In this solo presentation, James Helliwell reflects on 15 years of investing that have grown his personal portfolio to over £2 million. He argues that long‑term success boils down to three consistent habits: (1) knowing exactly what companies to buy, (2) timing purchases wisely, and (3) maintaining a focused, diversified set of high‑conviction holdings. To operationalise habit 1, he walks through a proprietary seven‑factor screener that rates companies on profitability, durability (pricing power and margins), growth, reinvestment efficiency, valuation (price‑to‑free‑cash‑flow rather than PE), and price‑trend. He illustrates each factor with real‑world examples such as Fortinet, Costco vs. Walmart, and Nvidia. Habit 2 is explained through a valuation lens: buying at fair value using free‑cash‑flow multiples and avoiding cheap‑but‑low‑quality “value traps.” He also stresses that timing is less about chart‑based market‑timing and more about buying when a company’s valuation score is attractive. Habit 3 covers portfolio construction: aim for 15‑20 high‑conviction stocks, avoid over‑diversification, and align holdings with a personal macro view. He introduces macro filters – the ISM PMI business‑cycle indicator, sector themes (AI, semiconductors vs. software, healthcare for aging populations, China’s luxury demand) – and an AI‑risk flag within the screener to weed out companies vulnerable to automation. The video concludes with a call‑to‑action to use the screener link, watch a follow‑up video, and a personal note about his upcoming trip to South Korea.
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I've grown my portfolio to over £2 million, and after 15 years of investing, I think it comes down to doing 3 things consistently. So in this video, I'm going to break down exactly what those are, how they've helped me to manage 8-figure funds as a pro and go on to use this with my own investing personally here, and how you can also use them hopefully to grow your portfolio without worrying what the market will do next, because that's never going to go away. So let's get into it, beginning with the first step here, which is knowing what to buy. Because if we want to build a portfolio that grows wealth, gains value, however you want to put it, then our first goal should be to find great companies. It's common sense, right? Unless you're an accountant, the idea of company analysis can feel really confusing. When I was starting out, even the first sort of 6 to 12 months into my career, I just wanted to avoid it completely. I was reverting to charts, looking at technical analysis. I could figure everything out from price action because everything is in the price, as they say. But that ultimately failed. And then I turned to things like ratios, looking at the PE ratio. I didn't have to go through balance sheets. It was kind of already done for me. And it was just this idea per The Intelligent Investor and Buffett of buying what was cheap. But that wasn't going to work either because all that led me to do was looking at the wrong companies, low-quality ones that were cheap for a reason. And I ultimately still had no idea which numbers mattered and whether even fundamentals that I was trying to understand here were overrated too. So, Here's the thing that helped me when I was starting out that I think answers that question of what to buy. Now, I've built this into a screener, which I'll leave a link to in the description if you want to check it out. So this is the overall rating for these 7 factors. So you can see how the company ranks relative to other companies in the industry, the white dots, and then on the right-hand side, relative to all companies in the universe. For each of them. So profitability, obviously we want companies that are profitable rather than making a loss. We want companies that are efficient in terms of how they're able to convert sales into profits and also reinvest those profits within the business to return even more profits to scale. In other words, durability is about profit margins. Is the company able to raise its prices So a good example of that, whilst we're looking at Fortinet here, would be a brand like maybe Hermès within luxury with its Birkin bags that are waitlisted, or Ferrari. The others on here, just to pick up the pace, growth is very obvious. Are they growing sales? So this distinguishes a company perhaps like Costco, which is still growing. Let's just pull up an example. Compared to a cash cow like another retailer, say Walmart, one that's mature. It may have quality fundamentals, but it's not really growing compared to a similar quality company that also still has growth. As you can see here, it scores highly. So just returning to, we'll stick with Fortinet. Touched on reinvestment a little bit around efficiency. If the company is generating all of this profit, it's got a surplus. It can reinvest it and scale and make even more money. We don't want it to spit out a dividend at this stage. We want it to reinvest in the business because it's very hard to find another company that is this good, this profitable, this good at making money and scaling. So there's a replacement cost, an opportunity cost if it just spits out a dividend to us. We would then have to go and find another better idea, or at least equally good, to reinvest that money. So that's why it comes into it. And then the last couple, we've mentioned valuation already. The final one is the price trend. So instead of looking at what's cheap, which is where a lot of people often start and get it wrong, we should instead be looking to find companies that are actually worth owning in the first place, just as we've seen there. But buying the right company at the wrong time could still lose money, not to mention all of