position-ladder

position-ladder is a skill for Claude Code from yennanliu/InvestSkill. It costs 44 tokens per session (6,423 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A stock-trading planning framework for building a position in stages, managing share counts and cost basis, and deciding when to exit if the investment thesis breaks.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to plan entry prices, share limits, trim-and-rebuy cycles, lot accounting, wash-sale checks, and thesis-based exit rules for a stock position.
Why use it?
It organizes gradual buying and trimming while accounting for tax rules such as wash sales, so reported returns and average costs are not misleading. It requires current market data before analysis.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: positional $N argument.

Part of the us-stock-analysis plugin — 27 skills shipped together

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/yennanliu/investskill/position-ladder
Any agent
npx skills add yennanliu/InvestSkill --skill position-ladder
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/yennanliu/InvestSkill

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install us-stock-analysis, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 27 skills.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for position-ladder

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/yennanliu/investskill/position-ladder.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/yennanliu/investskill/position-ladder)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/yennanliu/investskill/position-ladder"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/yennanliu/investskill/position-ladder.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 44 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 6,423 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00044 $0.06423
Opus 5 $0.00022 $0.03211
Sonnet 5 $0.00009 $0.01285
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00642

Measured 7d ago against content hash 8e7fe40de3d3, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-06, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

position-ladder scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 7d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

plugins/us-stock-analysis/skills/position-ladder/SKILL.md · 411 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 411 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Position Ladder — Staged Entry & Cost-Basis Management

⚠️ Data Verification — Do This Before Any Analysis

Before running any analysis, always retrieve the latest market data for the ticker:

  1. Fetch current price — use web search or ask the user for the live price, 52-week range, and market cap. Never assume a price from training data.
  2. Confirm key figures — recent earnings, revenue, key ratios (P/E, P/S, etc.) as applicable to this skill.
  3. State your data source — note where the numbers came from (e.g., "Google Finance, June 19 2026") at the top of the output.
  4. Flag stale data explicitly — if live data is unavailable, display this warning before proceeding:

⚠️ Live data unavailable. The following analysis uses training-data estimates which may be significantly out of date. Verify all prices and metrics before making any decisions.

Never silently substitute training-data estimates for current prices. When in doubt, ask the user to paste the latest quote.


⚠️ Read This First — This Is Scenario Modeling, Not a Recommendation

This framework is more prescriptive than the rest of the InvestSkill catalog: it outputs specific price levels and share counts. Every number it produces is a conditional plan under stated assumptions, not an instruction to trade.

Three honest claims must appear in every output:

  1. Lowering average cost is not the same as making money. Average cost is an accounting anchor and a psychological one — it is not a return metric. Trimming a high-cost lot mechanically lowers the number without creating a dollar of wealth. Always report total return and realized P&L alongside average cost, and show the buy-and-hold comparison.
  2. This is volatility harvesting. The strategy monetizes oscillation around a level. It outperforms in a range-bound / mean-reverting tape and underperforms in a strong trend — in either direction. A stock that only goes up leaves the ladder underfilled; a stock that only goes down fills it and keeps falling.
  3. Position control is the actual edge. The hard ceiling on share count — "stop adding at N shares, no matter what" — is what converts averaging down from an unbounded liability into a bounded, pre-sized bet. Without the cap, this is not a strategy; it is a mechanism for concentrating capital into losers.

Read the full file on GitHub · 411 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 7d ago First seen · 411 lines · 44 tokens per session scan A 8e7fe40de3d3

Subscribe to this mod's changes

position-ladder is a skill published in the GitHub repository yennanliu/InvestSkill (200 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 44 tokens to every session and 6,423 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.