The longer I’ve been investing, the more I’ve realized that my portfolio looks like a map of my thought process—half macro-obsessed strategist, half company-specific detective. I didn’t plan it that way. It just turned out that different corners of the market trigger different sides of my personality. Sometimes I want to stand on the mountaintop with binoculars, surveying the economic horizon. Other times I want to crawl on my hands and knees through the weeds of a company’s financials, squinting at operating margins like an archaeologist brushing dust off fossils.
That’s basically the split between top-down and bottom-up investing. And I live in both worlds… depending on what I’m buying.
The Top-Down Mind: My Macro-Fueled ETF Brain
Top-down logic is deceptively clean, like a blueprint on a whiteboard:
Macro → Sector → Asset
Interest rates, GDP trends, inflation waves, central bank mood swings—these things form the weather patterns of the financial world. And I kind of enjoy watching the skies. There’s something oddly satisfying about connecting big-moving variables to entire sectors, almost like predicting which crops will thrive based on the coming season.
That’s exactly why, for ETFs, I almost always default to top-down thinking. ETFs feel macro. They’re baskets of sentiment, cycles, and broad theses.
Take my holdings in TLT and TLH. Those are not “I love this issuer’s culture” positions. Those are “something’s brewing out there in the macro cosmos” plays. Part future-prep, part quiet hedge. If rate cuts show up eventually—and they usually do after a long enough tightening cycle—long-duration bonds can breathe again, sometimes dramatically. And in a recessionary scare, they can be that one friend who doesn’t freak out when everyone else is running in circles.
iShares 10-20 Year Treasury Bond ETF (TLH)
iShares 20+ Year Treasury Bond ETF (TLT)
Owning them makes me feel like I’m at least acknowledging the possibility that the economy might hiccup, or wheeze, or full-on cough up a lung. Just a little macro insurance policy tucked away. It’s the part of my brain that likes to say, “Let’s not pretend the world is always sunshine.”
The Bottom-Up Mind: My Company-Whispering Stock Picker
Then there’s the other side of me—the one that forgets the broader economy even exists and fixates on one company like I’ve just discovered a new species.
Bottom-up logic cares about the little things:
Earnings. Margins. Moats. Whether the CEO seems like someone who sleeps. The price vs. what I think the business is actually worth. Macro becomes background noise. Ambient hum. Something you notice only if the power goes out.
That’s how I ended up with stocks like Wendy’s. There’s something oddly grounding about looking at a single company and asking myself: Is this business good? Does the price make sense? Do I understand what makes it tick?
Wendy's (WEN)
It feels like the opposite of the abstract macro world. It’s tangible. I can literally walk into a Wendy’s and see the product. I can read their earnings call transcript and trace the logic of how they make money. It’s almost comforting—like solving a puzzle with corners and edges instead of trying to piece together a sky made of shifting clouds.
Bottom-up investing satisfies the part of me that likes businesses as organisms—each with its quirks, vulnerabilities, and little engines of growth humming quietly inside.
Living Between Two Worlds
I used to think I had to choose a side. People love framing it like some philosophical divide—order vs. chaos, structure vs. intuition, big picture vs. microscopic details.
But the reality of my portfolio says otherwise.
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My ETFs speak fluent macro.
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My stocks speak fluent micro.
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And I bounce between the dialects depending on what I’m trying to understand.
Top-down thinking tells me where the tides might be going. Bottom-up thinking tells me which boats are built well enough to survive them. And somehow navigating those two modes feels more honest to how my mind naturally works.
So Which One Suits Me? Well… Both
Not because I’m trying to optimize some perfect strategy, but because different investments trigger different instincts in me. A bond ETF makes me think about the Federal Reserve’s heartbeat. A fast-food chain makes me think about unit economics and brand stickiness and whether their breakfast menu is actually pulling its weight.
Maybe that’s messy. Maybe it’s contradictory. But it’s my map, and it reflects how I see the investing world—sometimes from the stratosphere, sometimes from street level.
In the end, the real distinction isn’t which style I “prefer.” It’s which lens helps me understand the thing I’m buying in a way that feels real, grounded, and personal.
And somehow, switching between top-down and bottom-up has become less a choice and more just… the way my brain naturally wanders through the market.
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