An specialist's habits, pointed at the market
I'm Joshua Terrell — an independent investor and self-described tinkerer, based in a home office in Dublin, Ohio, one of the northwest suburbs of Columbus. This page is the long version of what the homepage says in a sentence.
From spreadsheets at work to spreadsheets at home
Before I was an investor, I was a systems specialist — the kind of job that trains you to distrust anything that "just works" until you've traced why. I opened my first brokerage account almost by accident, mostly to stop feeling behind, and found that the same instincts that made me good at debugging made me decent at reading a balance sheet: slow down, check your assumptions, and never trust a number you can't reproduce.
Today this blog is where I keep the notes I'd otherwise lose in a dozen spreadsheets — the reasoning behind a covered call, the fine print in a bond's official statement, the mistake I made sizing a position too large. I write for the version of myself from five years ago, and it turns out a few thousand other people find that useful too.
How I got here
The short version of a long, occasionally expensive education.
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2013
First brokerage account
Opened a small account mostly to understand what "the market" even meant, funded with savings from a first specialisting job.
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2016
Started selling options
Learned covered calls the hard way — by selling one against a stock I wasn't actually ready to give up, and getting called away.
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2019
Bought a first municipal bond
Picked up a small local-issuer bond mostly out of curiosity about how city financing actually works. The tinkering never stopped.
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2022
Went independent, part-time
Shifted to managing my own capital and a small amount for family, alongside consulting work, from a home office in Dublin, Ohio.
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2026
Started JoshuaTerrell.org
Began writing the notes publicly. This site is new and still being built out — thank you for reading it early.
What I believe about investing
Not a strategy so much as a set of guardrails I keep bumping back into.
Understand it or skip it
If I can't explain a position's mechanics to a non-investor friend in two minutes, I don't own it yet.
Write it down before, not after
A thesis written after the trade is a story. A thesis written before is a test.
Quiet compounding beats loud predictions
I'd rather be the person still investing calmly in twenty years than the person who called one big move correctly.
Working out of Dublin, Ohio
I'm not on a trading floor — I'm at a desk in Dublin, Ohio, a suburb northwest of Columbus, with two monitors, a coffee that's usually gone cold, and a bond prospectus open more often than you'd think. If you're an investor in the Columbus area, I'm always glad to trade notes over coffee.
Local context matters more than people expect: a good chunk of what I've learned about municipal bonds came from reading offering documents for districts and municipalities right here in central Ohio, because they were the easiest ones to verify in person.
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