ABOUT ME#

I was born in a small town deep in the Italian countryside, long enough ago that my earliest memories go back to the magical nights of Totò Schillaci at the Italia ‘90 World Cup. In school I liked numbers, and where I come from that means exactly one thing: engineering. I obeyed. Once I entered the workforce, I ran into the inconvenience of having to invest the savings sitting idle in my bank account, and I made two discoveries. The first was the world of passive investing, through the books of Bogle, Malkiel and Bernstein. The second was the early FIRE movement in its most radical incarnations, Early Retirement Extreme (ERE) and Mr Money Mustache (MMM). What has stayed with me from early FIRE is the saving discipline and a certain allergy to superfluous spending; on the more radical ideas I have softened my stance — not least because, in the meantime, new opportunities have come along.

My life as an investor was a genuinely simple affair for many years: after reading Bernstein’s famous “Four Pillars”, I spent 15 years invested in a plain 100% equity portfolio made of 2 ETFs: 60% S&P 500 and 40% Europe. Fate was kind enough to grant me the longest bull market in history, but nothing lasts forever, so I decided to start de-risking after the pandemic. Helped by rising rates since 2022, I am building my bond tent to settle on a 70% equity / 30% bond portfolio. In preparation for retirement, I became an avid reader of the Early Retirement Now (ERN) site, in particular the SWR and Options series. I am cautiously experimenting with short-vol strategies, more out of curiosity than conviction: the rest of this site tells you where that led.

One necessary disclaimer: I am not a finance professional and I have nothing to sell — I am an engineer who studies as a self-taught amateur, makes his fair share of mistakes and takes notes; this site is those notes, shared in the hope that the mistakes I have already made can be spared to someone else.

For anything at all, you can write to: thetabruv@gmail.com.