About Penke
Hi there! I'm Penke, aka Harm Jan Bosscher. I'm a professional webdeveloper since 2005 and started my own company, HJ Webdevelopment, in 2011. My slogan, shaped by 21+ years of experience, is: "There's always another bug."
And there is! See how many companies and countries are getting hacked these days. The good news is that we can also use AI to find the bugs. My job as a webdeveloper has changed a lot because of AI. Instead of writing every single line of code myself, I now spend more and more time telling AI what I want, checking what it creates, finding the mistakes and making sure everything actually works.
You could call that an Agentic Engineer. But whatever we call it, the basic job hasn't really changed: understand how something works, find what is wrong and improve it. And that's actually pretty close to how I look at companies too.
PenkeInvesting
I found my inspiration in trading and investing years ago. Like every investor, I wanted to find the best stocks out there. But there are thousands of companies. You simply cannot sit down and read every annual report and every quarterly report yourself, so you need some way to filter first.
I started looking for tools, but quickly noticed that the information I actually wanted was often blurred, abstracted into some mysterious score or locked behind expensive paywalls. And when the information was available, it was often written in accounting language that assumes you already know what all those numbers and ratios mean.
That wasn't really what I wanted. So I did what I normally do when I cannot find the tool I want: I started coding it myself. And I mean manually. Before AI could write half a website for you in a few seconds, I was writing scripts that read financial reports, structured all those numbers and stored them in my own database.
That allowed me to go through huge numbers of companies very quickly. Instead of reading thousands of reports first, I could use the numbers to find companies that looked interesting and then spend my time understanding those businesses better. And it worked. I found interesting companies much faster.
It started as PenkeTrading
PenkeInvesting wasn't always called PenkeInvesting. Back in the days it was PenkeTrading, and PenkeTrading had a lot more price information. Stock prices, historical prices, charts and other market data were a much bigger part of the website.
The problem with stock price data is that it is heavily protected and licensed. Just because you can see a stock price somewhere doesn't automatically mean you are allowed to collect that data, store it and commercially use it in your own product. For years I worked with external data suppliers, which meant there were always restrictions around what I could do with the data and how I could use it.
Then came what I call The Great Reset. I rebuilt a big part of the platform and moved away from data I didn't really control. That also meant saying goodbye to a lot of the price data PenkeTrading used to have.
At first you might think: how can you have an investing website without showing the stock price? I thought about that too.
Then I remembered Warren Buffett talking about how little attention he gives to the stock price itself. He wants to understand the business first. The price becomes important when he actually wants to buy or sell. And I thought: actually... that's exactly what investing should be about.
You already know the stock price
You probably check the stock price every day anyway. Maybe more than once. 😄 You don't really need PenkeInvesting to tell you that Nvidia is trading at $X, Apple went up 2% today or Bitcoin suddenly dropped again. You can find that everywhere.
What is much harder to find is an answer to: what is actually happening inside the business? Is the company making more money? Is it actually turning that profit into cash? Can it comfortably pay its bills? How much debt does it have? Are profit margins getting better or worse?
I also want to know whether management is creating more value with the money it has, whether your share of the company is becoming more valuable, and whether new shares are being created so your little piece of the company is getting smaller. And after you understand all of that: what price would you actually be willing to pay for this business?
That's what I want PenkeInvesting to help you with.
I now work the other way around
A lot of investing starts with the price. The stock is at $100. Will it go to $120? Will it drop to $80? Should you buy now? Should you sell?
I want to turn that around. I first look at the company. I look at how much money the business makes, how much cash it produces, how much debt it has, how those numbers are changing and what each share actually represents.
Then we can start asking much better questions: at what price would I become interested in owning this business? At what price would I want to buy more? And if you already own it, at what price might the market be paying so much that you would start thinking about selling?
That means you're not waiting for the price to suddenly move before deciding what you think. You can think about it beforehand.
I want you to plan before emotions take over
Short-term price action is incredibly difficult to predict. A stock can fall after great earnings, go up after bad earnings, or move 10% because of one headline that everybody has forgotten about a week later. For very short periods there is a huge amount of emotion, positioning, speculation and randomness involved. Trying to predict every little price move starts looking a lot like gambling.
But over longer periods the business matters. If a company keeps making more money, producing more cash, becoming financially stronger and creating more value per share, that eventually matters to what investors are willing to pay for it.
So I want you to separate those two things. The market gives you a price. The company gives you the numbers. If you understand the numbers first, you can decide whether you actually like the price the market is offering you.
And you can make that decision before the chart suddenly turns red and everybody starts panicking. That's where I think you can gain a lot of confidence. Not because you know exactly what the stock will do tomorrow. You don't. I don't either. But because you already have an idea of what you think the business may be worth to you.
You don't need to speak accounting
This is another thing I want to do differently. A lot of financial websites are built for people who already understand finance. They show you terms like Return on Equity, Current Ratio, Free Cash Flow, Operating Margin, Debt to EBITDA, Price to Earnings and Price to Book, and then basically leave you alone with the number.
Great. But what does it actually mean to you?
