Here's the first principle that changed how I think about money: money shouldn't be the goal. Money is meant to be used, or burned, to be effective. Think of it as gasoline or fuel. It must be used to create value, to transfer, or to make something out of it.

Traditionally, money was seen merely as a medium for exchange, but in today's world, it's much more than that. You don't just let it sit there. You can invest it, save it, change it, and make it work for you. When it's working for you, in essence, it's being burned to earn more. The idea isn't to hoard money but to create a feedback loop that gains you more.

When we had Flynn, I started to feel like I needed to build something that would last and that would also do well. We needed to build for the future, for a better tomorrow. So I went on a mission to find a good portfolio strategy that would be lower risk but also leveraged enough to produce real returns.

This is the technical breakdown of my multi-portfolio investment strategy. For the story behind why I built this and my approach to thinking about it, check out Building a Strategic Portfolio System as a New Parent.

This post covers the specific allocations, exposures, rebalancing mechanics, and backtest results.

I recently checked my OpenRouter stats and discovered something surprising: I've used more credits than 98% of people on the platform. Not because I run an AI company or manage a team of engineers. Just me, using AI to augment my daily life.

Over the year, I've accumulated hundreds of millions of tokens across different models as I upgraded, experimented, and built systems that work. That's roughly equivalent to writing 4,000 novels worth of text. All this testing and development has taught me deeply about how AI models work together, what they're each good at, and what it really takes to build reliable AI systems.

I used to subscribe to way too many newsletters. Each one had good insights, but reading through them every morning felt like wading through the same ideas dressed up in different words. I was spending an hour each day on information I could have absorbed in ten minutes, and the redundancy was killing me.

I used to think I was a productive person. I loved spending time alone reading psychology books and thinking about my life. That all felt very manageable when it was just me.

When I realized my son was coming, I panicked. How could I keep growing as a person while being there for my child? How could I balance my own goals with being the father I wanted to be?

The first month was rough. There was so much to do, so little sleep, and I felt like I was failing at everything. But slowly, we found a rhythm. I had to let go of my old approach and figure out what actually worked in this new reality.

With a newborn, I managed to build a multi-portfolio investment strategy, develop my AI trading recommendation engine, and work on several other AI automation projects. People ask me how I got all that done. The answer isn't working harder or sleeping less. It's working completely differently.