Northshore Notes is a personal journal by Alex Chen about money, machines, and decision-making. The aim is to make difficult ideas easier to inspect: show the assumptions, work through an example, and leave a route back to the source.
The name is a reminder to step back from the current. A useful idea should still make sense after the news cycle moves on.
What you will find here
Financial foundations. Compounding, costs, interest-rate exposure, and the mechanics behind familiar investment language. The focus is on understanding the trade-offs rather than predicting next month’s market.
Applied AI. Practical ways to retrieve evidence, calculate correctly, evaluate a workflow, and recognize a system’s limits.
AI & markets. The intersection: testing investment signals, reading financial statements with AI, and connecting technical progress to business economics.
Editorial approach
These essays are AI-assisted and prepared for this journal. Sources are linked so readers can inspect the underlying research; a citation is a starting point for checking a claim, not a guarantee of correctness. Numerical examples are fictional unless explicitly identified otherwise. Calculations include their assumptions and, where useful, reproducible code.
This initial collection was prepared on October 26, 2026. Dates from January through October organize it as a retrospective 2026 notebook; they do not represent an independently recorded publication history. The examples address durable concepts rather than claiming to report market conditions on those dates.
The journal does not publish live market quotes, claim audited investment performance, or imply that a hypothetical example is a real trade. Interpretations and proposed workflows are presented as analysis, with limitations alongside them.
How to read the notebook
Start with the financial foundations for costs and bond risk. For practical AI research, begin with retrieval and verification, then follow the evidence-first workflow.
The reading list collects primary references, and the archive keeps the complete collection in date order.
Scope of the writing
The material is educational and general. It does not assess your circumstances or recommend a particular security, financial product, or trading strategy. Examples use US dollars for convenience; tax, legal, and account rules vary across jurisdictions.
Read critically, check the original documents, and keep room for the possibility that a useful idea still has an important boundary.