The Duck Investor

Hi, welcome. My name is Peter.

I'm in my early 30s, and I've been investing for about 10 years now, the last 8 of those focused specifically on value investing. I'm not a professional investor. Everything I know comes from books, podcasts, and a lot of trial and error actually putting money into stocks and getting it wrong along the way.

I live in Europe, which is the main reason I focus on European small caps. It's also where I think an individual investor can actually have an edge. These companies are often too small for big funds to bother covering, so there's less competition on the analysis side, not less opportunity. That said, if I find something good outside Europe, I'll take a look at that too. The regional focus is more about where I have context, not a hard rule.

The name comes from rubber duck debugging, the old programmer habit of explaining your code out loud to a literal rubber duck on your desk, because putting an idea into words is usually how you find the hole in your own logic. That's the whole premise here. The calculators (Graham Number, Intrinsic Value, Margin of Safety) are part of how I'm learning what these numbers actually show and when each one is useful. I don't run all of them on every stock, I reach for whichever fits what I'm trying to figure out. The journal is me explaining, out loud, why I think a stock is undervalued. Partly so you can follow along, mostly so I catch myself when the thesis doesn't hold up.

I'm not selling a course or a strategy, and I'm not claiming to have this figured out. I'm just trying to get a little better at it every day, mistakes and all. The mistakes are in the log too.

- Peter

Nothing on this site is financial advice. It's a personal record of my own research and decisions, shared for transparency, not as a recommendation to buy or sell anything.