Personal investing · Fallstudie
The news that breaks the assumption you wrote at buy time arrives as a notification
Was dabei herauskommtThe buy-thesis note and the incoming news note attach to the same ticker entity, a matching item fires a "Watch: capacity expansion" notification, and asking about that holding returns an answer that quotes sentences from both notes together.
Saturday morning. He opens his brokerage app and looks at the return on a position he bought last November: -18%. He can't immediately remember why he bought it, so he opens his notes folder. There's the buy memo. "Rides the power-equipment supercycle. Assumption: competitor capacity expansion won't land before 2027." One slot over in the same folder sits an article he clipped four months ago: the competitor is bringing a new line online in the second half of 2026. He read that article. He clipped it. He just never connected the two files.
This person has a day job. He's eight years into investing on the side, and for eight years he's been piling up markdown: research notes on tickers and sectors, thesis memos written at the moment of purchase, quarterly earnings summaries, clipped news on his watchlist. This piece shows what he asks and what comes back once that material is in a Consilience workspace with news feeds attached. It isn't a real customer story — it's a hypothetical scenario we thought through, and the ticker names and article details are made up as examples.
Eight years of notes and 41 buy theses
The material is already there. Every time he bought something he wrote down why. Every time earnings dropped he summarized the numbers. Every watchlist article got saved with its link. All of it is markdown, sitting on his disk.
- About 620 research notes on tickers and sectors. Eight years' worth going back to 2018, foldered by year.
- 41 thesis memos written at the moment of purchase. Most follow the shape "why I'm buying + 2-3 assumptions," and each assumption is usually one sentence.
- About 210 quarterly earnings summaries. Twelve holdings and watchlist names × eight years. Order backlog and operating margin numbers are baked into the body text.
- Roughly 1,300 clipped news items on watchlist names. Most are just a URL and an excerpted paragraph.
- 17 post-mortem memos written after selling. He wrote down why he was wrong. He has almost never reopened them.
How it works today
He writes a thesis memo when he buys. That part he's kept up for eight years. The problem is what comes after. Of those 41 memos, almost none get reopened six months later. By the time something feels off and he goes hunting for one, the loss is already locked in.
He reads the news daily. He read the competitor capacity-expansion story and dropped it in the clippings folder. But noticing that the story touches the sentence he wrote six months earlier — "competitor capacity expansion won't land before 2027" — requires him to be holding that memo in his head at the instant he reads the article. The 1,300 clippings and the 41 thesis memos sit on the same disk and know nothing about each other.
How he sets it up
Dropping in the notes folder is half of it. Making the news arrive on its own is the other half. The original markdown stays where it is and doesn't change.
Attach news to eight years of notes
Drop in the whole notes folder
Put the research notes, thesis memos, earnings summaries, and clippings folders into the workspace and extract. The first extraction over 620 notes doesn't finish in one sitting, so leave it running and go do something else. When it's done, the assumption sentences from the buy memos are attached to their ticker entities.
Follow only the names whose thesis is still live
On a ticker's entity page, go to External signals and click Follow news. That creates a news feed bound to the entity's name, so stories about it flow into your live/ folder as notes. He doesn't turn on all twelve holdings and watchlist names — only the 7 whose thesis memo still holds.
Turn on industry streams from the catalog
"Add a source" in Live feeds carries about sixty sources across eight categories — news, finance, research, and more. He turns on a filings stream, and for the power-equipment trade publication that isn't in the catalog, he pastes the RSS URL into the dashed "Add your own feed" box at the top.
Pull watch keywords out of the assumption sentences
This is the step the whole scenario hangs on. In "Watch for keywords" at the bottom of Live feeds, he types the exact words that appear in his own assumptions: "capacity expansion," "new line," the competitor's name. When any feed records a matching item, a "Watch: capacity expansion" notification fires, and clicking it jumps straight to the note.
How he asks
"@Gaon Electric pull up the thesis and assumptions I wrote when I bought this"
→ It quotes my own sentences from the November 2025 buy memo, verbatim.
"Rides the power-equipment supercycle", "Assumption: competitor capacity
expansion won't land before 2027", "Assumption: order backlog holds at
two years." Each sentence carries a link to the source note, so I click
through and open the memo itself.
"Anything that came in on this name since last month that doesn't fit my assumptions?"
→ It picks out 2 news notes from the live/ folder. One is the story about
the competitor targeting a new line in the second half of 2026, with the
headline, source, and timestamp stamped on the note. The answer quotes
that article's sentence next to my own "competitor capacity expansion
won't land before 2027." It does not tell me which one is right.This works because a live/ note isn't a special object. An article a feed records becomes an ordinary timestamped markdown note, and it gets extracted into the graph exactly like a note he typed himself. So the company mentioned in the article attaches to the same ticker entity his eight years of notes were already using. The assumption sentence from the buy memo and the sentence from the article hang off the same entity — ask about the holding and both come along.
Clicking a link in the answer opens the source note, so he can check for himself whether the quoted sentence really reads that way. Dozens of articles a day won't bloat the graph with duplicates: already-recorded items get dropped at the dedup gate before extraction runs. The External signals panel in the knowledge-graph view groups recent items by source, so he can skim what arrived without opening each note.
What changes
| Before | Now |
|---|---|
| 41 buy memos that never get reopened six months later | Ask about the holding and the answer quotes that memo's assumption sentence verbatim, with a link to the source note |
| Read the competitor capacity-expansion story, drop it in the clippings folder, done | That story arrives as a live/ note and attaches to the same ticker entity |
| You have to remember, at the instant you read it, which article touches which assumption | Set "capacity expansion" — pulled straight from the assumption sentence — as a watch, and every match fires a "Watch: capacity expansion" notification |
| Open a news app on Saturday and binge the week's stories | While the app is open, feeds check and only new items land in live/. Ones you've seen get dropped at the dedup gate |
The software does three things in this scenario. It takes news in as live/ notes and attaches them to the same ticker entity, it notifies you when a word you set shows up, and when you ask, it quotes your memo and that news together. Which sentence is right, whether to revise the thesis, whether to sell — that's the person's call.