About The Money Maniac
Hi, I'm Daniel.
I write a weekly personal finance newsletter that boosts your financial IQ in five minutes. Below is the story of how I got here, what I write about, and how I think about money.
How this started
I grew up in a middle-class family in Tucson, Arizona, with two interests that ended up colliding: math and money. My mom planted the seed early. As a teenager, I had saved up a couple thousand dollars from chores (a few bucks a week) plus a steady stream of side hustles, and she encouraged me to put it into gold. That was around 2007. When gold ripped higher in the years after the Great Recession, I cashed out for a profit that, to a kid earning a few dollars at a time, may as well have been the lottery.
That stuck with me. Investing turned a rounding error into a meaningful number. I was hooked.
A few years later I watched the fallout of the Great Recession and the Occupy Wall Street movement up close. Regardless of how valid the grievances may have been, one thing was clear to me. Rather than spend my time worrying about what others had and what I thought I should have, I'd be better off heads-down building my own.
That has been the foundation ever since: investing as a way to control more of your own outcome.
The path
- 1
Cornell University
Engineering and business. Graduated with honors. Spent way too much of college reading 10-Ks for fun.
- 2
JPMorgan Chase, on Wall Street
Loved the markets. Less in love with the lifestyle, the grunt work, and the cog-in-the-machine feeling. Stayed long enough to learn how the sausage gets made.
- 3
Left finance to start my own businesses
Kept investing my own money the whole way through. Never stopped studying markets, sectors, and the psychology of why people do strange things with their portfolios.
- 4
The Money Maniac
Friends and family kept asking the same finance questions. Rather than answering each one separately, I started writing the answers down. That turned into the weekly newsletter you can read here.
What I write about
The newsletter is mostly three things.
Investing
My focus is long-term and structural. My edge lives at the sector level, not in handpicking the next ten-bagger.
FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early)
I'm more of a fat-FIRE aspirer than a lean-FIRE optimizer. I genuinely enjoy building, saving, and investing, and I'm happy to keep doing all three for as long as it takes so that I'm not the one budgeting in retirement.
Financial psychology
Saving habits, money mindset, how to keep cool when the market is upside down. The behavioral side of personal finance.
What I don't write about.
- Get-rich-quick anything.
- Day trading or intraday Wall-Street-Bets-style momentum plays.
- Hot takes for clicks. The newsletter is meant to compound. So is everything in it.
A few wins, and a few losses
Some receipts to ground the talk in real numbers. I've been right and I've been wrong, and both have been useful.
Wins
Micron (MU)
Entered 2017
+1,200%
Shopify (SHOP)
Entered 2017
+1,300%
Direxion Tech 3x Bull (TECL)
Entered 2017
+1,400%
AbbVie (ABBV)
Entered 2018
+200%
Losses (or missed)
Tesla (sold) (TSLA)
2019
Missed +1,200%
Twilio (TWLO)
-65%
- ...and others I'm sure I'm forgetting.
The point isn't to flex the wins. It's that the wins paid for the losses many times over, because the wins compounded over years and the losses got cut. That's the beauty of investing—asymmetric upside.
How I invest
Despite the examples above, individual stock picking is actually a small part of my approach. Roughly 90% of my portfolio sits in market-wide and sector-wide bets. The remaining 10% is the individual names I have real conviction on, which is where the wins and losses you just saw came from.
Why so much in sectors? Because picking individual winners is hard, and the data is consistent. Very few people, including professional fund managers, beat the market over the long run. Trying to do it anyway feels both risky and a little overconfident to me.
What I've found a lot easier is identifying durable, multi-year tailwinds. I look for structural changes in the economy, advances in technology, and demographic shifts. Then I bet on the sector as a whole.
The trade-off is real. You don't always catch the single best performer in a category. But you also don't miss the move altogether, which is what happens to those who try to hand-pick.
This style means 3+ year holding periods. You don't need to nail the bottom or the top. Get directionally right, stay in the trade, and let time do the work.
Where this is going
My personal goal is fat FIRE. Keep working, keep saving, keep investing until a 3% to 4% withdrawal rate produces hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in passive income. I'd rather optimize for choice than for an early finish line.
The newsletter is part of the process. Writing it forces me to research, defend my thinking, and learn out loud. If you're here, you're probably a maniac too. Welcome along for the ride.
Read along every Friday
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