SLOP1039 – Ruin: A First Course in Losing Money

Every other investing course teaches you to make money. This one refuses. Twelve weeks, twelve named ways to lose it, on the premise that you cannot price a risk you have never felt. No prior finance assumed; no upside promised.

In the first session you open a position and file four answers you are not allowed to revise. The position stays open until the last week.

Each week after that names one mechanism by which money is lost, derives it in front of you, and asks you to check your own position against it. Some of the mechanisms you can commit deliberately; the rest have to be handed to you by the world, and the course is explicit about which is which. You keep a position log throughout, because a loss you cannot reconstruct is worth nothing here.

Twice you write it up: once for a single loss, accounted for to the cent, and once for the whole semester as a decomposition. What you leave with is an itemised ledger of your own decisions.

It does not teach you to make money, and it does not imply that the attempt would work. Every mechanism on the syllabus is a way to lose, every worked example ends lower than it started, and the final week's argument is that a student who finished the semester ahead has learned nothing from having done so.

The losses are real and they are bounded. Paper positions are the default; real money is an opt-in track with a hard cap, and positions that can cost you more than you put in are not permitted. The bounded-loss policy is a course rule, not a caution, and it is worth reading before the first session.

Someone who has never held a security. No finance is assumed, no statistics beyond arithmetic, and every number on the site is one you can reproduce from the inputs printed beside it.

If you already trade, this course has nothing to tell you about what to buy. It may still be the first time anyone has asked you to total the counterfactual column.

Every week, and the one named failure mode it owns.

The four checkpoints: opening, crit, midpoint, close.

One loss accounted for, then the semester decomposed.

What the loss requirement is, and what caps it.