Read this first
Rules of the game
Before you read a single trade I publish here, read this page.
All of it.
If that sounds like over-the-top legalistic CYA nonsense, I get it.
But trust me. It isn’t.
Let me say the most important thing up front, because it’s the thing most people miss:
I’m not giving you trade recommendations. I’m posting my own trades.
That’s a meaningful difference, and if you’re new to following anyone in this space it’s worth slowing down on. A recommendation is someone telling you what to do. “Buy X at this price, sell at that price, here’s your stop.” A signal service. There are plenty of those, most of them are bad, and that isn’t what this is.
What this is: a log of what I personally bought and sold with my own money. Real positions. Real entries. Real exits. Real losses when they happen, and they happen. I post it because I think too many people in this space talk big without ever showing their hand, and I’d rather be the kind of writer who has skin in the game and proves it.
You’re welcome to read those trades. You’re welcome to learn from them. You’re welcome to do absolutely nothing with them. What you should not do is treat them as instructions. There’s a phrase you’ll see thrown around online: DYODD. It stands for “do your own due diligence”. I want to spell that out because newbies sometimes scroll past it. It means: before you put money into anything, you do the homework yourself. You read the company filings. You look at the chart. You think about how it fits with the rest of your portfolio. You consider whether you can actually afford to lose what you’re putting in. You don’t outsource that thinking to me, or to anyone. Not because we’re untrustworthy - though plenty of people are - but because nobody else knows your situation. They can’t. Only you do.
It is my money on the line here. A lot of it. I funded the account with 50,000 CAD - which is about 30% of the money I have in the stock markets. That number matters because it tells you the scale I’m playing at, and it tells you the size of the swings I can stomach. If I size a position at 5% of the account, that’s 2,500 CAD. If you copy it with 5% of a 5,000 dollar account, that’s 250 dollars - and your dollar swings on the trade are ten times smaller than mine. The percentages match. The emotional weight doesn’t. Mirror my trade with a different account size, a different broker, a different country’s tax situation, a different time of entry, and you’re not actually in the same trade. You’re in a related trade that just happens to share a ticker.
The foundation.
None of what comes next on this Substack matters if your house isn’t in order.
Step one is debt. If you’re paying 18% on a credit card, paying off the credit card is the best risk-free 18% return you’ll find anywhere on the planet. Better than my best trade this year, almost certainly. Pay your dues. Mortgages are about the only debt I’d call sensible to carry. Everything else? Clear it first. Then come back.
Step two is physical. Not paper. Not ETFs. Not miners. Physical metal that you hold, that nobody can rehypothecate, that exists whether your broker exists or not. Buy mechanically, buy regularly, and don’t try to time it. Walk into a pawn shop or a local dealer and pick up one or more silver coins a month (10% of your spare income). That’s the base you’re building. Roughly 70% of my exposure to this thesis sits in physical and does absolutely nothing exciting. Which is the point exactly. The exciting part is supposed to be small.
If you can’t, PSLV is a reasonable proxy, but it has some risks that pure physical doesn’t have. So it’s my suggestion for a last ditch.
This portfolio - the one you’re about to read - is step three. The other 30%. The part that can disappear without rearranging my life.
That last sentence is where most people lie to themselves. “I can afford to lose this.” Can you? Really? If the number went to zero tomorrow, would you change anything? Delay retirement? Move? Take on debt? If yes, you can’t afford to lose it. Reduce the size until you can.
The minimum amount that actually works.
Here’s something I should be explicit about, because subscribers ask. How much money do you actually need before this kind of trading makes sense?
The honest answer involves doing some math on a real trade. Recently I wanted to add a call spread on SLV. Cost: 300 USD per spread. That’s the minimum unit - you can’t buy half a spread. I was sizing it at roughly 5% of my trading portfolio, which is consistent with how I size most positions.
