How I Think About LEAPs and Diagonal Calls
A plain-English guide to long-dated calls, short-call financing, calendars, diagonals, and the mistake of capping the exact upside you bought.
Read the latestOperator journal
Build logs, research notes, and field reports.
This is the public layer of the work: what I am learning while building dashboards, research systems, local intelligence workflows, and Small Town Capital. Enough of the process to be useful. Not enough to turn the private playbook into a giveaway.
Note: public posts are receipts and reflections. They are not trade alerts, execution instructions, or a map of the private research system.
2026
Claude, Codex, and the Receipt
A note on using coding agents without letting them turn the repo into a mystery box.
From Notes to an Agent That Knows Where to Look
A build note on connecting a note vault to an agent without turning memory into a junk drawer.
Turning Market Data Into an Instrument Panel
A working note on market data, stale quotes, spreads, and building screens that make fewer decisions worse.
The Terminal as Live TV
A note on watching logs, workers, builds, and services instead of treating the terminal as a black box.
UI Iteration Is Operating Discipline
A short build note on why interface polish matters when a screen is supposed to help you make decisions.
The Boring Part Is the Edge
Why the least glamorous Small Town Capital work, notes, receipts, verification, and boring operating systems, is probably the part that matters.
Public Proof Without Giving Away the Playbook
How I think about writing publicly about Small Town Capital without publishing the private research, structure, and execution details.
Institutional Footprint Mapping
A research note on tracking quiet institutional behavior without turning scraps of data into fake certainty.
A Public Dashboard for Waynesboro
A quick walkthrough of the Waynesboro dashboard: what it does, why I built it, and how it points back to public source data.
Building in Public Without Becoming a Guru
A note on using BenBrannen.com as an operator journal for dashboards, trades, automation, and Small Town Capital.
The Options Council: Premium Is Useful, Handcuffs Are Expensive
A trading-system note on LEAPs, short calls, diagonals, and why my dashboard needs a Short Call Warden.
From Public Records to Market Research
Why local investigations, company filings, and dashboard work all train the same research muscle.
Building the Small Town Capital Intelligence Machine
How my trading dashboard, research notes, public records work, and automation projects are becoming one operating system.
Fixing an Old Astro Site After Two Years Away
Rebuilding my development environment, fixing GitHub Pages, and getting back into builder mode.
A New Age
Rebuilding my development environment.
2023
Announcement: BMBlogs 2.0
Announcing my rebuilt personal website.
The Wedding Photo ZIP Problem
Using a small Bash script to extract and sort dozens of wedding photo ZIP files.
Running 100+ Days in a Row & Turning Data into Insights
102 straight days of 5K or more, 362 miles, and the Strava-to-Looker dashboard that kept score.
10 Applications of Google Apps Scripts
Ten practical Google Apps Script ideas I keep coming back to.