DocStoX
On inheriting a portfolio, and discovering that the hard part is the one nobody writes down.
My father used to read annual reports the way other people read the newspaper. I did not understand what he was doing until I had to do it myself.
He would sit with a company for weeks. He would talk about the business — who ran it, what it sold, whether the debt made sense — and only at the very end would he mention the price. I was a student. I half-listened, the way you do when you assume there is unlimited time to learn something properly later.
He passed away in November 2025. A few weeks after, I sat down to look at what he had left, and understood that the decisions were now mine.
Nobody teaches you the last step.
I want to be precise about what was hard, because it was not what I expected. It was not finding information. The filings were public. The ratios were on four different websites, free. I had more data in front of me than my father ever had.
What I did not have was the thing he had spent thirty years building, the part that never got written down: knowing which of those numbers mattered for this particular company, and what to do about it. I could tell you a company's return on equity. I could not tell you whether to hold it.
So I did what you do. I opened twelve tabs. I copied figures into a spreadsheet. I read forum posts from strangers who sounded certain, which I have since learned is the cheapest thing to fake. Some evenings I would finish, look at what I had assembled, and realise I had arrived exactly where I started — holding the same question, now with a spreadsheet.
And underneath all of it, the thing I actually remember: being afraid of getting it wrong with money that was not really mine.
So I built the thing I needed at 1am.
DocStoX started as scripts to stop myself re-doing the same work every week. It became a company because I do not think I am unusual. There are a lot of people who inherited a portfolio, or opened their first account, or have been investing for years and still feel like they are guessing at the end.
It pulls the scattered material into one place, does the arithmetic, and goes all the way to a view — with the workings attached, so you can disagree with it properly instead of taking my word for it. My father would never have accepted a verdict without the reasoning. I would not either, and I built it.
Which brings me to the blanks.
You will find em-dashes on this site where other platforms print a number. That is not an oversight. If we cannot trace a figure to a source, we would rather show you nothing than show you something plausible.
It makes our pages look less impressive. I have made peace with that. When someone is sitting where I was sitting — tired, scared, deciding something real — a confident wrong number does more damage than an honest gap ever will.
For the same reason: nobody can pay us to change a score or appear in a screen, and we do not sell tips. It is written into the editorial policy so you can hold me to it rather than trust me on it.
We will still get things wrong.
Data arrives late. Upstream sources carry errors we inherit. The AI is occasionally confident and mistaken. I would rather tell you that here than have you discover it on your own — so if you find a figure that looks wrong, tell us, and it gets fixed. That is a real process, not a line in a footer.
My father taught me to read a business before buying it. I am trying to build the thing that teaches everyone else — and to make the last step, the one nobody explains, a little less lonely than I found it.
