I built Norlyst for my own desk. Every rule in it is something I got wrong once.

Portrait of the founder, drawn in black and white, in front of a bookshelf — **Maxime Francoeur**Montreal · full-time private investor, Canadian and US micro and small caps · [email protected]

Every investment started the same way: a filing in one place, a note in another, a model in a spreadsheet, and an analysis in a chat window that would be forty threads back by the time I needed it. The facts were all there. The judgment was nowhere.

I work special situations in Canadian and US micro and small caps: takeovers, going-privates, liquidations, rights offerings, shells with tax losses. The work is reading: filings end to end, circulars, the notes nobody reads. For years I kept one Markdown file per ticker and copied the conclusions of each analysis into it by hand, so the next analysis would have the context. Recopying, one file per ticker, no view across them. Impossible to say at a glance which company had six analyses out of seven and which one carried four red flags.

Norlyst keeps that mental model, one profile per ticker and analyses that stack, and removes the recopying. It is the workbench I use every morning: the alert email goes into a queue, the filings come out of SEDAR+ and EDGAR into the profile, the skills I download from its AI Skills page run the analyses in my own Claude and import each one once I say yes, the assistant I connected reads the profile, its filings and its documents when I ask it to, the deal goes into the monitor, and the threshold I set finds me on the Home page when it is crossed.

It refuses a few things on purpose. It will not add 3.4 out of 5, LOW and a price under its weighted range into one score: that number would be false and reassuring. It will not guess a value it does not have; a missing field stays empty and a missing verdict stays grey. It runs no model of its own; your notes reach an assistant only when you connect yours, and that assistant can add, import and modify, never delete. It sends no email and no push: what changed waits on the Home page. It is not a broker, not a signal, not a terminal.

I am opening it to other independent analysts in small batches, at a flat price, because a tool like this gets better when a few serious people lean on it and tell me where it bends. If that is you, request access. I read every reply.

Maxime FrancoeurFounder, Norlyst · September 2026

Request access See a week of work

Three rules the code enforces, so the copy does not have to.

Each one is a constraint in the product, not a promise on this page.

No reassuring number: Seven verdicts on seven scales are never added into one score. The profile shows seven analyses; you do the weighing. In the code: the profile has no aggregate field; the Pipeline shows the worst verdict and N of 7, nothing else.
Never guess: A field the filing does not give stays empty, not estimated. A verdict the analysis did not reach stays grey. An import that cannot read a value falls back to the form default and tells you. In the code: null is a legal value everywhere; normalizers refuse rather than invent.
The analyst's words: Profile, deal, filing, verdict, condition, milestone: never the system's words on a screen you read. In the code: interface strings follow the vocabulary of the route table; the sidebar uses the page names.

Who builds it: One person, who also uses it every trading day. No sales team, no roadmap theatre.
Who it is for: Independent analysts and small funds working event-driven names in Canada and the US, who read the filing rather than the summary.
Not for: Anyone looking for a signal, a score, a screener or a place to execute. It holds the reasoning; it does not do the reasoning.
Reach me: [email protected]. Replies come from the person who wrote the code, usually within a day.