About this site
Shuhari.Capital is an independent publication launched in October 2025. If you subscribe for free today, you'll get full access to the website as well as email newsletters about new content when it's available. Thank you!
Shuhari (Japanese: 守破離) is a Japanese concept that describes the stages of learning to mastery.
Disclaimer First
Everything on this site documents my personal portfolio and research journey. None of it is financial advice. I am not a licensed financial advisor, portfolio manager, or investment professional.
The portfolio I run is my own and I publish it transparently because I believe in open research and the benefits of getting to know other people on a similar journey, not because I'm recommending anyone replicate it.
If you choose to follow the eToro portfolio via copy trading, that is entirely your decision and your risk. eToro's own Terms of Service for copy trading apply. Past performance, including the backtest results I use for my research that are shown on this site are not indicative of future results.
Do your own research. Make your own decisions.
So what is Shuhari.Capital?
I work in fintech (Open Banking) and have been hobby-programming in Python for years, building apps for personal use and/or early MVPs for startup ideas. I've always been fascinated by the intersection of code and markets and started tinkering with a data collection and stock screening dashboard as a side project. Nothing fancy. Just filtering stocks by a handful of financial metrics to see what floated to the top.
The first versions were rough around the edges, but they got me hooked. I started reading research papers on momentum, tactical asset allocation, and sector rotation. (O'Neil, Meb Faber, Gary Antonacci for example.)
Over time, the screener turned into a portfolio system, with more and more macro signals and layers to diversify. (Since a few versions before the inception of this blog, I signed up for an "Ultimate" tier of "Financial Modelling Prep" API (not affiliated!), which I found very useful so far to fetch the economic and fundamental company data needed for my decision making.
Last year, I (reluctantly) started using Claude Code on weekends to accelerate the development, and that changed the pace entirely. I'm not a professional developer, so the project grew to a scale that became harder for me to handle as a hobby and I have had the chance to learn about the ins and outs of Claude through this application.
The core idea has stayed the same through the iterations: I want to invest with a defined, automated set of rules to remove the emotional inertia that has killed my returns in the past. (Which I have then often tried to make up with erratic action, causing even more harm.) I wanted something between "buy a world equity ETF and forget about it" and "actively trade based on discretionary factors". Something that respects the academic evidence on momentum, diversification, and risk management, but is practical enough to actually run as a non-professional investor.
Where are we today? (Q1 2026)
The system runs five separate strategies, ranging from a macro ETF "stability core" to an individual stock selection ("Alpha Overlay"), most of which rebalance monthly. I've been running it for my own portfolio for a while now, and eventually set up an eToro account so my family could follow along via copy trading:
As of March 2026, the latest backtest (November 2012 – March 2026), looked like this:
| Portfolio | S&P 500 (Buy & Hold) | |
|---|---|---|
| Total Return | +205.2% | +477.1% |
| CAGR | +8.75% | +14.09% |
| Volatility | 8.68% | 14.10% |
| Sharpe Ratio | 1.01 | 1.01 |
| Sortino Ratio | 1.03 | 0.90 |
| Max Drawdown | −11.9% | −23.9% |
| Calmar Ratio | 0.74 | 0.59 |
| Beta | 0.41 | — |
| Alpha (ann.) | +2.97% | — |
(This does not yet include my Alpha Overlay picks.)
What this shows: we're basically getting the same Sharpe ratio as the S&P 500, but with 40% less volatility, reduced drawdown, and a beta of 0.41.
This increased stability comes with the usual trade-off in total return (+477% vs. +205%), but was my main goal in building this initial version of the project. Drawing down -11.9% compared to −23.9% for SPY was a critical goal for me. Both the Sortino and Calmar ratios confirm the downside protection and favour our portfolio.
We can now focus on improving upside and try to get even more Alpha, but the baseline seems to sit where it was intended.
What this blog can become
I started the blog with the Economic Pulse series to get used to interpreting economic data and putting it into words. Disclaimer: I do use Claude to work on my drafts here, but am explicitly not blindly releasing AI work as it would be against the goal of this exercise. With a few of these released, I will start to add the following in 2026:
- The investment concepts: explaining the financial theory behind the system in plain language and referring to the literature I have taken inspiration from. Not academic, but enough to understand why the model does what it does. Start with the Concepts page.
- The development journey: as I am not a professional programmer, this project is as much a learning experiment in programming and application design as it is for financial investing. The technical decisions, the architecture, the mistakes, I will try and put a lot of it in writing here as well. Maybe it can be helpful to someone on a similar path.
- The monthly rebalancing and results: I will publish the monthly portfolio compilation and the results over time, as well as my interpretations of what went well and what did not.
The goal is simple: get more people interested in thinking about investing beyond "buy world equities and forget about it." I think there is an interesting a middle ground between passive and active investing that's worth exploring, and the tools to do it yourself have become very accessible these days.
Find Me Elsewhere
GitHub: shu-ha-ri (most projects are private, I might open-sourcing more over time)
Medium: @shuhari (more personal writing coming soon)
eToro: shuharicapital