Why Chip Stock Investor Is Becoming a Software Business

We started a YouTube channel in 2022 called Chip Stock Investor. We had no expectation anyone would seriously watch, let alone follow along for years. But many of you have! What started out as a simple way for us to track our thesis for our own private use has potential to be a real business, with real people doing real things to affect positive outcomes in the economy.

And so Chip Stock Investor is now building software. In fact, we’ve been at it for just over a year now. Despite what some say, vibe coding using AI doesn’t make the job easy. Easier, yes. But easy? No.

So we’d like to provide our reasoning, the why behind building a software product, the same root question we start all of our investment analysis research with. Because we aren’t going to stop doing research. Rather, it turns out the research itself has been building towards this all along, and we believe now is the time to start building a proper business.

We are our own first customer

I have a couple decades of professional experience working in the investing industry, and more than a decade of public-facing research. Experience managing investor money is not the same as researching and managing a personal account. Besides industry training on how markets work, our range of experience working one-on-one with other people’s and businesses’ is very different. Being placed in a fiduciary position for money not our own produced a process, a repeatable framework to help drive ideal outcomes.

We run that process every day. The tools we want to run it don’t exist in a form we can buy. Most mass market investing products are built around screeners that assume you know what to look for; media coverage and social platform “suggestions” driven by maximizing clicks; sentiment gauges, technical charts, and other shallow analyses lacking rigorous depth; all helping create echo chamber doom loops.

All of which is useful for generating activity, but far less useful for reaching an objective conclusion (or as close as to objective as possible, since human beings are by nature anything but).

So we’re building for ourselves first, opening it to the users who follow the process, and for those looking to build their own unique process reflecting their own needs, goals, and values. Longer term, and put more simply, we aspire to be a data science company.

Technology outruns the financials underneath it

The gap between what technology can do and what a business can actually earn from it is where most tech investing goes wrong. In other words, reflecting the hyper-connected social media world we live in, technology businesses are pitched to the masses on narratives.

Striking that balance between tech and its financial reality gatekeeper is what we’ve been doing for years (including four years now on camera as Chip Stock Investor). The problem is that the balance currently exists as hundreds of disconnected videos and articles. A viewer can watch fifty episodes and still not have the framework in a form they can apply to the next business is a data infrastructure, process, and product problem. Not a “just create more content” problem.

Data is more accessible than ever, making sense of it isn’t

“Process over picks” is our new motto. The internet, really all day-to-day conversation, is chock full of stock picks and “analysis.” Picking and investing in stocks has become something of a global pastime. Which means stock picks are a commodity, and cheaper (as in “lower-value”) than ever.

Much of this is a result of the proliferation of free trading apps and free, readily accessible data. The internet. Company filings, government economic data, earnings transcripts, and a fast and steady beat of media reports are all sitting in the open. But tools to organize, filter, and process these disparate forms of information are harder to come by.

That’s not to say powerful data science-driven tools don’t exist. But they often live inside financial firms as part of their own proprietary workflows, or behind subscriptions priced for institutions. Recent advances in generative AI and machine learning have changed what it costs to build in that category.

A YouTube channel is not a business

A final reason, one we’d like to be direct about: A social media account, blog, or video channel produces episodes. It does not produce a workflow. And based on various forms of feedback we’re collecting, this business model is broken. As a result, there’s no good way to monetize media as a business (yes, Chip Stock Investor is an actual business) — unless of course we feed into the doom loop explained in the last heading above. Which we’re not interested in doing.

We could keep publishing videos and articles and treat never-ending requests to “cover this stock” or “cover this topic.” But doubling down on the processes the content has always been demonstrating seemed like the much bigger value add, for all stakeholders involved thus far.

First steps

Since 2022 we’ve built something we’re proud of: We’ve further refined and articulated a framework that bridges technology and finance, in public, mostly for free (less the few seconds for an ad that pays Google, not us), at a scale we didn’t expect. We are largely responsible for the explosion in “supply chain-based technology investing” and analysis that social media sites and blogs are now full of. We’re sorry about that, because the vast majority of these takes completely miss our original point and thesis.

We believe the tools we’ve begun building are incredibly valuable, and the feedback from our early supporters reinforces it. We’ll keep reporting on how it goes. And we’d like to hear from you along the way. Stay in touch!

If you want to learn more about what we’re building, including a chance to ask questions, a special live event will be broadcast on September 7, 2026, 7am Pacific. Join from this link to Zoom, or via the YouTube livestream.