I never went to school for finance myself. I'm a webdeveloper. I learned investing because I was naturally interested in it and because I wanted to understand what I was doing with my own money. My coding skills helped me a lot because I could collect huge amounts of financial information, calculate things myself, compare companies, find strange numbers and keep digging into something until I finally understood what it was telling me.
Over time I learned the accounting terms and ratios simply because I needed them. And that's why I know you can learn them too. You don't need to become an accountant, you don't need a finance degree and you don't need to memorize hundreds of formulas. You just need someone to explain what the number actually means first.
I explain the simple thing first
That is why I'm changing the way I explain company analysis on PenkeInvesting. I don't want to start by telling you: "Free Cash Flow is $14.7 billion." If you don't know what Free Cash Flow is, that number doesn't help you much.
So first I explain what is actually happening. The normal business brings cash in. Then the company has to spend money to keep the business running and growing. Maybe it needs machines, factories, data centers, stores or other long-term investments. The cash that is left after those things is what investors call Free Cash Flow.
Now you know what we're talking about. Then we can look at whether that cash is growing, shrinking, stable or completely different from a few years ago.
That's how I want to explain the other ratios too. First I want you to understand what is happening and why you should care. Then I teach you what investors call it, show you the actual number and show you how it has changed over time. That way you're not just looking at financial terminology. You're slowly learning it.
And then there is AI...
We're now entering a really interesting period for investing. Anybody can open an AI and ask: "What stock should I buy?", "Should I sell Nvidia?" or "Give me the best 10 stocks for next year." And AI will happily give you an answer.
The problem is that a lot of people are going to stop there. They won't understand why, they won't check the numbers, they won't know whether the AI misunderstood something and they won't really know what they own.
I don't think you should stop using AI. I definitely don't. I use AI every day. But there is a huge difference between using AI as a tool and blindly letting AI make your decisions for you.
If you understand the basic numbers and ratios yourself, you can actually judge the answer AI gives you. You can ask better questions and notice when something doesn't make sense. You can say: "Wait... free cash flow is falling. Why are you calling this an improvement?" or "This company has more cash than debt. Are you interpreting that ratio correctly?"
Now you're using AI as a tool instead of blindly following whatever it tells you.
You might actually have an advantage
Think about two investors. One person knows the ticker, checks the stock price 20 times a day and asks AI whether they should buy or sell. The other person understands how the business makes money, knows whether cash flow is growing, knows what is happening with debt, understands the important ratios and has already thought about what price they would be willing to pay.
Who do you think is in the better position when the stock suddenly drops 20%? The first person sees -20% 😱. The second person can ask: did something actually change in the business?
That's the advantage I want you to build. It doesn't mean you're magically going to beat everybody. It doesn't mean every investment will work. And it definitely doesn't mean I can predict the future for you. But knowing more about the company than somebody who didn't do the work gives you more information to make your decision with.
Avoiding one stupid emotional decision can save you a lot of money. And finding one company before everybody else notices how much the business has improved can make you money. That's why I think learning this stuff is worth the effort.
Why there is a membership now
For a long time, I deliberately avoided paywalls. Especially if you were just getting started with trading or investing, I wanted you to be able to use as much of PenkeInvesting as possible. Most tools and analyses were available for free, usually limited only by depth or usage.
Then bots and AI systems started consuming large parts of the website automatically. The strange thing was that I originally built all of this to help people, but slowly more and more of the work was being consumed by machines, scraped at scale and reused elsewhere.
So I eventually added memberships. I sometimes call the paywall an AI wall. I don't want to hide basic investing knowledge from you. You can still search companies, look around the website and learn how I think about companies.
But the deeper analysis, the tools that scan thousands of companies and the systems that save you a huge amount of research time are now mainly for members.
What you can expect from me
If you decide to subscribe to Penke, I don't want you to feel like you simply bought access to another financial database. I want you to feel like I'm helping you do the research.
You can go through all my company analyses and see whether a business looks strong, weak, improving or getting worse. You can use the Simple Stock Finder to look for interesting companies yourself, or use the Business Change Finder to find companies where the numbers are starting to improve or weaken.
You can also scan thousands of companies with the Fundamental Stock Scanner and Stock Trends Screener. And if you want to do your own research with AI, you can download the financial data and put it directly into ChatGPT, Claude or another AI.
But you're not just getting tools. You can actually ask me questions. You can email me at support@penkeinvesting.com or find me on Discord. I'll help you understand the tools, numbers and calculations. I'm just not going to tell you what you should buy or sell, because that's your decision.
And if there is a tool you think would help you and could also help other members, tell me. I might build it. I'm also creating videos for you on YouTube, and I might even start doing live sessions where we can analyse companies together.
And yes... you'll probably notice something when you look at the membership prices. Spoiler: I like 7's. 🥸
You still make the decision
At the end of all of this, your money is still your money. I don't know where a stock will trade tomorrow, and I'm not going to pretend I do. What I can do is help you understand what is happening inside the company, show you the numbers, help you understand the ratios and show you what is improving or getting worse.
I can also help you think about what the business may be worth and what prices might become interesting to you. Then you decide.
That's basically what I want to teach you with PenkeInvesting: don't start with the stock price. Start with the business. Understand what you own, think before the market starts moving, use the tools, use AI and use me. But in the end, make your own decision.
Penke 🥸