Hello World.
There are two kinds of financial content. One is built to be watched. The other is built to be used.
Most of what's out there is the first kind. YouTube channels, podcasts, the finance section of every major publication — there's real information buried in all of it, but the noise is the point. Attention is the product. The advice is incidental.
The second kind exists too. Benjamin Graham wrote it. It's dense, rigorous, and worth every page if you're willing to sit with it. Most people aren't, not because they're lazy, but because 600 pages of investment theory doesn't land if you don't yet have the foundation to make it stick.
The Shallows is an attempt at what sits between those two things. No show. No filler. Just the information, explained plainly, with the math visible.
Here's what we're building and who it's for.
The Tools
Every night, a screener runs across 1,500+ publicly traded companies. Each one gets evaluated on the same set of criteria — financial health via Piotroski F-Score, distress risk via Altman Z-Score, intrinsic value via discounted cash flow models, and portfolio efficiency via Sharpe ratio optimization. The output is a ranked list of names worth looking at, with the reasoning attached.
From that screener, three research products are being built:
Tear Sheets — one-page company snapshots. Revenue trend, margin health, debt load, valuation relative to intrinsic value, recent insider activity. Everything that matters on a single page, in plain language.
Insider Digest — a weekly breakdown of significant SEC Form 4 filings. When a company's own executives are buying stock with their personal money, that's a data point. We track it systematically so you don't have to read the filings yourself.
Daily Brief — the full nightly screener output delivered each morning as a PDF, with the top names flagged and the methodology visible so you can follow the logic, not just the conclusion.
None of this is fully live yet. The screener runs. The models work. The research products roll out as they stabilize.
The Sequence
The tools above are built for people who are financially ready to use them — no high-interest debt, some savings, a monthly surplus that can be invested consistently and left alone through a downturn.
That's not most people starting out. It wasn't where I started either.
Here's the thing about investing before your financial foundation is solid: the market doesn't care why you need the money back. If you're carrying a 22% APR credit card balance and also putting $200 a month into an index fund, you are not building wealth. You are paying 22% to feel like you're building wealth. The math doesn't work in your favor.
So before the screener, before tear sheets, before any of the market tools — there's a Personal Finance track. It starts with an honest look at where you actually stand. It covers getting out of debt, building a real cash buffer, and reaching the position where investing is the logical next step rather than something you're doing out of hope.
The personal finance content comes first because it has to. Once it's done, the rest of this makes sense.
Where to Start
If you're carrying debt or have less than $1,000 in savings — start with the Personal Finance track. Lesson one is already up.
If you're past that and want to understand how the screener works and what we're looking for in a company — that content is coming. Subscribe and it'll reach you when it's ready.
That's what this is. No timeline. No pressure. Just the information in the order it's useful.