Not from Wall Street.
That's the point.

I'm Nikolay Babeshkin. Not a fund manager, not a financial advisor, no MBA from Wharton. I spent 12 years building and running one of the largest internet companies in Central Asia — then took the same way of thinking and applied it to managing my own money.

This site exists because I wanted to see if I could do better than the people I was paying to manage my money. Turns out, I could. So now I'm showing my work — publicly, with real money on the line.

The path here

2011 – 2023

CEO, Kolesa Group — Kazakhstan

Built Kazakhstan's largest classifieds platform from $15M to $300M+ capitalization. 360 employees. Baring Vostok invested in 2014. This is where I earned my capital and learned to think in systems.

2019

Started investing

Started managing my own portfolio. ETFs at first. Pretty quickly figured out that understanding risk matters more than picking winners.

2021

Went quantitative

Started building systematic strategies — backtesting, factor models, risk management. Paper traded everything before putting real money in.

2022

Real money in

Put real money into the strategies. The 2022 bear market was the first live test — strategies stayed positive while the S&P 500 dropped 18%.

2023 – Present

Andorra. Full-time investor.

Left the corporate world. Moved to Andorra. Running a multi-million dollar portfolio across several quantitative strategies, and posting the results here.

Why public?

Two reasons, both selfish:

Discipline. When your performance is public, you can't cheat. Can't cherry-pick periods. Can't hide bad months. Can't tweak the strategy after the fact and pretend you didn't. Having this site forces me to keep things clean and honest, which makes me a better investor.

Accountability. If you claim a strategy works, show the receipts. Not a backtest from 1995. Not “our model portfolio returned 40%.” Actual money, actual trades, actual results — including the ugly ones. This site is my receipt.

What I believe

Risk management is the strategy. Anyone can generate high returns with enough leverage and luck. The hard part is keeping drawdowns small and recovery times short. I'd rather make 20% a year and never lose more than 13% than make 35% and watch half my portfolio disappear in a crash.

Backtests lie. Live results don't. Every strategy looks great in hindsight. That's why I separate backtest, out-of-sample, and real money periods on every chart. If I can't show live performance, I don't show it at all.

Systems beat opinions. I don't try to predict where the market is going. I build systems that react to data. When my Risk Meter says hedge — I hedge. When it says stay invested — I stay invested. No emotions. No "this time is different."

Transparency builds trust over time. I'm not asking anyone to believe me today. I'm building a track record you can verify yourself, year after year. The longer this site runs, the harder it is to dismiss.

Skin in the game

Every strategy on this site is funded with my own money. I don't manage anyone else's capital. I don't sell signals or subscriptions. If a strategy fails, I'm the one who loses money. That's the most honest incentive I know, and it's why I pay more attention to drawdowns than returns.

This is not financial advice

I'm showing what I do with my own money. I'm not telling you what to do with yours. Past performance doesn't guarantee future results. I might be wrong. The strategies might stop working. Markets change. What doesn't change is that I'll show you exactly what happened — good or bad.