the hours that you might have wasted doing the analysis. Timing actually has very little to do with price charts and thinking of timing the market in that way. So here's how I know when to buy a stock that's on my watchlist here. So this is where valuation comes in, but probably not in the way that you've been told. If you were to pull up a chart of Nvidia, the PE ratio, you would look at this and see it at 35 times and go, that's expensive compared to the S&P. And you might look at a peer such as Taiwan Semiconductor, so a stock in a similar industry, and say Nvidia still looks expensive at 35 times earnings because its peer is at 30 to 31 times. But the reason this is wrong potentially is actually twofold. If you are looking only at companies that have a low PE, we know that you're going to be drawn towards value traps, towards low-quality companies to begin with, because what's cheap is often cheap for a reason. The second issue is that the PE ratio itself can be manipulated. It's more easily manipulated than free cash flow. So the valuation measure that I look for, as represented by this green line on the chart and the valuation score here, is actually price to cash, price to free cash flow. That's almost 25% lower than it's traded at historically. So to be able to buy an amazing company, even at fair value, is pretty much the dream. But that doesn't mean that we should just go out and buy everything that ticks the boxes because if they're all in the same industry, for example, or exposed to the same theme, then you're putting all your eggs in one basket. And that's risky because if the market drops, then you're without diversification. So here's what I've learned when it comes to building a portfolio that might also help you when you're doing that yourself. Okay, so this is more about your worldview. guys, and which companies fit in with it rather than this obsession with diversifying to a point of ultimately di-worsifying. Now, a starting point for this that I was shown earlier in my career is to think about the business cycle. One of the cleanest ways of doing this is to look at lead indicators, this one being the ISM PMI Index. When it's above 50, the economy should be seeing expansion over the next year, and therefore that's bullish for stocks. Below 50 is bad news. So looking at this right now, we can see that it's been improving and it's in fact surged in recent months. So without naming the obvious theme here with AI, we could look at the performance of, say, semiconductors versus software, which became a very important theme. Earlier this year, Claude Code basically came out. I think there was an announcement around offering some sort of legal services, something like that. And all of a sudden overnight, the world or investors caught onto the fact that software companies could be quite easily replaced. You might be thinking about AI in this sense, what it means for companies like chipmakers like Nvidia. Obviously that's the most consensus long position in the market now. And on the other side of that, what it means for companies in the software space like Intuit, for example. So it's for you to decide what your view is on these different themes. If you think that software, the fear in software has been overblown, then there might be a great opportunity using the screener to identify high-ranking software companies that are now trading at incredible discounts. If you take a different view that, look, these guys are just cooked, it's over, then this would obviously be a sector to avoid. And one of the things I've done is build into the screen an AI risk flag. So even though they might rank highly, let's take MSCI. They've got an analytics business, which of course is software as well as ratings. you can see that they are actually also under threat. So there's various themes. Another one would be longer term. So thinking beyond the business cycle, population growth. You could look to companies in the healthcare space solving problems for aging populations, for older societies. Within this, you might also think about how the world is getting fatter, believe it or not. As middle-class incomes rise, diets through disposable income, see a greater propensity towards lifestyle diseases like diabetes, weight loss drugs developed by Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly, for example. And another quick one that comes to mind would be what's going on in China. They are the world's biggest consumer of commodities. Their middle class is also one of the biggest drivers of luxury demand. And you can see it currently affecting companies like Hermès, LVMH, and so on because China is still slowing down. This being another one of the leading indicators that you can look at, and that is being felt in the earnings of luxury companies and perhaps also overall global GDP growth. So I don't want to make this too complicated. You don't necessarily need to be all over the macro data. You can be, it depends on your investment horizon. I would aim for a minimum of 15 to 20 stocks. You can add a few more, but I wouldn't go crazy and begin becoming basically a diversified portfolio. Because when you've bought great companies at reasonable prices and you truly believe in them, then price is just noise. It's like the neighbor putting his head over the fence and saying, do you want to know how much your house is worth? You haven't asked for it. It's just the market's vote. It's based on feelings and emotion. Rather than facts. So if you want more help with this, then click the link below and watch this video next, which YouTube thinks you're going to love. And I'm actually off to South Korea next week, so I'll see you from there, from the home of the world's best-performing stock market this year. Take it easy.