Run that backwards. If 300 USD is 5% of the portfolio, the portfolio needs to be at least 6,000 USD just to take that one position at that sizing. And that’s the cheapest end of what I trade. Most positions sit higher than that. So if you want to actually be able to replicate this kind of trading - not just one trade, but to keep sizing reasonable across multiple positions - you’re looking at a 10,000 USD floor as the bare minimum. In other currencies that’s roughly 14,000 CAD or AUD, 9,000 EUR, 7,500 GBP. Below that, the math stops working. If the smallest unit you can buy is too large a chunk of your portfolio, that means you’re either oversized on every trade or you can’t enter the trade at all.
If your disposable income is 500 to 1,000 a month, please do not play the markets with this. Build the physical base first. One coin a month, every month, regardless of price. That’s the trade for your situation. It’s not exciting. It will not make you rich quickly. But it will protect you, and it builds something that compounds quietly while you decide whether you ever want to graduate to step three.
If you do want to graduate eventually, build the trading account separately. Don’t fund it from the physical stack. Save toward it from new income, on top of the monthly physical buying, until you have enough that the smallest position I’d take is genuinely 5% of your account. That’s the moment the math starts working. Not before.
I lose 300 dollars on a trade, it’s a bad day. You lose 300 dollars on a trade and it’s 5,000 in your account, it’s a month of your disposable income. Same dollar loss. Completely different consequence. Sizing matters because the percentage is the same but the human weight isn’t.
Now about risk tolerance.
Mine is high. Higher than yours, very probably. Not because I’m braver, but because my situation lets me carry it. Steps one and two are done. I have income from elsewhere. I have enough runway that a bad trade in May doesn’t mean a smaller dinner in June.
Your situation is different. A 22-year-old with a wad of starter capital and forty working years ahead can afford to take some hits, learn, and rebuild from them. A 75-year-old trying to squeeze a bit of extra yield out of a nest egg cannot. The same trade I make - say, a six-month out-of-the-money call on a silver miner - is a reasonable speculation for the first and outright financial malpractice for the second. I cannot tell you which of those two you are. I don’t know your debts, your income, your dependants, your tax situation, your existing positions, your sleep tolerance. Anyone selling you a “one-size” portfolio is selling you a costume, not clothes.
My trades.
What I trade is miners and some options. Mostly silver and gold names. LEAPs as the workhorse - those are long-dated call options, usually a year or more out, giving a position the time it needs to actually work. Sometimes shorter-dated calls when the setup is exceptional. Occasionally hedges. The portfolio is the thesis from Gold and Geopolitics with skin attached - if you’ve been reading the publication you’ll recognise the names.
The rewards, when they come, are real. Very real. A well-timed LEAP on a silver miner during the right kind of cycle low can do things to your capital that no index fund will ever do. I’ve once had a pretty nice 1600% on an SLV trade in half a year. That covered losses I made elsewhere. Not going to pretend that that one trade is all I did and make you imagine that I can repeat it on demand. It was a gamble. An asymmetric bet that paid off. I made other gambles that went to zero. In aggregate? I win. Most of the time.
The broker.
I use Interactive Brokers. IBKR. Not because they pay me, they don’t, but because they’re one of the few brokers that gives me reasonable execution on the trades I actually make. Options on miners listed across multiple jurisdictions. Canadian-listed juniors that show up nowhere else. The ability to actually exercise something on expiry day instead of having my broker pretend the option doesn’t exist.
This isn’t a plug. The point is that broker mismatch is a real and very specific reason you might read a trade here, try to mimic it on whatever app your country’s pension-friendly retail broker pushes you toward, and end up in something subtly different that behaves subtly differently and loses you money in ways that wouldn’t happen to me. Some of these positions don’t exist on those platforms. Some of the option chains aren’t tradeable. Some of the underlying shares aren’t even listed where you can reach them. Check before you copy. Or rather - check before you copy, and then remember that I told you not to copy in the first place.
The behaviour I don’t want to see.
There are people - and I’ve read enough of these stories to know it’s not rare - who have lost millions by overleveraging into options and then panic-selling at exactly the wrong moment. Not thousands. Millions. They go all-in on calls that look like a free trade. The setup turns choppy for two weeks. Their position is down 40, 50, 60 percent on paper. They can’t sleep. They sell. The trade resumes its move three days later without them.
