Diversification and book design. How the desk builds exposure, role, and hedge before it ever picks a ticker.
Portfolio Construction is the book-first issue. Retail typically thinks position-by-position. What should I buy next, where do I get in, what is my stop. The desk thinks book-first. What is my beta exposure, my duration exposure, my dollar exposure, my commodity exposure, my convexity exposure, and which roles are still unfilled. Then it picks the tickers. The portfolio is the trade. The tickers are how you express it.
You will leave with the five exposure buckets and the symbol ladder that fills each one, the account-size translation from $500 through $10K+, the correlation and diversification rules that decide what is redundant vs additive, the portfolio scorecard for grading your current book, the 0DTE acceleration sleeve for small-account compounding, and the weekly portfolio worksheet that forces the same review every Sunday.
Kai writes the weekly Relay and is building Stryk, the intraday version of this framework. If you read the guide and want it running live, that’s the product underneath.
Stryk runs the same three-layer read (positioning, dealer mechanics, and flow) in real time, with confidence-scored signals routed to your broker.
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