I'm not a financial advisor

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Not a CFP, not a CFA, not an RIA, not registered with any regulator anywhere. No professional licenses, no fiduciary duty, no E&O insurance. Nothing on this site is, or should be treated as, personalised financial advice.

I'm a guy who spent a long time in a corporate job, traded my own money the whole time for many years and now writes about how I think about money. That's it.

Reading this site doesn't create any professional relationship between you and me. I'm not your advisor. I'm just a person on the internet sharing what works for me.

What this site is for

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Education and perspective. I share strategies I use, tools I've built, math that holds up, and lessons I learned the expensive way. The point is to help you think more clearly about money — not to tell you what to do with yours.

Read everything here as one informed person's opinion. Then go form your own.

What you have to do

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Your own research. Always. Before acting on anything you read here:

• Check the numbers yourself. I make mistakes. Calculators have bugs. Markets change. Past data is not future data.
• Match the advice to your situation. I'm a Dubai-based expat planning a Philippines retirement. Your tax residency, currency, broker access, family situation, risk tolerance and time horizon are probably different.
• If you're making a big decision such as buying a property, restructuring a portfolio, picking a brokerage, choosing a withdrawal strategy, hire someone who knows your specific situation. Hire a licensed advisor in your jurisdiction if you think it's worth what they charge. I'm not a substitute for that.

What investing actually is

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Every investment carries risk. There's no guarantee you'll make money. There's no guarantee you won't lose money. The math on this site assumes long time horizons and disciplined behaviour, both of which require effort that nobody can do for you.

Specifically:

• Past performance does not predict future returns. Every backtester on this site, including the Safe Withdrawal Rate calculator, looks backward at historical market data. The future does not have to look like the past.
• Options strategies, including the wheel, cash-secured puts, covered calls, credit spreads and iron condors, can lose money. They can lose more money than you might expect. Premium selling has unlimited downside on naked positions. I write about them because I trade them, not because they're safe.
• Dividend investing, index investing and "boring" passive strategies can also lose money. Diversified equity portfolios have had multi-year drawdowns. They will again.
• Geographic arbitrage and expat strategies depend on tax treaty conditions, visa rules and immigration policy that can change without notice. What's true for Dubai in 2026 may not be true in 2030.

Affiliate disclosure

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Some links on this site are affiliate links. If you click one and end up signing up or buying something, LibreLeo may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.

A few rules I follow:

• I only recommend brokers, tools and services I actually use or would use.
• Affiliate revenue does not change my opinion of a product. Where I think the affiliate option is worse than the non-affiliate one, I'll say so.
• I'll always tell you if a specific link or post is sponsored.

My own products

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I'm currently building Theta Vault, a desktop options trading journal. When I mention it on this site, that's my own product. I have a financial interest in you trying it. I'll always make that obvious.

Comments, community and contributions

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If you leave a comment, ask a question on a forum, or send me an email, you're sharing your opinion, not asking for advice. I might respond. My responses are still opinions, still not advice, still subject to everything above.

I reserve the right to remove comments that are spam, abusive, illegal, or impersonate someone else.

No liability

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By using LibreLeo you agree that you understand the above. You acknowledge that any decisions you make based on what you read here are your decisions, and any consequences, financial or otherwise, are your responsibility.

I am not liable for losses, missed gains, taxes, fees, broker disputes, or any other financial outcome you experience after reading something on this site. That's not me being defensive. It's a basic truth of how educational content on the internet works.

Updates

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I'll update this page when I add new disclosures, switch tools, or learn something the hard way that's worth surfacing. Date at the top tells you when.

If after reading all of this you still want to dig into the math, the strategies and the calculators on LibreLeo. Welcome. Let's go.

Chris

If you want anything tied to you removed, email me and I'll do it.

Who I am

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LibreLeo is operated by Chris W., a private individual based in Dubai, UAE. There's no company behind it. It's just me. Contact: through any of the social links, or email if you subscribe to the Newsletter.

