He's Back

In writing this post I feel a slight sense of sheepishness. Two years of almost monthly updates, followed by nothing. In my defence, it’s been a busy couple of years. And I’m slightly skint, having bought a flat. The combination of the two has resulted both in paying less attention to the stock market and in not having a realistic opportunity to invest.

But after an admittedly entirely self-imposed period of running my personal balance sheet a little close to the red (furnishing a flat from scratch whilst learning to drive, followed by purchasing a car is pretty expensive… who knew?!) things are now beginning to look financially rosier. As a result, it’s time to get involved in the public markets again.

[Dead Crow.png] Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated (fortunately, this public health hazard of a beverage is no longer available to buy) Source: Untappd

What’s bringing me back?

I recall a tweet from around 2021, whilst still in a bull market and before inflation really hit globally in a big way, that asked whether, following the great investing period at the time, many on FinTwit would still be investing should a couple of years within a tougher environment transpire. I had an uneasy reaction to reading it at the time. What would I do in that situation? Fortunately (or not, depending on how you look at it), I didn’t have to wait long to find out the answer, with a -56% year in 2022. There’s nothing like your portfolio value getting cut in half to determine whether you’re in it for the long haul! (To put this in perspective, even after regular £ additions and two years of positive returns following the drop, the £ value of my portfolio still hadn’t returned to its previous high by the time I needed to sell it down to fund the flat purchase). After what’s felt like an eternity on the sidelines, I’m now fairly certain that I’ll be investing in some capacity for the rest of my life, and I’ve been reflecting on where that certainty comes from.

Fundamentally:

  1. I really enjoy the process of identifying opportunities that the market has mispriced.
  2. I love the infinite and individualistic nature of the investing game: there’s always more to learn yet no-one else to blame if those learnings result in poor returns.
  3. The understanding of businesses built through investing is something I find intellectually stimulating and has helped develop my comprehension of global events.
  4. The financial incentives to playing the game well don’t hurt either!

Also, making predictions is just fun; one of the primary reasons for this blog is having a record of what I was thinking at a particular time in order to (hopefully) be able to identify where that thinking was correct or flawed post hoc.

Ok, so what now?

There are a couple of reasons, aside from the conspicuous gap in monthly posts, as to why I’m viewing this as the ‘next era’ of both my investing journey and the blog.

Firstly, this time around represents a new and frankly daunting challenge: I’ll be building up the portfolio from nothing. Literally starting at zero. As my investing journey in 2018 began after coming into a small amount of money that I had no idea what to do with, this represents new territory. While I can’t see myself building an all-SaaS portfolio again, especially at this stage of the market cycle (have you heard the words ‘AI’ and ‘bubble’ said in combination yet today?), I’ve decided that I want to take a ‘risk-on’ approach to starting from the ground floor. As it stands at the start of 2026, to me that means - at least, initially - investing in individual stocks. There’s a place in my portfolio for index funds, probably a large place, but first it’s time to build.

Second, and more relevant to the blog itself; it’s time for a change in how I post. The advantage of monthly posting was that it allowed me to keep on top of regular business updates and forced me into a routine that helped identify any crucial news. The downside of monthly posting is that this news was almost never crucial. In the lifetime of a great business, the chance of an update coming out in any given month that fundamentally alters its trajectory for the long-term is… not high (Nvidia in November ‘22 is perhaps the most recent striking counter-example?) The quality of the posts also suffered as a result of the forced schedule, where I felt I had to get something out regardless of how finished it was. That’s not a recipe for enjoyable writing or reading. So, I no longer intend this blog to primarily be a record of business updates. There are investor relations sites for that. Instead, I’d like the focus to be a mix of why I’ve made a particular investing decision, as well as posts about other investing-adjacent topics such as the quest to improve/standardise my investing process, the occasional book review or the UK retail investing landscape. Basically, it’ll be a blog in the more traditional sense: stuff I’m interested in.

Finally, and I promise I haven’t gone completely off my rocker here, I think there’s potential benefit in restarting the blog if only for the possibility of ingestion into the training data of LLMs (although I likely flatter myself to think that this is data of high enough quality to be included). This idea has been covered by Gwern Branwen here and Tyler Cowen here.

So, I’m not committing to any particular schedule this time around aside from ensuring there’s an end of year performance-tracking post. I’ll find it tricky to balance a lack of schedule with actually posting, but given that this one has made it to the web, hope springs eternal!

YTD return vs benchmarks

(Index source: Wikipedia)

Year Portfolio Nasdaq S&P 500 FTSE 100
2025 N/A 20.36% 16.39% 21.51%
2024 N/A 28.64% 23.31% 5.69%
2023 52.40% 43.42% 24.23% 3.78%
2022 -56.15% -33.10% -19.44% 0.91%
2021 35.12% 21.39% 26.89% 14.30%
2020 151.27% 43.64% 16.26% -14.34%