Playbooks
The rest of this site explains what instruments are and why they work. These pages do something different: they walk through the documents and screens you actually face, line by line, in the order that works — what to read first, what to ignore, and what is missing on purpose. Education only, as everywhere here — see the disclaimer.
The library
- How to Read a Fund Factsheet — two pages, forty numbers, six that decide the outcome. Identifiers, the cost floor, concentration, tracking difference, and why performance comes last.
- How to Read a Structured Product Term Sheet — the one method that works on every structure: find the option you sold, price it independently, and read the scenario the brochure does not chart.
- How to Read an Option Chain — which of the columns carry information, how to spot a stale quote, what open interest really says, and how to read the skew straight off the screen.
- How to Read a Bond Quote — clean versus dirty price, which of the four yields is shown, day-count conventions that silently change the answer, and comparing two bonds honestly.
- How to Read a Key Information Document — three regulated pages, one of which is a fact and two of which are models. What the 1–7 risk indicator does and does not measure.
- How to Read Financial Statements — why to start with cash flow, what ties the three statements together, and the reconciliations that reveal the most.
- How to Think About an Allocation — not what to hold, but how to reason about a mix: what each sleeve is for, why risk shares differ from capital shares, and a five-sleeve calculator with the correlation input that decides everything.
- How to Size a Position — the inversion that fixes most of it: start from the loss you can accept and derive the size, never the reverse.
- How to Read an Annual Report — three hundred pages of which twelve decide everything. Cash flow first, notes second, narrative last, and the four notes worth reading before anything else.
- How to Read a Credit Rating — an ordinal opinion about one narrow question. Issuer versus issue, what notching reveals, and what a rating deliberately excludes.
- How to Read a Central Bank Statement — the decision is already priced. Read the diff, the vote split and what the press conference declined to repeat.
- How to Read a Broker Statement — four sections, of which most people read one. Where withholding tax, FX conversion and cash interest actually appear.
- How to Run a Portfolio Review — a structured pass in an order designed so the boring findings surface first, because that is where the money is.
What these have in common
- Read in the order that works, not the order printed. Every document on this list puts its marketing first and its most decisive number in the middle.
- One number usually dominates. The dividend treatment on a certificate, the maturity schedule on a balance sheet, the bid-ask on an illiquid option — find it and most of the analysis is done.
- What is absent is information. A factsheet that omits turnover, a term sheet that does not chart the flat market, a KID that cannot tell you what the alternative pays — the gaps are consistent and they are not accidents.
- Recompute rather than accept. Every playbook links to the calculator that settles its central question in under a minute.
Once the documents are readable, the comparisons put two products side by side, and the learning paths put everything in a teachable order.