What I collect

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1. Basic visitor analytics (Google Analytics)

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When you visit LibreLeo, Google Analytics logs:

• Pages you visit and how long you stay
• Approximate location (country / region — not your exact address)
• Device type, browser, screen size
• Referring site (where you came from)
• Anonymous identifier (the _ga cookie)

I use this to understand which posts are useful, which calculators get used, and whether the site is growing. I never see your real name, email, or anything that personally identifies you through this.

Google's own privacy policy applies to this data: https://policies.google.com/privacy

2. View and like counters (Firebase Firestore)

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When you load a post, the site quietly increments a view counter for that post. If you click a like button, it increments a like counter. Both are stored anonymously in Firebase. No login required, no identity captured. Just numbers.

Firebase signs you in anonymously through Google's Identity Toolkit so it can write the counter. That anonymous session doesn't survive past the page visit.

3. Newsletter signup (if you choose to)

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If you enter your email in the newsletter form on LibreLeo, your email goes to Beehiiv. They send you the newsletter on my behalf.

The only thing I see is your email address and roughly when you signed up. I don't see anything else about you.

You can unsubscribe at any time using the link at the bottom of every newsletter. Unsubscribing removes you from the list immediately.

What I don't collect

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• I don't ask you for your name, address, phone number, financial information, or any identity document.
• I don't have an account system. There's nothing to sign up for, no profile to create.
• I don't have any e-commerce checkout, so I never see card details.
• I don't sell or share your data with anyone for marketing purposes.

Cookies

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The site sets these:

That's the full list of what I knowingly set. If you want to block all of these, browser extensions like uBlock Origin or your browser's "Do Not Track" + "Block third-party cookies" setting will handle it. The site will still work.

Third-party services

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Beyond what's above, LibreLeo loads JavaScript from a few external services to make pages work:

• Google Fonts - for typography on some calculator widgets. Google logs your IP when fonts load.
• Hostinger - the hosting provider. They have access to server logs (IP, request times) by virtue of running the server.
• Cloudflare - for some CDN and DDoS protection. They see HTTP traffic.

Each of these has their own privacy policy. I picked them because they're standard and reliable, not because they're maximally private.

Where data is stored

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• Google Analytics data → Google's servers (mostly US-based)
• Firebase counters → Google's servers
• Comments → GitHub (US-based)
• Newsletter list → Beehiiv (US-based)
• Server logs → Hostinger (data centre in Europe / Asia depending on configuration)

I do not personally maintain a database of LibreLeo visitors anywhere.

How long things are kept

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• Google Analytics data: 14 months (Google's default retention)
• Firebase counters: indefinitely (they're just integers, no identity attached)
• GitHub comments: indefinitely, until you delete your own
• Newsletter list: until you unsubscribe

Your rights

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You can ask me to:

• Tell you what (if any) data I personally hold about you.
• Delete a specific comment you posted (or you can do it yourself on GitHub Discussions).
• Remove you from the newsletter (the unsubscribe link at the bottom of every email does this immediately).

For Google Analytics and Firebase counters, those don't contain identifiable data — there's nothing to extract or delete that's tied to "you" specifically.

To make a request, send me a message through any of the social links in the footer, or comment on a post asking me to follow up.

Changes to this policy

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If I change what data the site collects, I'll update this page and bump the "updated" date at the top. Material changes will be announced in the newsletter.

A note on jurisdiction

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I'm aware that European visitors are protected by GDPR, UK visitors by UK-GDPR, California visitors by CCPA, and various other places have their own data protection laws. I've tried to be honest about what LibreLeo actually does so you can decide whether to engage with the site or not. If you want me to delete anything tied to you, email me. I'll always do it, regardless of where you're based.

I am not currently a registered data controller in any specific jurisdiction. LibreLeo is a one-person blog operated by an individual based in the UAE.

Last updated: 2026-06-18

Chris