Claude Skills by jeffreytse

Use when assessing trend strength and potential trend changes on a price chart — plotting two groups of moving averages (short-term "trader" group and long-term "investor" group) and reading their relative separation and compression as a signal of trend strength, consensus, and potential reversal.

Use when considering a stock in an industry currently generating intense media attention, a wave of new IPOs, or widespread public enthusiasm — screening for whether the enthusiasm reflects genuine, durable business economics before entering.

Use when choosing between actively managed funds and low-cost index funds, or building a simple diversified portfolio from a small number of funds — e.g., "should I pick stocks or index funds?", "what is a three-fund portfolio?", "active vs passive investing"

Use when deciding whether a specific proposed operation qualifies as investment or speculation — testing whether thorough analysis actually supports safety of principal and an adequate return, rather than assuming any stock purchase is automatically "investing."

Use when setting up an overall investment approach — honestly classifying yourself as a defensive (passive, minimal-effort) or enterprising (active, willing to do substantial extra work) investor, and committing to that track's rules rather than drifting between the two.

Use when judging where a market cycle currently stands — classifying the current phase as correction, adjustment (accumulation or distribution), or trend (exaggeration) using Kostolany's egg-shaped cycle model, to judge whether a move is likely to continue, pause, or reverse.

Use when considering margin debt or other borrowed capital to increase an equity position — evaluating why leverage's asymmetric risk of forced liquidation outweighs its return-amplifying appeal.

Use when observing an extreme market move, bubble, or crowd behavior — checking whether multiple psychological biases are compounding in the same direction simultaneously, producing an effect far larger than any single bias would explain alone.

Use when constructing a portfolio around both the best and worst companies identified through fundamental research — going long the strongest businesses and short the weakest, rather than expressing research conviction only on the long side.

Use when screening stocks for value — comparing a stock's P/E ratio against its total return potential (earnings growth plus dividend yield) rather than judging P/E or growth in isolation, favoring low-P/E stocks whose combined growth and yield justify a higher total-return-to-P/E ratio.

Use when a daily price quote is tempting an emotional reaction — treating the market as an erratic business partner who offers a price every day, and recognizing you're never obligated to transact with him just because he shows up.

Use when building a position in a stock or trade that is confirming the original thesis with favorable price movement — adding to the position incrementally as it moves in the expected direction, rather than committing the full intended size all at once at initial entry.

Use when choosing between a statistically cheap but mediocre business and a higher-quality business at a fair price — deciding what "cheap" should actually mean in an investment decision.

Use when analyzing a market trend that seems to be feeding on itself — checking whether participants' perceptions and actions are actively altering the fundamentals they're supposedly reacting to, creating a self-reinforcing feedback loop rather than a market simply converging on stable equilibrium value.

Use when researching a specific company candidate — actively visiting stores, talking to employees, customers, suppliers, and competitors to gather firsthand information not available in financial filings.

Use when identifying an underperforming company with a significant, addressable gap between current value and potential value under different management or capital-allocation decisions — taking a meaningful ownership stake and actively pushing for specific changes, rather than passively waiting for a catalyst to occur on its own.

Use when evaluating what kind of return and holding behavior to expect from a stock — classifying it as a slow grower, stalwart, fast grower, cyclical, turnaround, or asset play, and matching expectations and exit discipline to that category.

Use when building a trading strategy from statistical patterns in historical data rather than fundamental analysis or discretionary judgment — requiring every signal to be backtested and quantitatively validated before capital is committed, and removing discretionary override once a validated model is live.

Use when constructing a growth-oriented portfolio expecting most positions to underperform or fail, but a small number to multiply many times over — sizing and portfolio construction around a search for ten-baggers rather than uniform expected returns.

Use when a current debt buildup, asset boom, or credit expansion is being explained away as structurally different from past episodes that ended in crisis — check the situation against the same quantitative markers (debt-to-GDP trajectory, capital-inflow surges, asset-price acceleration) that have preceded financial crises across many countries and centuries, rather than accepting the specific narrative reasons given for why this particular case won't follow the same pattern.

Use when evaluating a new investment opportunity — quickly sorting it into "yes," "no," or "too hard," and stopping further analysis immediately once it lands in the too-hard basket rather than continuing to grind through it.

Use when designing a systematic, rules-based trend-following approach — defining explicit, mechanical rules for entry (breakout confirmation), position sizing (volatility-based units), and exit, removing subjective, in-the-moment discretion from the trading process.

Use when forming a trading or investment view — requiring the view to differ meaningfully from prevailing consensus on a specific, near-term, checkable point, not merely differ in general sentiment, since a view identical to consensus offers no edge regardless of whether it's correct.

Use when considering investments outside stocks and bonds — e.g., "should I invest in private equity?", "is crypto a good portfolio diversifier?", "how do REITs compare to direct real estate?", "what about commodities?"

