Not from Wall Street.
That's the point.

I'm Nikolay Babeshkin. I'm not a fund manager, not a financial advisor, and I don't have an MBA from Wharton. I'm a tech entrepreneur who spent 12 years building and running one of the largest internet companies in Central Asia — and then applied the same systematic, data-driven thinking to managing my own capital.

This site exists because I wanted to see if I could invest my own money better than I could pay someone else to do it. Turns out, I could. And now I'm showing my work — publicly, with real money on the line.

The path here

2011 – 2023

CEO, Kolesa Group — Kazakhstan

Built the country's #1 classifieds platform from $15M to $300M+ capitalization. 360 employees. Baring Vostok Capital Partners invested in the company in 2014. This is where I earned my capital — and learned to think in systems.

2019

Started investing

Began managing my own portfolio. ETFs at first. Quickly realized that understanding risk matters more than picking winners.

2021

Went quantitative

Started developing systematic strategies — backtesting, factor models, risk management frameworks. Paper trading to validate ideas before committing real capital.

2022

Real money in

Put real capital into my quantitative strategies. The 2022 bear market was the first live test — the strategies stayed positive while the S&P 500 fell −18%.

2023 – Present

Andorra. Full-time investor.

Left the corporate world. Relocated to Andorra. Now managing a multi-million dollar portfolio across multiple quantitative strategies — and sharing the results openly on this site.

Why public?

Two reasons, both selfish:

Discipline. When your performance is public, you can't cheat. No cherry-picking periods. No hiding bad months. No adjusting the strategy after the fact and pretending you didn't. This site forces me to keep everything clean, documented, and honest — which makes me a better investor.

Accountability. I believe that if you claim a strategy works, you should be able to show the receipts. Not a backtest from 1995. Not “our model portfolio returned 40%.” Real money, real trades, real results — including the bad ones. This site is my receipt.

What I believe

Risk management is the strategy. Anyone can generate high returns with enough leverage and luck. The real skill is keeping drawdowns small and recovery times short. I'd rather make 20% a year and never lose more than 13% than make 35% and lose half my portfolio in a crash.

Backtests lie. Live results don't. Every strategy looks great in hindsight. That's why this site separates backtest, out-of-sample, and real money periods on every chart. If I can't show live performance, I don't show anything.

Systems beat opinions. I don't try to predict where the market is going. I build systems that react to data. When my Risk Meter says hedge — I hedge. When it says stay invested — I stay invested. No emotions. No "this time is different."

Transparency builds trust over time. I'm not asking anyone to believe me today. I'm building a verifiable track record that speaks for itself — year after year. The longer this site runs, the harder it is to dismiss.

Skin in the game

Every strategy on this site is funded with my own money. I don't manage other people's capital. I don't sell signals. I don't offer subscriptions to my picks. The only person who loses money if a strategy fails is me. That's the most honest incentive structure I know — and it's the reason I pay more attention to drawdowns than to returns.

This is not financial advice

I'm showing what I do with my own money. I'm not telling you what to do with yours. Past performance doesn't guarantee future results. I might be wrong. The strategies might stop working. Markets change. What doesn't change is that I'll show you exactly what happened — good or bad.