Your attention queue — what actually changed and what needs a decision. A quiet day is a good day.
Atlas guides process; it is not financial advice and gives no buy/sell calls. Everything you enter stays on this device.
Foundation & long-term portfolio
Investable portfolio
offline
$—
Day
—
Total gain
—
Cash
—
By bucket
Investable portfolio = your holdings + cash. Not your full net worth (it excludes home, debts, outside assets).
Holdings
Projected value in 20 years — base case
$—
—
What builds it (base case)
You add $0Growth $0
This is a scenario range — three fixed return assumptions (bear/base/bull), not a probability band. Real markets are lumpy; a bad decade or a fat-tailed crash can land below the bear line, and a poor early run hurts most. The levers you control are savings, time, and the goal — not the return.
Starting from today
$—
Monthly contribution$200/mo
Time horizon20 yrs
Goal$100,000
The long-run S&P average is ~10.5% nominal, ~7% real — so 6/8/10% is an honest band, not a forecast.
The boring core that wins
A century of evidence: almost no one beats the market by picking, and the edge that survives is process, cost, and behavior. This is the default — keep doing these quietly and relentlessly.
1
Lay the foundation
3–6 months of expenses in cash; clear high-interest debt. Never invest money you'll need soon.
Survival is the precondition for compounding.
2
Own the whole market, cheaply
A low-cost broad index is the core. 85–90% of active funds trail the index over 15 years (SPIVA), and past winners don't persist.
Bogle: costs are the one thing you control.
3
Automate contributions
A fixed monthly transfer on payday. This — not returns — is most of your path to the goal.
Pay yourself first; remove the decision.
4
Shelter from tax & allocate by life stage
Use tax-advantaged accounts; hold more stock when young, shift toward bonds as earning years shrink.
Allocation drives >90% of the result.
5
Stay the course
The best days cluster next to the worst. Don't sell in panic; don't chase what's run.
Behavior is where most investors lose.
6
Rebalance with new money
Direct fresh contributions to whatever's underweight rather than selling — no taxes, no timing.
Quiet, mechanical, relentless.
Active desk
A disciplined pipeline. Each name moves through stages; the app does the finding and the analysis, you make every decision. Candidates are ideas to research, never buys.
Honest odds: most active retail traders lose over six months and under 1% beat a simple index net of costs. Run this small, with money you can lose, and measure it against just holding the index.
Library
Calculators run on-device. Research prompts copy into Claude or Cowork — each structures your thinking and lists what to verify; none give a recommendation, and never trust a number you haven't checked against the filing (SEC EDGAR).
Calculators
Research prompts
▲ Active-trading tools (off by default)
Under 1% of day traders beat a simple index net of costs. These are code generators, not signals. Kept for completeness.
The ten books behind Atlas — each distilled to the one principle that transfers to a solo investor. They converge: know what you're doing, control costs, separate price from value, demand evidence, keep a margin for error, respect uncertainty, avoid ruin, behave consistently.
You & your policy
Profile complete0%
Atlas can't give you personal guidance until it knows your situation. Two minutes sets it up.
Active sleeve
The capital firewall: the most you'll ever commit to active picks. Core is protected behind it.
Backup & data
Everything lives only on this device. Export a backup file you hold yourself — the single best protection against losing it all if this device or browser is wiped.
Backup encryption (passphrase) is a planned follow-up. For now keep the file somewhere private.
Import your portfolio
Feed holdings from any broker safely: export your positions to CSV (or copy the holdings table) and import here. It's parsed entirely on THIS device — no logins, no passwords, no account numbers needed, nothing uploaded. Repeat for each account.
Atlas never needs trade access — only ticker, shares, and cost. Never give an app the ability to place trades or move money.
The disciplined ideas worth taking from the quant world — abstracted from the math. A century of quant blow-ups says the same thing as your value canon: control risk, distrust your models, never bet the account. None of this is prediction; it's how to stay honest and survive.
The four-model frame
Every disciplined strategy — quant or not — is really four decisions. Atlas's Active desk is structured around them:
1
Alpha thesis
Why this is mispriced. (Your written thesis + value range.)
2
Risk model
What can go wrong, named in advance. (Kill-criteria + the risk-type checklist below.)
3
Cost model
Spread, commissions, and tax drag — the certain cost you pay against an uncertain edge. (The cost/tax line in the Entry Plan.)
4
Allocation
How much, and how it fits the whole. (Sleeve budget, position size, portfolio heat — Core stays protected.)
Risk types to consider
Model risk — your valuation is a metaphor, not reality. Be wrong slowly, not catastrophically.
Regime-change risk — what worked in this market may be specific to it. Ask: does the thesis survive a different regime?
Exogenous-shock risk — the unmodeled event (rate shock, regulation, a 10-K surprise). Position so one doesn't ruin you.
Crowding / contagion risk — popular trades de-lever together. If everyone owns it for the same reason, the exit is narrow.
Two cautions the quants learned the hard way
A clean screen is not a validated edge. A screen surfaces candidates to research, not a backtested strategy. Torture data long enough and it confesses; a thesis that only fits recent data is suspect. Demand the out-of-sample, different-regime case.
Edges decay and crowd. Real edges are usually structural and temporary; once published and crowded they fade. Your durable advantages are cost, tax, diversification, patience, and behavior — not a clever screen.
Sizing for survival (fractional Kelly)
Kelly maximizes long-run growth only when you know your edge precisely — and a solo investor almost never does. So size a small fraction of any "optimal" bet. The goal is variance control and survival, not betting bigger. The position-size calculator and portfolio-heat readout enforce this.
Out of scope for Atlas (by design): derivatives pricing, HFT/microstructure, and options-volatility trading (that's Murmur). Speed and leverage are not a solo investor's edge.