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James van Geelen

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James van Geelen didn't plan a career in finance. He wanted to be a doctor but couldn't get into medical school. Instead, he founded an alternative medicine startup, sold it to a private equity fund in 2018, and used the proceeds as seed capital to start investing and writing research. He also co-founded one of Connecticut's first medical marijuana dispensaries. It's the kind of origin story that would disqualify him in the eyes of institutional gatekeepers — and that's precisely what makes his subsequent trajectory so striking. Van Geelen began publishing macro and thematic equity research under the name Citrini — derived from "citrinitas," an alchemical term for one of the four stages of creating the philosopher's stone — on Substack in 2023. The name was prescient. What followed was a transmutation: from unknown independent researcher to the most-read finance writer on one of the internet's largest publishing platforms. The turning point came in late 2022, when van Geelen publicly announced a short position in Silicon Valley Bank. Months later, SVB collapsed. The credibility earned from that call, combined with early identification of AI infrastructure and GLP-1 drug investment themes, built Citrini's audience at exponential speed. Today, with 216,000+ Substack subscribers and approximately 90,000+ Twitter followers, Citrini sits atop the finance Substack leaderboard — ahead of Michael Burry, Doomberg, and every established name in financial media. His personal portfolio has returned over 200% since May 2023. The CitrIndex — his published portfolio of thematic positions — has included reported calls on Korea ETFs and energy names that significantly outpaced broader benchmarks. But it was his February 2026 report, "The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis," that cemented his market-moving power. The essay's dystopian AI scenario triggered a $200 billion market selloff and drew a formal rebuttal from Citadel Securities. Van Geelen practices what he calls "second-order thinking" — not just identifying trends, but mapping the cascading consequences of those trends across seemingly unrelated assets and geographies. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has publicly praised his work. At 34, with no institutional backing, no Bloomberg terminal pedigree, and a path that wound through med school rejection and cannabis dispensaries, van Geelen has built more influence over financial markets than most people with decades at Goldman Sachs. He's no longer under the radar — but the speed at which a self-taught outsider rose to this level of impact is the point.

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