This is an interview with MarketFighter of The MarketFighter Strategy.
At a glance:
Current subscriber count: 3,600
Most successful post: My Investment Approach that Outperformed the Stock Market in 25 of 26 Years
Most underrated growth tactic: Posting notes every day.
Favorite Substack feature: The detailed growth statistics where I can see where new subscribers came from.
One creator everyone should follow: The Private Ledger. He’s a great writer covering companies before they go public.
One tool you can’t live without: My Excel sheets (old-school, I know).
Key metric to track: Subscriber count, both free and paid.
Main revenue source: Paid subscriptions (aside from investing).
One sentence describing your newsletter: I share my simple ETF investment strategy with investors who value consistency and rational decisions.
One piece of advice for new writers: Spend more time on Notes than you expect!
The Beginning
Tell us a bit about yourself to begin with.
I’m a software engineer and investor living in Denmark. I’m 41, living with my wife and our two sons. I consider myself a family man and prioritize it highly. Investing has been a passion of mine for many years, with the goal to achieve financial freedom. Earlier this year I quit my software developer job to live off my investment strategy.
Tell us about your publication. What do you write about and who is it for?
I write about stock market investing from a strategic and evidence-based perspective (no business analysis). I don’t go deep into academic theory, but I present useful findings from research.
Most importantly, I share my own monthly ETF strategy. It’s a rules-based approach I developed five years ago based on a combination of research findings, and I’ve had great results with this strategy.
I write for anyone who cares about optimizing investment returns and has the discipline to follow a systematic approach. I share the exact trades and the full strategy with paid subscribers.
What was your investment and writing journey before Substack?
I started investing in 2004 when I was 18 and inherited an amount roughly equal to $10,000 today. I honestly had no idea what I was doing back then. But it somehow ignited a passion for investing, and I spent the better part of two decades hunting for high-probability ways to optimize returns.
In early 2021 it felt like the stars aligned, as I managed to build a relatively simple system based on all my research findings. Backtesting revealed significant and very consistent market outperformance over the previous 20 years.
I still remember the exact moment on one particular night, when I realized I had discovered something out of the ordinary.
Since then I have invested the majority of my money following this approach. In April 2026 I quit my job as a software engineer, as my returns from investing in the system kept growing.
You spent years developing your investment strategy before launching the publication. What made you decide to start sharing it publicly?
To be honest, in the beginning I was skeptical. What I had found seemed a bit too good to be true based on everything I knew about how markets work. I just waited for it to somehow stop working.
But it didn’t stop, and the pattern I had seen in my backtests continued as I traded it with real money on the table.
After around five years I felt much more confident in the long-term value of my strategy. In the meantime I had gotten increasingly tired of my day job, and I dreamt of an independent life centered around my passion for investing.
That’s where Substack came into the picture. I had never published any writing before, but I figured it could be the perfect match for me.
What made Substack the right platform for this particular business?
Three things were in play here:
1. After five years of great results with my system, I felt it was time to share the strategy and my performance publicly.
2. While I considered quitting my job, I also knew I would need one or more new projects to wake up to every morning in a new independent life.
3. Investment returns tend to go up and down a lot. I was hoping to find a way to add a more consistent side-income to my returns.
I soon found out that Substack could be the solution that ticked all the boxes.
The Growth Story
What did your first few months on Substack look like?
I started on March 1st this year. I knew from other stories that the beginning tends to be slow, so I had no expectations. After 22 days I had my first 100 subscribers. This surprised me, and it gave me a feeling that this project had real potential.
After six or seven weeks, subscribers started reaching out to ask me why I didn’t charge money for my service. One of them even said he hoped I would do it soon, so that he could count on me not to suddenly stop delivering. That’s when I knew people really found value in my work.
You’re now at around 3,500 subscribers and #19 Rising in Finance. Can you walk us through how you got there?
It has been a fairly steady journey so far. While growth in the early months was already faster than I expected, it has been slightly accelerating since then. On most days I get 20-30 new subscribers now.
I had no initial network or following on other platforms, so it’s just organic growth on Substack, starting from 0.
I did a single post on Reddit, but I found that engaging directly with the Substack community gave much more meaningful interaction. Posting notes every day has definitely been a key driver.
What did your growth look like at key milestones like 100, 500, 1,000, and 2,000 subscribers?
In general there has been a compounding effect, and my growth seems to increase over time, at least so far. My first 100 subscribers took longer (22 days) than my last 400 for instance. From time to time, I’ve had a few days where it slowed down, but not for months.
