After a nearly two-year pause in public content, Solt DB will restart the presses this week. Two years ago I decided to reorient from selling investment research to selling outperformance with a real-money fund. After all, any jabroni with a Substack can pretend to understand biotech stocks. Not many have a consistent track record of clear thinking, the returns to prove it, or can prove their returns.

I manage Finch Trades by Solt DB, which is a long-term oriented investment fund that demonstrates my approach to biotech investing in the messy real world. It's more intentional and slower than the fast-paced, content-for-the-sake-of-content platforms constantly shoved down all our throats by financial media. It's focused on objective research, taking intelligent risks, and investing with a margin of safety. If you've enjoyed my hype-busting analysis of the bioeconomy over the years, then this is that -- just applied to biotech investing. Avoiding shiny objects, swerving left when everyone else falls over themselves to swerve right, and making sense of it all with my approachable writing style.

Through the end of Q2 2026 (June 30th), Finch Trades has a lifetime return of 128.1%. That's a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 46% in the two years and one quarter since Finch Trades started. It didn't require a furious pace, day trading, penny stocks, or options. Quite the opposite. I've made 28 total purchases in the 27 months since inception. In the long run, disciplined investing will outperform chasing shiny objects every time.

This is the first quarterly market report where I'll walk through the performance in greater detail and share thoughts on the state of the market and/or bioeconomy.

By the Numbers

The market is in a historic bubble. Everyone thinks they're a genius during a bubble. Everyone thinks they earned it. But I'm not f*nching stupid. The speculative fervor sweeping through markets has certainly aided the performance of Finch Trades and the performance of the four benchmarks we compare against. The important thing is maintaining an appropriate strategic posture to survive the bubble. 

Finch Trades is well positioned to survive (and maybe thrive) when the wheels fall off the market. It's important to note a few things.

First, Finch Trades has been managed while acknowledging that the bubble exists. Exceedingly few funds have the discipline to position themselves and their clients in the same manner. But I won't lose my job if I don't follow peers in a lose-lose game of musical chairs that investing pods on Wall Street are forced to play. That gives me (and members) an advantage.

I currently have a cash position equivalent to 18% of the starting principal of Finch Trades. That was enabled by intelligent risk taking and locking in gains for non-core positions. If every open position fell back to its cost basis and each of the four benchmarks fell 25%, then Finch Trades would maintain its outperformance -- just not quite the nearly triple-digit thumping through the end of Q2 2026.

A strong capital position will also allow me to redeploy cash at lower prices when the bubble deflates. I'm in no rush, and wield an abundance of patience.

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Second, Finch Trades follows a disciplined approach to investing. I'm not speculating. I'm not gambling. I'm not day trading. It's disheartening to see so many individuals doing just that, especially since I've seen multiple times in my investing career how those capers end during these kinds of speculative market periods.

The portfolio had three active positions at the end of June 2026 (four as of this writing), plus the cash position. I've made 28 total purchases since inception in April 2024, or roughly 1.1 purchases per month. The key is not being too rigid, exiting positions when the thesis breaks, and only swinging at fat pitches down the middle. After all, there's no pitch count in investing.

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Third, a strict adherence to valuation discipline means I've benefitted from both the power of compound interest and shorter-term market inefficiencies. 

Although I've opened opportunistic positions as short as one (1) and two (2) days -- exited at 11.9% and 18.7% gains, respectively -- two of the current three core positions have been open for over two years and counting. Importantly, Finch Trades has outperformed for three consecutive calendar years. The principal invested in 2024 has returned 157.5%, the principal invested in 2025 has returned 48.0%, and the principal invested in 2026 (so far) has returned 40.4%.

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The performance of Finch Trades increased significantly from Q1 2026 to Q2 2026 due to successful data readouts for core positions and speculative momentum across the biotech sector. As of the June 30 cutoff, the portfolio has seven data readouts, one PDUFA date, and one accelerated approval pathway through the end of 2026.

My confidence in one core position has slipped, especially given disappointing data readouts from the competitive landscape for a shared asset class. A second asset with a near-term data readout has greater potential. I expect to fully exit the position by the end of the year, albeit at a lower maximum ceiling (and possily a loss) than previously expected.

State of the Market

The markets have been swept up in speculative fervor. The S&P 500 has gained at least 16% in six of the seven years from 2019 to 2025. The index is up another 9% year to date. It's fun, but it's not the sign of a healthy or sustainable market.

The only historical comparison is the late 1990s. Of course, that period of exuberance was followed by three consecutive years of double-digit percentage declines in 2000 (-10.1%), 2001 (-13.0%), and 2002 (-23.4%). Investors today can barely tolerate a single month of declines. Imagine if your 401(k) declined by double-digit percentages for multiple consecutive years. 

Although corporate profits are healthy, investors are paying record multiples for every dollar of income (or sales for that matter). It's true that overvaluation rarely stops a rally, but most analysts fail to see that the drivers of record profits are artificial.

In a June 2023 paper titled End of an Era: The Coming Long-Run Slowdown in Corporate Profit Growth and Stock Returns, an economist at the Federal Reserve estimated that roughly 40% of stock market returns from 1990 to 2019 were driven by lower corporate tax rates. The paper also argued that all of the expansion in multiples (how much you pay for each dollar of income) during that span could be explained by lower interest rates.

