Four Crashes. Three Lessons. One Investing Platform.

Stockyard · September 29, 2026

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Four Crashes. Three Lessons. One Investing Platform.

My first "incident" with the stock market was the 1987 crash. By pure luck, I had sold my mutual funds a couple of weeks before the crash to buy our first house.

So, I learned nothing.

Then came the dot-com boom.

Some background: I'm an electrical engineer, and I've spent over 40 years in technology startups. (My first programming was on punch cards in high school, so yeah, I've been around.) In the '90s, I was working at a startup that had gone public, helping build telecommunications products that saw explosive growth. Heady times… That run cemented an optimism that has survived many, many mistakes since.

I was also investing in the market, mostly tech. I felt pretty smart. Warning signs of a bubble were there, but I didn't have a model for what a bubble looked like. I knew tech stocks were ridiculously overvalued, and I did stay away from the craziest ones.

That did not protect me when the crash came.

Lesson 1: We learn nothing from success, only from pain.

My personal journey in investing took me through two more crashes: the 2008 financial crisis, then COVID.

Every crisis felt like the end of the world. Every crisis was followed by a recovery, and eventually the market was higher than before.

Lesson 2: It's important to be in the market.

Along the way to the next black swan, countless predictions of the end of the world are made. Very, very few prognosticators got it right. Even fewer got it right more than once.

But why did the market keep coming back? The majority of the market consists of robust businesses that respond to crises, adapt, and thrive. Great businesses are built on strong fundamentals and run by competent people.

Why do most prognosticators get it wrong? The fact is that there is a lot of noise in the marketplace.

Lesson 3: Bet on businesses, not prognosticators.

So how did an engineer who loves building things end up building an investing platform? First, I had to clearly understand the challenges I was facing as an investor, and their root causes. These are the challenges I want to address with Stockyard:

Emotions. This is the killer. Volatile markets trigger our worst instincts (I speak from experience). When markets are down, we listen to doomers, and we sell. When they are up, it's all happy talk, and we buy. Buy low, sell high becomes reversed. One of Warren Buffett's famous lines is "Be fearful when everyone is greedy and be greedy when everyone is fearful." Very few people master this. Why? Unlike Warren Buffett, most people do not understand the durability of the businesses they invest in. In a crisis, that knowledge is essential to making reasoned decisions.

Inattention. The public market consists of thousands of stocks, and you probably have a day job. Sure, you can follow a few stocks, but it is very difficult to consistently and comprehensively pay attention to the market day in, day out.

Furthermore, we suffer from availability bias: we pay attention to what we already know, the same few stocks everyone is talking about. Meanwhile, lesser-known businesses start to boom. One of the most annoying types of articles out there is the "if you had invested $1,000 in Apple when it went public…" Well, gee, we don't have time machines! (Bring out the DeLorean.)

Untested Ideas. We may have theories on investing strategies or the characteristics of long-term winners. We might think they are brilliant ideas, but they are just theories. How do we know if they work? When you hear a prognosticator explain their theory, wouldn't it be great to be able to test it? Most commonly held beliefs about the market go untested. We just assume they work.

Once I understood the challenges, I went looking for tools that could help — and found them lacking.

Most platforms are built for looking things up, not for keeping watch. They'll show you data when you ask, but they won't monitor the market for you or apply your rules while you're at your day job. Investment managers have systems that do this — but they are costly. Cheaper platforms are typically incomplete and riddled with ads.

And no, a chatbot isn't the answer either. ChatGPT can tell you about a stock when you ask. It can't watch over 5,000 stocks every day, apply your rules the same way every time, and tell you when something changes.

I wanted something that would provide automation to avoid emotional investing, pay attention to the market on my behalf, and easily allow me to test ideas.

My ideal system would let me build and test any virtual portfolio I wanted, based on stock fundamentals or technicals (price patterns). It would run those portfolios every day, automatically, and notify me when something changed or when something I cared about happened.

That led me to build Stockyard. Those automated portfolios became Smartfolios, and the watching became Watchlists. Because the rules are built on business fundamentals, you hold companies for measurable reasons — and the rules don't panic when the headlines do.

Stockyard isn't meant to replace careful study of individual companies. It's meant to help you find the ones worth studying, and to keep watch once you own them.

Will it solve all challenges and make investing 100% predictable? Ummm, nope.

Will it give its users an edge in the market? I certainly hope so! I expect to continuously improve the system with user feedback. This is a work in progress. I have lots of ideas, and I expect to learn a lot from users.

I built Stockyard because the market taught me hard lessons I couldn't unlearn. Maybe it can help you learn them a little cheaper than I did. Check it out and give me your candid feedback. I would love to hear from you!