid-ask spreads, premiums or discounts to NAV, or fund closure. Real results will differ.

Investing involves risk, including possible loss of principal. Structures that limit downside do not guarantee against loss.

No affiliation

I have no affiliation with any issuer, fund company, or platform mentioned anywhere on this site. Nothing here has been reviewed, sponsored or endorsed by any of them. There is no advertising and no affiliate arrangement of any kind.

Privacy

There are no third-party scripts on this site, no advertising, and nothing loaded from another domain — every page pulls only files served from here. The calculators run entirely in your browser, and nothing you type into them is transmitted anywhere.

I do count pageviews, because I'd like to know which of these pages are actually useful. It happens on the server, so there is no tracking script and no cookie — nothing is stored on your device and nothing follows you to any other site. Per page load I keep the time, the path, your browser, operating system and device type, and the site that referred you.

To tell repeat views apart from separate people, each view also gets a pseudonymous id: a one-way hash of a secret value held on the server, your IP address, and your browser's user-agent string. Your IP address and user-agent are used to compute that id and are then discarded — neither is ever written to disk, and the id cannot be reversed back into either.

That id is stable over time, which is a deliberate choice worth being explicit about: it means that if you come back next month, this site can tell it's the same visitor returning rather than counting you as a new one. That's the whole reason it exists — "did anyone find this useful enough to come back" is the question I actually care about. It also means the id is a persistent identifier rather than a throwaway, so I'd rather say so plainly than bury it. It is not a cookie, nothing is stored on your device, it never leaves this server, and it is never shared, sold, or combined with anything else. Since it's derived from your connection and browser, it's approximate in both directions: switch networks and you look like a new visitor; share a connection and browser with someone else and you may look like the same one.

The only other information that reaches the server is what you deliberately type into the feedback form and send, which is stored privately and used only to answer or act on your message. None of it is shared with anyone, and none of it leaves this server.