Why this site shows real numbers

TL;DRThe numbers are real because a fake ledger is just a brochure with a goblin on it. Holdings, payments, cuts, the freedom date: they come out of the same files the goblin uses to run the cave. Gaps stay gaps. Wins do not get bigger type than mistakes.

A fake ledger is a brochure. This one publishes the ugly numbers too, in the same type as the wins, because a logbook that only goes up is a pitch.

The internet is full of money cartoons. A round number. A lifestyle. A yield that does not have a pay date. A "my first payout was" story with no account behind it. Some of those cartoons are honest about being cartoons. Most are not.

This site is a ledger with a sense of humour. The manifesto's sixth rule is the one that decides the tone: show the math, not the mirage. When possible, share real numbers. Holdings, goals, cashflow. Talk about drawdowns and dumb moves as much as wins. No secret system. No mastermind. No course. One goblin trying to buy his time back.

That rule has teeth. Every figure you can see on a page is supposed to have come from the cave's own records at build time. If a design mockup and the ledger disagree, the ledger wins, even when the mockup looks nicer. If a year cannot be verified against a filing, it is left out rather than guessed. If a section has nothing real to show yet, the page says so in English, or hides it. It does not fill the hole with a good story.

I would rather publish an ugly number than a round one I liked the look of. Round numbers are how a logbook turns into a pitch. I am not pitching. I am trying not to lie to myself in public, which is harder, and more useful.

What "real" actually means here

LedgerThe files that say what is owned, what was paid, what landed, and what the machine currently thinks. The pages read them. They are not decoration.

Honest bitThe panel at the bottom of the hoard that prints each holding's cut record in the same weight as the wins. A ledger that only shows wins is a brochure. That sentence is a rule, not a caption.

GapSomething the cave does not know yet, or has not written down yet. Unknowns stay unknowns. Filling them with a good story would be the mirage.

Real means the payment you see in a field guide is a payment that hit an account. It means the share count is the share count, not a rounded hero number. It means the freedom date is whatever the snowball said on the last day the ledger changed, not a slogan from a canvas. It means the cut count is computed from a sourced table, and a quieter total that was not a cut is named in English so the zero cannot hide it.

Real also means the ugly parts travel with the pretty ones. The calendar has thin months. The snowball has a spend-it switch that never arrives. A buy can come in smaller than planned because a broker froze an account. The freedom date ticks later as well as earlier. None of that is "content". It is what happened.

What you will not find: fake testimonials. Subscriber counts. A first-payout anecdote with a made-up figure. A recommendation dressed as a holding. The cave is a logbook of one goblin's money. It is not a model portfolio, and it is not a hint.

[If a sentence on this site ever sounds like "you should buy this", it is a failure of the page, not a tip. The names are here because they are in the cave. Your list can be a different list.]

One number, traced

Here is the proof, in the only form that counts. Legal & General paid 15.74p per share in June 2026. I owned 126,000 shares. £19,830 landed. That is not a round number. It is not the declared rate off a press release multiplied by a share count that was no longer the share count on the pay date. It is the cash that hit, and the effective rate that multiplies back to it, and the holding as it stood. The field-guide panel below is the same object the rest of the site uses. There is not a second, friendlier set of books for visitors.

Per share15.74p

Shares owned126,000

Landed · Jun 2026£19,830

You can walk that number onto the hoard and see it sitting in the calendar and the table with everything else. That is the whole trick. The cartoon is allowed to shout. The arithmetic is not allowed to perform.

The same standard is why the misses sit next to the lumps. In September the broker restricted the account for a KYC review, and a real-estate credit buy came in smaller than the number pencilled in two days earlier. The dispatch went up as it happened, freeze and all. In July the high-yield bag stopped short of twenty-five thousand shares. The target was a round number I liked. The ledger kept a bit over twenty-three thousand. I would rather you see both than a cave that only goes up.

The same standard is why this page can send you to What a dividend actually is without a warm-up myth. The coffee cart is a parable, and it says so. The payment that follows it is not. If you only remember one thing from Level 0, remember which is which.

Not financial advice. Just why the numbers are ugly on purpose, and where to go when you want the cuts in the same type size as the lumps.

The live version of all of this (the bills, the calendar, the honest bit) is the hoard. Start there, then read the coffee cart.