How Lukas Milosic Got Pulled Into Stocks at 13 Without a Roadmap
Lukas Milosic (@Pixelresearch_ on X) is young, still in his early twenties and currently studying at Frankfurt School of Finance and Management, but it would be a mistake to lead with that, because it tends to obscure what is actually interesting about him as an investor.
He got into markets at 13 after his brother pointed him toward a German finance YouTube channel, taught himself to screen and value stocks during the covid bull run, got humbled by the 2022 bear market, and responded the way good investors do: he read obsessively, revisited his process, and came out the other side with a clearer framework and stronger conviction about how he wanted to operate.
That trajectory is familiar to anyone who has been at this long enough. What makes it worth paying attention to is how deliberately he has thought through what he is actually doing.
600 Stocks Watched, 10 Owned: What Actually Makes It Through
His process starts with a watch list of roughly 600 stocks, Canadian microcaps at the core, but with a willingness to move up the market cap ladder when compelling opportunities dry up at the small end. From that universe, he is looking for a specific thing: inflection points.
Not just cheap stocks, and not just fast-growing ones, but situations where something has recently changed in the business trajectory and the market has not yet repriced it. He screens primarily for revenue growth acceleration and improving profitability, and will pay up for the right situation. He mentioned a general preference for sub-10x earnings but was clear that he can get comfortable outside that range if the forward picture justifies it.
The actual portfolio is concentrated. He runs roughly 10 positions, with three or four of them making up around 80% of the book.
He builds into positions slowly and frequently starts with a small tracking position, something under 1%, before doing his deepest work. The logic makes sense: having skin in the game changes how you read a filing or a press release, and it builds the discipline of deciding whether a small bet is ever worth turning into a large one.
That distinction between watching and owning came up a few times in the conversation and clearly reflects something he has worked out through experience rather than theory.
Why Mixing Styles Beats Picking One Lane
He does not box himself into a single investing style, and he pushed back on the idea that this reflects a lack of discipline. His view is that the frameworks, value, growth, momentum, special situations, are all just tools for identifying mispricing, and that the skill is in knowing which one applies to the situation in front of you.
He has been influenced by investors across all of those camps: Paul Andreola at Small Cap Discoveries, Cameron at Common Sense Investing, along with Seth Klarman and William O’Neil, among others. What unifies them, in his framing, is a shared emphasis on doing the work and staying intellectually honest about where you stand on a position. That is roughly what he tries to do himself.
One of the more substantive exchanges in the session was around holding periods and when to sell. His view: he prefers to hold as long as the thesis is intact and he does not see a better use of capital. He is skeptical of selling purely to take profit.
But he is also aware that the current market environment, where average holding periods have compressed significantly and stocks can give back months of gains in a single session, rewards decisiveness on the exit side in a way it did not even a decade ago. He does not think this changes how he builds positions, but he thinks it has to be accounted for on the exit side. We have noticed the same thing and think about it the same way.
Current Positioning and Pixel Research
The conversation also touched on two areas where Lukas has done specific work. The first is the gold mining cycle, which currently represents roughly half his portfolio, mostly producers, with one junior where he has higher conviction in the management team’s execution ability. His framework for the gold trade is explicitly cyclical: he tracks where the market is in the typical sequence from major producers to advanced development projects to earlier-stage discoveries, and sizes his exposure accordingly.
The second area is the Pixel Research Substack itself, which he launched publicly in September 2025. His first published pitch was Minova Corporation, a gold miner he presented at roughly 10 cents; the stock subsequently ran to around 50 cents before pulling back. He has since added investor interviews and macro commentary to the platform, with the interviews becoming the primary focus.
Journaling, Process, and Self-Assessment
On the topic of journaling and process documentation, we spent real time here because it is something we think about a lot at GeoInvesting as well. His argument is not that journaling is a productivity habit. It is that writing down your thesis, your reasoning, and your mistakes is the only reliable way to actually understand what kind of investor you are and where your process is breaking down versus where outcomes are just variance.
He does not back-test in the quantitative sense. Instead, he reviews his own history, documents what he got right and wrong, and tries to identify the behavioral or analytical failures that were actually within his control. That kind of deliberate self-assessment is not common, particularly at his stage, and it is worth highlighting.
The full replay is now available on the GeoInvesting Pro Portal. It runs about an hour and covers his background, screening process, portfolio construction philosophy, current positioning, the Pixel Research Substack, and a wide-ranging discussion on trend investing, holding periods, and the current state of the micro cap market. If you are spending time in Canadian small caps or thinking about how to build a more systematic process for getting from a large watch list down to high-conviction positions, we think the conversation is worth your time.