01
Read
Take the playbook.
Eighteen lessons. Eight hours total. Read at your pace — most readers finish in two weekends. Each lesson ends with a small reflection that builds your dashboard.
Education · Not financial advice
An investing strategy slow enough to actually work.
No timing the market. No picking winners. No daily checking. Nothing clever. A discipline you can follow for a decade, in eighteen lessons. Most investing is a hurry. This isn't.
Preview, a dashboard
Years to FI
8.4y
One of the two North Star numbers on every dashboard.
The philosophy
Buy the forest, not the tree.
The story
A king walks through a forest. Saplings everywhere. He can't tell which will reach the canopy and which will rot. Most won't make it.
He could try to pick the winners. Or he could buy a piece of the whole forest, and let time sort it out.
The discipline
Research finds that just 4% of stocks account for the entire stock market's lifetime gains. The other 96% combined produced nothing more than T-bills.
Picking the 4% is a gamble. Owning a piece of the whole forest is a discipline. The playbook walks you through how to build it.
01·The structure
Stability is the floor. Amplifier is the compounding.
The two sides are not a hedge, they're a partnership. The stability side absorbs the shocks that would otherwise force you to sell at the bottom. With stability holding the floor, the other side can take the kind of risk that actually compounds over a decade. The playbook names what goes in each side and how to size them.
02·How it works
Three steps, then a slow monthly cadence.
Amplifier is set up once and tended to lightly. No daily check-ins. No reacting to the news. Just the same calm motions every month.
02
Set up
Open the dashboard.
Your Years-to-FI number is calculated from your contribution. Pick your allocation. Wire up your brokerage account. Log your first DCA. The dashboard takes over from the playbook.
03
Continue
Show up once a month.
First week of the month: log your DCA. Quarterly: read Ben's note. Annually: rebalance. That's the whole cadence. Nothing in between.
03·An honest comparison
Most attempts to beat the market don't.
Decades of research keep arriving at the same answer. Here's what people commonly try, what the documented outcomes look like, and where Amplifier fits.
ApproachEffortDocumented track recordSource
Day tradingShort-term in & out of positions
Hours a day
Daily decisions, screen time, taxes
Daily decisions, screen time, taxes
~80–97% lose moneyNet of fees and taxes, over a year or longer.
Barber, Lee, Liu & Odean (Taiwan, 1992–2006); SEC investor bulletins
Picking individual stocksBuilding a portfolio of names you believe in
Hours a week
Reading filings, watching earnings
Reading filings, watching earnings
~64% underperform T-billsOver their lifetime, 1926–2016. Returns are driven by a small minority of winners.
Bessembinder, “Do Stocks Outperform Treasury Bills?” (2018)
Actively managed fundsPay a manager to pick for you
Outsourced
Fees of 0.5–1.5% per year
Fees of 0.5–1.5% per year
~85% underperform the indexUS large-cap funds vs the S&P 500 over 15 years.
S&P SPIVA scorecards, US year-end
Buy & hold the indexBroad-market index funds and nothing else
Minutes a year
Set it and contribute on schedule
Set it and contribute on schedule
Matches the index, by definition~10% nominal CAGR for the S&P 500 across 1926–2023.
Bogle / Vanguard; historical S&P 500 total return
AmplifierBuy-and-hold index + leveraged amplifier sleeve
~15 min a month
Log a DCA. Read Ben’s quarterly note.
Log a DCA. Read Ben’s quarterly note.
+32% 10-year CAGRBacktested two-sided allocation. Max drawdown −41%.
Internal backtest. Playbook lessons 4 & 9 walk through the math.
Amplifier isn't trying to beat the index by picking the right stocks or timing the market — both of which the research shows is hard. What it adds is a leveraged amplifier sleeve, sized as half the book and rebalanced annually, designed to amplify long-term growth without changing the calm cadence of the stability side.
04·Sample dashboard
What the dashboard looks like when you log in.
Two numbers up top, a ten-year chart, the strategy stats at the bottom. No live tickers, no flashing lights, no buy/sell prompts. This is what a calm investing surface should look like.
Portfolio · 10-year history
Years to FI
8.4 yrs
At $1,200/month.
Years to Snowball
14.2 yrs
When returns exceed contributions.
CAGR+32%
Max drawdown−41%
Sharpe1.2
Sortino1.8
Calmar0.78
P&L renders in neutral text, never green or red. Both feel like information, not verdicts.
05·A year in
A year with Amplifier looks like this.
Not a roadmap of features. A picture of the actual cadence: when you'll show up, what you'll do, and how often. The whole thing is slow on purpose.
Month 1
Start the playbook.
Read lessons 1–6 over a long weekend. Set your FI number.
Month 2
Open the dashboard.
Wire your brokerage. Pick a starting allocation (likely 70/30).
Month 3 — today
First DCA logged.
First-of-month purchase, in the dashboard. The streak begins.
Month 6
Quarterly rebalance check.
Allocation drift <5% so far. Nothing to do this quarter.
Month 9
Ben’s quarterly note.
“I trimmed the amplifier side after the run-up.” 250 words. Calm.
Month 12
One year in. Annual rebalance.
Trim whatever drifted. Reset the band. Recalculate Years to FI.
06·By the numbers
Backtested over a decade. Carried by Ben for years.
Historical figures from the two-sided allocation. Past performance doesn't guarantee future results, but it does tell you the shape of the thing.
32%
10-year CAGR
Compound annual growth rate of the two-sided allocation, backtested.
6%
Safe withdrawal
Sustainable annual withdrawal in retirement. The traditional rule is 4%.
8
Total ETFs
A small handful, named inside the playbook. The whole strategy fits in your head.
07·A note from Ben
In his own words
I built this for the version of me that almost panic-sold in 2020.
I'm not a financial advisor. I'm a guy who runs this strategy on his own money, who has been DCA-ing into it on the first of every month for years, and who got tired of explaining it one DM at a time to friends.
The playbook is the conversation I wish someone had had with me before I started. The dashboard is the calmer version of the spreadsheet I used to keep. There's no upsell, no premium tier, no countdown timer. No founding-member rate, no urgency, no scarcity.
If the strategy makes sense to you, take the playbook. If you want the dashboard, it's $9 a month. If you don't, that's fine too. Half the lessons stand on their own as plain investing education.
BenCo-founder, Amplifier
Two products
Own the playbook. Subscribe to the dashboard. Never bundled.
$99 once for the playbook. $9 a month for the dashboard. No middle tier, no founding rate, no countdown.
Playbook
Amplifier playbook
$99one-time
Lifetime access. Own it like a book.
- ›18 lessons
- ›Budgeting + FI worksheets
- ›Playbook-aware AI chat
- ›Never expires
Dashboard
Amplifier dashboard
$9/ month
Operationalize the strategy. Cancel anytime.
- ›Years to FI + Snowball
- ›Live contribution projections
- ›Founders Nest (Ben's quarterly note)
- ›AI chat with portfolio context
Both prices may rise as we add content and features. What you signed up for stays at the price you signed up at.