Use when evaluating a company's financial risk as part of a stock investment decision — checking debt levels against the company's cash flow stability and cyclicality, since heavy debt removes the staying power a business needs to survive a downturn.

Use when reviewing a specific investment decision before committing capital — checking it against a checklist of named psychological tendencies (incentive-caused bias, social proof, commitment/consistency bias, authority influence, and others) that could be distorting the judgment behind it.

Use when entering a derivative contract, securities lending arrangement, or any transaction where a specific counterparty owes a future obligation — assessing that specific counterparty's ability to actually meet its obligation, distinct from broad market or credit-bubble risk, since a transaction's value is worthless if the counterparty on the other side defaults.

Use when applying Graham's specific quantitative criteria for defensive (conservative) stock selection — checking a candidate against numeric thresholds for valuation, debt, earnings stability, and dividend history rather than a qualitative-only assessment.

Use when evaluating whether a company's growth-through-acquisition strategy is creating or destroying value — checking for "diworsification," Lynch's term for unfocused, unrelated acquisitions that dilute a good core business.

Use when evaluating an investment in an emerging or frontier market — checking political stability, currency risk, corporate governance standards, and regulatory environment specifically, since these risk categories are structurally larger and different in kind than in developed markets.

Use when reviewing a company's financial statements for early warning signs — checking whether inventory is growing faster than sales, a signal of unsold goods piling up that often precedes reported earnings or margin deterioration.

Use when auditing investment account fees, fund expenses, and advisor costs to identify excessive charges and optimize total investment cost

Use when evaluating the strength and validity of an investment thesis before committing capital

Use when evaluating a company's management team as part of an investment decision — assessing whether they redeploy retained earnings at returns above the cost of capital rather than empire-building or value-destroying reinvestment.

Use when evaluating whether an entire asset class or credit market is experiencing a systemic mispricing — verifying the underlying loan/asset quality directly rather than trusting credit ratings or market consensus, since ratings and consensus can be structurally wrong across an entire market simultaneously.

Use when valuing an option, especially an American-style option with early-exercise features — modeling the underlying asset's price as a discrete series of up/down moves over time and working backward from expiration to calculate the option's fair value at each node.

Use when assessing a security's current volatility and relative price position — plotting bands a set number of standard deviations above and below a moving average, and reading band width and price position relative to the bands as signals of volatility contraction/expansion and potential overbought/oversold conditions.

Use when assessing how sensitive a bond or bond portfolio's price is to a change in interest rates — calculating duration as the first-order approximation of price sensitivity and convexity as the correction for how that sensitivity itself changes as rates move, rather than assuming a bond's rate sensitivity is constant regardless of the size of the rate change.

Use when projecting investment growth, understanding the time value of money, or illustrating the cost of delay — e.g., "how much will $10k grow?", "Rule of 72?", "how much do I need to save monthly to reach $1M?", "what's the cost of waiting 5 years to invest?"

Use when valuing a company, project, or asset using discounted cash flow analysis

Use when determining how large a discount to demand between an estimated intrinsic value and the purchase price — choosing among calculation methods (DCF-based discount, net-net asset value, replacement cost, earnings power value) and sizing the margin to the estimate's actual uncertainty.

Use when assessing a company's true distributable cash-generating power for valuation purposes — calculating owner earnings (reported earnings adjusted for maintenance capital expenditures) rather than relying on GAAP net income alone.

Use when valuing a growth stock — dividing the P/E ratio by the expected earnings growth rate to judge whether a stock's price is justified by its growth rate, rather than judging P/E in isolation.

Use when valuing a company for a potential long-term holding — estimating what a private, strategic, or financial buyer would pay for the whole business (or its individual parts) rather than relying solely on its current public market trading multiple, then looking for a specific catalyst to close the gap.

Use when evaluating investment performance on a risk-adjusted basis using Sharpe ratio, Treynor ratio, Jensen's alpha, or Sortino ratio

Use when quantifying how much a portfolio could plausibly lose over a specific time horizon at a specific confidence level — expressing risk as a single, comparable dollar or percentage figure (Value at Risk) rather than a qualitative sense of "risky" or "safe."

Use when assessing whether a security is short-term overbought or oversold — calculating Williams %R (the position of the current close relative to the recent high-low range) to identify potential short-term reversal points, distinct from longer-horizon valuation methods.

Use when building a fixed-income allocation and needing predictable cash flow with managed interest-rate and reinvestment risk — e.g., "how do I ladder bonds?", "CD ladder vs bond ladder", "fixed income for near-term cash needs"

Use when constructing or managing a portfolio — setting explicit maximum exposure limits to a single issuer, sector, country, or correlated risk factor at the aggregate portfolio level, so no single concentrated exposure can inflict outsized damage even if each individual position was sized reasonably on its own.

Use when setting a defensive investor's overall stock-bond split — applying Graham's specific range (never less than 25% or more than 75% in either stocks or bonds), adjusting the mix within that range as conditions change, and rebalancing back toward the chosen split periodically.