AXLFI Blog
Research, frameworks, and investor notes
A curated set of article cards for longer-form investing ideas, playbook breakdowns, and book-driven research.
Investor Playbooks
Peter Lynch's Investing Approach: Growth, Valuation, and Simple Business Math
A breakdown of Lynch's simple business math, how he classified stocks, and why Magellan's track record still matters.
Investor Playbooks
CANSLIM: O'Neil's Formula for Finding Big Stock Market Winners
A breakdown of O'Neil's seven-letter framework, why it combines fundamentals with price action, and how the sell discipline makes it work.
Trading Systems
Turtle Trading: The Original Breakout System Built on Rules, Not Prediction
A breakdown of the original Turtle system: channel breakouts, volatility-based sizing, pyramiding into winners, and why the edge was discipline, not prediction.
Position Sizing
The Kelly Criterion: The Math of Betting Big When the Odds Are in Your Favor
A breakdown of the Kelly criterion: the math behind optimal bet sizing, why overbetting destroys edges, and how fractional Kelly protects against estimation error.
Trading Systems
Nicolas Darvas: The Dancer Who Turned Momentum Into a Trading System
A breakdown of the Darvas Box system: consolidation boxes, breakout entries, trailing stops, and why a dancer’s method still maps to modern momentum trading.
Factor Investing
Relative Strength Investing: Buying the Market’s Leaders Instead of Its Bargains
A deep look at relative strength and momentum: the RS line, decile performance, leader rotation, and why buying winners works better than most investors expect.
Factor Investing
The 52-Week High Effect: Why Stocks Near Their Highs Often Keep Winning
Why nearness to the 52-week high predicts future returns, how it relates to momentum, and the behavioral logic of anchoring to prior peaks.
Trading Systems
Stan Weinstein’s Stage Analysis: How Great Trends Often Begin Before the Big Move
A breakdown of Weinstein’s four-stage cycle: basing, advancing, topping, and declining — and why the Stage 1 to Stage 2 transition is where the biggest winners often begin.
Market Internals
Marty Zweig’s Trend + Breadth Approach: Why the Best Bull Moves Often Begin With Broad Participation
Zweig’s framework combines price trend with breadth participation to identify higher-quality market advances.
Trading Systems
Mark Minervini’s Volatility Contraction Pattern: Why Tightening Price Action Often Precedes Explosive Breakouts
The VCP identifies leading stocks that tighten in price and volume before breaking out, exploiting supply exhaustion in strong uptrends.
Trading Systems
Ed Seykota's Trend Following: Why Big Money Often Comes From Riding a Few Large Trends
Seykota's rules-based trend following: ride major trends, cut losses quickly, and let a few outsized winners drive long-run performance.
Trading Systems
Jesse Livermore: Why the Big Money Is Often Made at the Right Moment, Not at the Lowest Price
Livermore's pivotal point theory says the best entries come from buying strength at key levels where the market proves its intent, not from bottom-fishing.
Factor Investing
The Post-Earnings Announcement Drift: Why Earnings Surprises Often Keep Moving Stocks After the News
A breakdown of PEAD: why earnings surprises keep moving stocks long after the announcement, how it connects to momentum, and why the anomaly persists.
Quantitative Research
Trend Scanning: Adaptive Labeling for Financial Time Series
An adaptive labeling method that picks the look-ahead horizon where trend evidence is strongest, avoiding the arbitrary window choices that plague most financial ML pipelines.
Quantitative Research
The Triple Barrier Method: A Better Way to Label Trades Than Using a Fixed Horizon
A labeling framework that asks “which barrier gets hit first?” instead of “where is price at time t+h?” — producing labels that reflect actual trade outcomes.