Why Quantery exists

Quantery didn't start as a product plan. It started as one thesis, a hunch with rules attached, and a founder who wanted to know if the hunch survived contact with data. This is the story.

One article, one sentence

In June 2026, Henry Zhang published a write-up called "What I Learned from Michael Burry", and Michael Burry himself shared it with an approving note. The piece skips the movie version of Burry (the crash calls, the doom tweets) and works out how he actually hunts on the long side: washed-out stocks, where the sellers have mostly run out of shares to sell. Near the end, Zhang writes the sentence that started all of this: "The real alpha is not in copying the trade. The real alpha is in extracting the decision engine."

(To be clear: Burry endorsed that article. He has no connection to Quantery whatsoever, and has never heard of us. Probably.)

The one-thesis scanner

Our founder did the literal version of what the article suggested. Zhang compresses Burry's long setup into a checklist, so he wrote that checklist down as explicit rules, put numbers on everything that could take one, and built a small scanner to run that single thesis against the US market. He named the thesis the Michael Burry Washout, which felt fair: the ideas were Burry's, the distillation was Zhang's, and the engineering was the part he added.

The scanner worked. Not "worked" as in instant riches; worked as in it did the thing screeners never quite did: it read every filer in the market, including thousands of companies he'd never have looked at on his own, and returned the small handful that passed rules he could defend out loud.

From one thesis to an engine

Somewhere in those first runs it clicked: the thesis wasn't the product. The loop was. Take any hunch, write it as rules a machine can execute, scan the whole market with it, backtest it against point-in-time SEC filings that can't peek at restatements, and read the results with the biases accounted for. So he built the loop as a desktop app: build screeners from raw fundamentals, define your own calculations, backtest without limits, and keep every byte of it on your own machine. Classic screens ship as editable starting points (a Buffett-style quality screen, Greenblatt's Magic Formula, and more), but the built-in screens were never the point. The point is the thesis you haven't written yet.

The first introduction

The best version of the story happened while Quantery was still an early build running on a dev machine. One night in July 2026 the thesis scanned 5,272 US names. It returned three survivors, and the top one was a company our founder had never heard of. He ended up owning it. The whole story, the workup, the trades, the honest accounting of what could still go wrong, is the first entry in the trade journal on our Substack.

The rules of the shop

A few commitments that apply to the app and to everything we publish:

• Every criterion shows its number and its source. There is no proprietary-rating layer between you and the filings.
• Backtests are honest about what they are: point-in-time fundamentals, survivorship-aware, hypothetical, costs excluded, and labeled as such.
• Your ideas never leave your machine. Local data, local scans, your own API keys.
• Research tooling, not investment advice. Always.

Who's behind it

Quantery is built by Michael Wayland (Wayland Holdings LLC). He trades his own account, runs his own screens, and grows the product in whatever direction his own research demands next. He writes daily notes on the blog and a weekly issue on Substack, where the trade journal lives: real positions, dissected after the fact, losers included.

Want to try the loop yourself? There's a free 14-day trial, no card required.