Building the portfolio feed
and why it’s taken longer than it should
A few of you have been asking about this portfolio publication.
Fair enough - I mentioned it, then went quiet, which is usually how you telegraph either imminent launch or quiet abandonment.
This is neither.
It’s bureaucracy.
The feed is being designed to do one thing - and one thing well: to let you see what I’m actually doing with my own money, with a short lag. No curated highlights. No selective memory.
The whole thing.
Here’s where it stands.
The Interactive Brokers account is live. That’s the foundation - without it none of the rest matters, and getting it set up correctly took more paperwork than I anticipated, which is a sentence I never expected to type about a brokerage account in 2026.
The Substack integration is fully wired end-to-end: trade happens, alert fires, post lands in your inbox. The alerts are configured at the IBKR level, so the lag from execution to notification is somewhere between 20 and 30 minutes.
Not real-time, but close enough that front-running me would require both ambition and a very fast finger.
What’s still left: flex query testing. IBKR’s Flex Query system is how I pull structured trade data for the automated posts, and I want to stress-test the formatting before it goes live to actual humans.
I’m also doing a full end-to-end test, which - fair warning - may bleed into your inboxes. If you get a test post from the portfolio feed in the next week or two, that’s me poking the machinery, not a real trade. Probably. I’ll try to make it obvious.
I also need to write some actual context - what I’m doing and why, what kind of account this is, and whether following it makes any sense for your situation.
Probable launch: somewhere in mid-May.
Which, if I’m being honest, isn’t entirely accidental. The market has been in a peculiar kind of suspended animation - not crashing, not recovering, just chopping up and down while everyone waits for the next signal.
I’ve been calling it the doldrums, and I think they lift around the same time the feed goes live.
Convenient timing.
Or just patience finally coinciding with opportunity.
We’ll see.