For me, my biggest milestone so far was not a subscriber count, but receiving the Substack Bestseller badge in July, as I reached more than 100 paid subscribers. I’ve been absolutely blown away by the early support and the fact that this already happened less than five months in.
What were the biggest growth drivers?
Notes, definitely. I love statistics and data, and Substack has a great dashboard for tracking down where subscribers come from. In my case, notes are by far the biggest driver.
A few of my notes caused extraordinary attention and new subscribers. Especially the note I posted on the first day of my new independent life after quitting my job. That seemed to resonate with a lot of people.
What’s one thing that worked much better than you expected?
The community.
I don’t know what it is, but it feels like Substack attracts a special breed of intellectual and reasonable people who care about others and who actively engage and motivate each other. This is a really special corner of the internet, and I hope it stays like this.
Do you actively use Notes? If so, what kinds of Notes bring you the most subscribers?
Every single day.
In general most subscribers find me through notes where I clearly express what it is I’m doing (giving them a good idea of why they should consider subscribing).
Also, notes with a personal touch that readers can relate to or milestone celebrations tend to bring a good number of new subscribers.
Trust & Investing Content
Building an audience around investing requires a lot of trust. How did you establish credibility?
It’s a good question. I try to be myself and be honest in everything I do. I publish open performance metrics every month, and anyone can go back and look them up if they want to. I don’t try to hide bad numbers. Many subscribers have reached out to tell me that this transparency means a lot.
Another factor might be that I have a long story behind what I’m doing. I’ve been investing for 22 years, done an extensive amount of research, and I’ve personally traded the same strategy with my own money for more than five years now.
How do you decide which parts of your strategy to explain for free and which belong behind the paid subscription?
I decided from the beginning to only put my trading signals behind the paywall. These are needed for people who want to follow my strategy. I wanted everything else to be publicly available, so more people can find it and engage around it.
How much of your content comes from your investment research versus ideas from conversations with readers?
Most of my content comes from research, but the decisions on what to focus on in my articles are definitely inspired by comments and messages from readers.
I love the ongoing feedback I get, as it helps me judge what readers are missing and what they want to know more about.
How often do you publish, and how did you arrive at that publishing rhythm?
I have two fixed monthly articles: My trading signal, and my monthly performance report. Aside from these, I publish anything between 1 and 4 articles with strategic market insights.
I did not settle on a fixed publishing scheme, like publishing once every week. I prefer to publish the right thing when it’s ready, and not because I set a deadline.
What metrics do you actually pay attention to?
The subscriber counts are the most important to me, both the free subscribers and the paid.
I rarely check my follower count.
Open rates are interesting as well.
Do you think the high-stakes nature of investing makes readers more cautious about subscribing or paying?
Actually, I think it’s the other way around. When readers can see a tangible monetary benefit from subscribing, they can quickly decide if it’s worth it for their case or not.
Every time I get 17 new subscribers, one of them ends up upgrading to the paid tier, according to my statistics. I’m very satisfied with that.
The Business Side
What does your monetization model look like today?
It’s paid subscriptions and nothing else. I have a monthly plan at $45, and a yearly one at $375 (30% off versus the monthly plan).
What kind of free content converts readers into paid subscribers most effectively?
It has very much been the articles where I explain my strategy, show how it has performed, and the small notes about how it has affected my own life.
What’s Next
What’s your goal for the next 12 months?
I rarely set specific numbers for goals, but I do everything I can to continue growing and learning, as more and more people find my Substack.
Every single new subscriber means a lot to me, and my plan is to continue doing this for many years to come.
What are you currently experimenting with on Substack?
Collaborating with other writers. I have started writing articles together with six other finance writers to share our different perspectives on investing. This interview is also a new step for me.
If someone had 100 subscribers today, what would you tell them to focus on for the next 30 days?
I would focus on notes and post at least one every day. Of course the substance of the articles means a lot as well, but it’s the notes that get people’s attention.
Where do you think Substack is heading as a platform, and what opportunities do you see opening up for creators?
There has been a lot of discussion around this lately. I think it will keep growing, and competition will increase. For creators, my guess is:
If you’re just providing content that looks like everyone else’s, it will be tough. But if you have a unique offering that readers won’t find elsewhere, you will thrive.
That’s my two cents.
Just saw that I was mentioned as the person to follow, thank you for the kind words my friend :) Everyone is welcome!!
I love the style of this as well. Interviews are content I really want to get into.
Our POV is everything when it comes to the markets