And that analysis ended before the record-low interest rates during the pandemic and more recent corporate tax cuts from the One Big Beautiful Bill signed into law in 2025.

Lower tax expenses mean Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Tesla paid just $15.8 billion in federal income taxes on $315.2 billion of net income in 2025. That's an effective tax rate of just 4.9%, or $50.8 billion less than what would be expected at the 21% corporate tax rate. For comparison, the country spends $100 billion per year on transportation and $73 billion per year on education, workforce training, and social services.

In other words, a lot of wealth created in the last decade or so was borne of accounting tricks that transferred federal receipts to shareholders. It was never unsustainable, is destabilizing society, will negatively impact the retirement plans for millions of households passively investing in 401(k) they don't understand, and will likely need to be clawed back at the worst possible time.

The problem of course is that the United States is running large deficits during a period of economic expansion, which means it has little firepower to provide stimulus during the next downturn. The bigger problem is that the countries that typically buy Uncle Sam's debt have their own domestic problems to address. When the market and economic bubble from artificial intelligence deflates, Americans will need to wake up to the reality of the situation: fiscal mismanagement, political gridlock, and a demographic cliff could torpedo the value of most assets. You know, your 401(k), your house, your Pokemon card collection.

Put simply, clawing our way out of the next economic downturn will likely require sharply higher corporate tax rates, through legislation that restores historical federal corporate tax rates above 21%, institutes a higher minimum tax rate for corporations, reverses recent tax breaks, or a combination of efforts. The good news for the People is that there's plenty of money sloshing around. The bad news for the markets is that it might quickly become socially and politically unacceptable for shareholders to keep hoarding it. But hey, they had a great run.

That could easily create a multi-year stagnation in earnings growth -- the key driver of stock market returns, artificial or not -- and unravel multiple years of recent gains. Such a scenario would throw cold water on the wealth effect currently carrying consumer markets and thwart the retirement trajectories of millions of households.

I'll share more thoughts on the bubble(s) in a dedicated article soon. Specifically for the bioeconomy, an article this week will ponder what the furious pace of drug developer acquisitions means for the biotech winter. Is it over? And if so, what does that mean for the workers powering the American bioeconomy?

Nucleate Pittsburgh BioHack

Solt DB was founded as a public benefit company. The goal is to wield our independence to show a better path forward for the bioeconomy, with real analysis instead of the endless cheerleading pretty much everywhere else, while supporting great people and causes.

That includes our local Nucleate Bio chapter, Nucleate Pittsburgh. Whereas traditional biotech hubs have stronger existing networks and infrastructure that reduce the influence of chapters, the Steel City's lack of a coherent strategy for living technology makes our local chapter significantly more important on a relative basis. Considering the untamed infrastructure in the Pittsburgh region, Nucleate Pittsburgh might be one of the most important chapters in the United States.

And with that, the second Nucleate Pittsburgh BioHack is planned to take place in November 2026. It's a big deal. The first BioHack in 2024 had over 200 students from six universities, 25 teams, and over 50 mentors. The weekend hackathon event brings together students from local universities such as Duquense University, Carlow University, the University of Pittsburgh, and Carnegie Mellon University; judges from companies such as (ahem) Solt DB, Nvidia, and UPMC Enterprises; and mentors from startup accelerators like LifeX and prestigious law firms I can't spell anyway.

Through the end of August 2026, I will donate 50% of the cost of all new annual memberships to support the Nucleate Pittsburgh BioHack event. That's in addition to the $2,500 the finch has pledged for this year's event.

Subscription Limits

I started Solt DB (the business, not Finch Trades) with $4,592.75 of my own money, plus a weird set of nerdy skills. The business paid for itself within 10 months of launching and I rewarded early members by locking them in at $10 per month for life. That's allowed me to build the platform "the right way" without sacrificing independence or values. I'll never be a cheerleader, we'll never have ads or corporate sponsors, and I don't want to collect your email addresses. It also allowed me to take two years to build Finch Trades while crawling into a pseudo stealth mode.

I've continued that price lock tradition for all membership tiers since. Meaning, if you become a paying member and maintain an active membership, then you'll never be exposed to price increases. But I limit the number of members in each tier.

• The current $35 per month (monthly) or $315 per year (annual) tier has fewer than 100 spots left.
• After that magical number is reached, the price will increase to $45 per month (monthly) or $405 per year (annual).
• Solt DB doesn't offer discounts or sales.

‍Upcoming Site Improvements

Protect Your Ass(ets)

It's 2026, but static PDFs still run the world of finance for some reason. That creates problems for investors. The informational value of a static PDF report begins to decay as soon as it's published.

Solt DB is overhauling company pages for every business in the coverage ecosystem. The biggest change is allowing members to see my research and modeling for every individual asset in the coverage ecosystem. This change will provide a living research deep dive walking members through the rationale, mechanism of action, development status, competitive landscape, nerdy risks, and more for each molecule, product, and technology platform. Additionally, Asset View will make it easy to see each asset's contribution to a company's overall model, which is how I determine the margin of safety for investment opportunities.

This is a big lift considering there are over 100 assets in the coverage ecosystem.  I hope to complete it by mid 2027.