After selling my company, I suddenly found myself on a new journey.

I had capital to manage, but no desire to blindly hand over the steering wheel. I met with private bankers and investment firms, listened carefully, and explored the usual routes. In the end, I landed somewhere else: self-managed, income-focused investing.

That journey started about four years ago. Like many income investors, I subscribed to expert portfolios and learned from people such as Steven Bavaria, Steve Selengut, Rida Morwa and others. They shared a wealth of practical knowledge and helped me understand the income-investing world: CEFs, BDCs, REITs, income ETFs, distributions, discounts, NAVs, and the many ways investors can chase yield.

But over time, I kept running into the same missing piece.

The knowledge was valuable, but the decision-making was often not data-driven enough for me.

I wanted to know more than whether a fund looked attractive today. I wanted to know whether the income asset was healthy. Whether its trajectory was improving or deteriorating. Whether the distribution was supported. Whether NAV was being preserved. Whether similar assets had survived over time. And whether my own portfolio decisions were being guided by evidence instead of yield, stories, or gut feeling.

That search eventually became IQ Score.

IQ Score is my attempt to bring more structure, discipline and big-data analysis into income investing. It classifies income assets as Friends, Question Marks or Foes, helping investors look beyond headline yield and ask a better question:

Is this income asset actually worth owning?

My Portfolio

I built IQ Score because I needed it for my own portfolio.

Today, I manage a seven-figure income-focused portfolio of 219 distinct tickers.

The portfolio is designed around income first. My long-term objective is to generate roughly 9–10% dividend yield, with an additional 1–2% potential return from active profit-taking by selling green lots (Selengut Style).

When I run my own holdings through IQ Score, the result is still very much a work in progress:

• 82 holdings are classified as Friends
• 120 are Question Marks
• 11 are Foes
• 6 are currently not covered

That is exactly why IQ Score exists. My portfolio is not presented as a perfect model portfolio. It is a real income portfolio being improved with a data-driven quality framework — one position, one classification and one decision at a time.

I may personally own positions mentioned on this site. IQ Score is research and classification, not personal financial advice.