Sometimes selling is the smart move. Genuinely. If the thesis is broken, if new information has come in that invalidates the setup, if the market structure has shifted underneath you - sell. Take the loss. Move on. That’s discipline, not panic.
But if you’re already down 80% on a trade, why are you selling? At that point you’ve already taken the damage. The remaining 20% is the lottery ticket on the way back. Either the thesis works and you claw some back, or it doesn’t and you lose the last bit too. The decision to sell at 80% down is a confession that you shouldn’t have sized it that large in the first place. The mistake wasn’t selling. The mistake was the position size that made it impossible to hold.
The trap is the size.
Always.
Position sizing is the single most important decision in this entire game, and it gets the least attention.
If I post a position and it goes against me by 30% the next week, I’m not selling. I’ll probably write about why I’m not selling. I might even add to it. If that prospect terrifies you, the position is too big for you. Cut it. There is no “right” position size in the abstract. There’s only the size that lets you hold through an ugly drawdown without selling at the worst possible moment.
The market is volatile and getting more so. Reversals reverse the next day. Big up days get followed by ugly red ones. Setups that look perfect on Sunday night look catastrophic by Tuesday afternoon. That isn’t a sign the thesis is broken. It’s what this stage of a metals bull looks like - jagged, exhausting, occasionally absurd. If you can’t tolerate it, your size is wrong, or your time horizon is wrong, or you should not be in this market at all.
FOMO.
A note on FOMO - that’s the fear of missing out, the feeling that the train is leaving the station without you. Some of the worst trades on record - across every market, every era - are the ones entered late by people who watched a setup work for six months and finally couldn’t stand being out anymore. Don’t copy a position I opened in February by entering it in May at three times the price. The trade I opened in February isn’t the trade you’re entering in May. The setup might be entirely gone. Read the date. Always read the date.
I will be wrong. Often, probably. I’ll close positions at losses. You’ll see those. I’ll hold positions through drawdowns that look insane and you’ll wonder why I haven’t sold. Sometimes I’ll be vindicated. Sometimes I’ll eat the loss six months later having held the whole way down. Both will happen. Neither means the framework is broken - it just means individual bets are bets.
The thesis I write about - the structural case for physical metals, the geopolitical reshaping of supply chains, the financialisation breaking down in slow motion - plays out over years, not weeks. Individual positions can lose. The thesis can still be right. If you can’t separate those two, please, do something else with your money.
How this actually works.
The trades post themselves. I have an integration that picks up each fill from my broker and publishes it here as soon as it’s available - usually within a few minutes of execution. That gets you the what: ticker, direction, size, price. Paid subscribers get a notification when that initial post goes out.
What it doesn’t include is the why. That gets added later, when I have time to sit down and write it up. Sometimes that’s the same evening. Sometimes it’s the next morning. Sometimes if I’m travelling it’s a few days later. The post gets updated in place with my reasoning, the chart I was looking at, the lines I drew, the cycle position I think we’re in, what I’m watching that could invalidate the trade.
You will not get a notification when those updates land. The platform doesn’t ping subscribers on edits, and I’m not going to spam a second post just to flag that the first one now has context. If you want the reasoning, check back. The original post is where it’ll appear.
This is deliberate. I’d rather have you see the trade in real time with no commentary than wait until I’ve crafted the perfect write-up to publish anything. The fill is the fact. The reasoning is the interpretation. You’re getting both, just not at the same moment.
What I am not (and yes, this is legalese).
One more time, because this matters: I’m not your advisor. I’m not licensed, not regulated, not supervised by anyone. I cannot tell you whether a trade is right for you. I will not tell you what to buy. I will not tell you what to sell. The “Primary Holder” tier exists for deeper conversations, but even there the answer to “should I do this?” is going to be “here are the considerations, decide for yourself”.
What you’ll get from me is what I do, why I’m doing it, and what I think might go wrong with it. The rest is yours.
Slow is good. Physical first. Position sizes that let you sleep through a bad week without selling at three in the morning. A broker that can actually execute what you’re trying to do. And the discipline to ignore me when ignoring me is the right call.
If any of that sounds boring, you’re not the audience. And I mean that as a compliment.
— No1