Investment claims, checked

Proof over
promises.

The internet is full of confident people with charts. We hold investment claims to the actual evidence — and explain the boring fundamentals the hype skips. No signals, no sponsors, no advice.

Start reading → Why we exist

01 What you'll find here

Two doors. All free.

Everything here is one of two things: something we've read and written up, or a small tool that does something useful. No tips, no portfolios — we're not your adviser, and we never will be.

Library

Two kinds of piece, one shelf. A check takes one promise — "1% a day," "guaranteed monthly income," "beats the market" — and runs it against the real evidence, with a straight answer and how sure we are. An explainer lays out how the machine works: inflation, interest rates, age and risk. Every card says which it is.

Browse the library → Being built

Tools

Real-return calculator, fee-drag calculator, a "1% a day" exploder. Free, no login — each one built to demonstrate a point, and honest about its own assumptions.

Coming soon →

02 Latest

The two most recent pieces

Explainer Published 3 September 2026

Gold as an inflation hedge

What inflation does to money in a drawer, what gold is as a thing you own, and why "moves with inflation" and "keeps your purchasing power" are two different claims that only seem to disagree.

Read the explainer →

Check Published 26 August 2026 · Updated 2 September 2026

"Dividend is safe income."

The steady cheque from a broad basket is real. "Safe income" rests on three more things, and the biggest one — that the cash comes on top of your capital — is the one the data does not support.

Read the check →

Everything we've published →

03 How a check works — take gold

The claim

"Gold protects you from inflation."

Worked example — this is the shape of a check, not one we've finished. A widely cited study of this claim concludes gold may work as a hedge if your horizon is measured in centuries, and that over the horizons people actually invest over it is unreliable. A separate dataset reports a positive correlation of 0.34 between gold and inflation since 1972 — that means they tend to move the same way, but far from always — while noting gold was volatile and had a low long-run return on its own. Those aren't quite the same question: one asks whether gold moves with inflation, the other whether you can rely on it to. The explainer that lays both out is published; our own check is next in the queue on the library. Sources for the two findings above. Claude B. Erb and Campbell R. Harvey, "The Golden Dilemma", Financial Analysts Journal 69(4), 2013, pp. 10–42 (doi:10.2469/faj.v69.n4.1; free working-paper version: NBER Working Paper 18706) — quoting the abstract, gold "may be an effective hedge if the investment horizon is measured in centuries. Over practical investment horizons, gold is an unreliable inflation hedge." · Elroy Dimson, Paul Marsh and Mike Staunton, Global Investment Returns Yearbook 2025 (London Business School / UBS, 2025) — the gold–inflation correlation since 1972 is in the free UBS public summary edition, which we read; the full Yearbook is a paid publication and we have not read it.

The proof stacklegend, not a score

In a finished check the coins are stacked: as many as the promise claims, filled in as far as the evidence carries it. The gap is the hype.

this is the key, not a reading —
no count here stands for gold

04 Why we bother

This isn't cynicism. It's measurement.

People have been counting for decades — funds, traders, forecasters, influencers. The numbers are remarkably consistent, and remarkably at odds with your feed.

89.5%

of US large-cap funds trailed
the S&P 500 over 15 yrs

97%

of persistent day traders
lost money (Brazil, futures)

56%

of finfluencers are
measurably anti-skilled

See the full story, with sources →

Proof overpromises.