Why Your Portfolio Doesn’t Make Consistent Returns (& How to Fix it)

I've grown my portfolio to over £2 million, and after teaching literally hundreds of investors over the past 15 years, there's one pattern that just seems to repeat itself, and it's that most investors are missing out on consistent returns because they never build an investment process that they can actually stick to. So in this video, I'm going to show you the exact framework I use to manage 8-figure funds with as a professional trader and make over £350k in the first 6 months of this year alone. And there'll be a link in the description if you want to try out the tool that I'll be using here free for 7 days. So here's the problem: your feed's probably full of videos like these. Goldman says buy, Bank of America says sell, every YouTuber's bullish on AI one week and calling a bubble the next. And after hours of sitting through this stuff, you're still left wondering who's actually right here. Meanwhile, the market somehow continues to grind higher. We all know the feeling. So you might think that, I don't know, I'll just buy an ETF and be done with it all, or maybe follow some trading system with some signals so you can just stop worrying about the news and actually make some money here. The problem with that is that most of those strategies are either too complex to follow or are frankly complete bullshit. And going all in on the S&P whilst it seems like a nice idea could end up leaving you with a very big drawdown when one day these doomsayers are actually going to be right. So let me show you the framework that I've personally relied on for years now and why it still sits behind every investment decision that I make to this day. So before I pull up the model itself, let me show you what it's based on. So it begins by asking two questions: is growth accelerating or decelerating, which you can see here with a chart of GDP, and is inflation a problem or not? And I know it sounds almost too simple, but virtually every asset class is driven by these two forces. And that's why pretty much the entire industry lost money a couple of years ago in 2022, because they weren't focusing enough on the inflation side. So their models suddenly broke because what they had done, and you can see the drawdown here where both stocks and bonds suddenly sold off together, is fit their model according to 40 years of low inflation and generally falling interest rates. And all of a sudden, these advisors were unable to explain why everything had broken and the clients were getting terrible returns. So here's one of the ways that my model overcomes this. So take the ISM, for example. This is a big survey of purchasing managers in the US. So when this indicator's above 50, it suggests that the economy will see expansion in the next 9 to 12 months. And below 50, it's the opposite. So this is one of the key data points that go into my model. Now we can also use a version of this report to answer the inflation question. So is inflation likely to be a problem or not? Because in a risk-off environment, you could go into bonds and ultimately get no protection. So here we can look at the combined prices index for the manufacturing and non-manufacturing PMI survey. So above 50, there's likely to be inflation pressure, and below 50, we might see disinflation— in other words, inflation slowing. And at the moment, we see that inflation pressure. Now, there's a few more variables to it, but that's basically how the model determines whether it's risk-on or risk-off, and whether we need inflation protection, whether that's within stocks or bonds or sitting in gold instead of cash. It doesn't need to be complicated, it just needs to be robust enough so that we can trust the signal and then follow the process. So let me show you the full backtest now based on the last 20 years and how this exact system has helped me to consistently beat the market. So again guys, there'll be a link in the description if you want to check this out. This is inside of the community This is the one that we're going to look at. So here are the results of the test. So you can see in green the strategy going back to 2007, just before the sell-off, the Great Financial Crisis. So when markets were at their most optimistic, right before the crash, and how we got a pretty smooth— this is a log scale— but a pretty smooth run over the past 20 years. And most notably compared to The benchmark in grey, that's if you were to just buy and hold the S&P, or a 60/40 portfolio in the blue dotted line, how it really accelerated around the time that other strategies were struggling. And that again, guys, is because it takes those two things into account, not only growth but whether or not that second question, inflation is a problem or not. So many models overlooked this because they've been optimizing for 40 years of low inflation and low rates. They didn't have to think about it, and they suddenly came unstuck. So the principle behind this is that the system is adaptive. The compound return historically comes in at just over 19%, and that's 10% higher than the 60/40 benchmark, which has returned 9.3%. 3% over the same period. Now the Sharpe ratio, which is the return relative to the volatility or the, the market risk of being invested, is positive. It's above 1. A drawdown of 15% is tiny compared to the 60/40, supposedly the safe model, which saw 30%. And the S&P had a drawdown of more than 50%. It fell in half at one point in the great financial crisis. So this is the value of proper testing, guys. Your goal shouldn't be to try and find a strategy that is perfect and it never loses, but to find the one that you can stick with, because that's what gives you the confidence to ultimately stay invested over the long run and compound, instead of abandoning your process at exactly the wrong time and locking in your losses. Inevitably before the market rallies right in your face. But you might be on the right side of the stock market and still lose money if you don't pick the right ETF. And with thousands now to choose from, there are now thousands of ways for you to get it wrong. So let me show you exactly how I've solved that by narrowing it down to just a handful of ETFs before selecting the best one to hold each month. There are now more ETFs listed in America than individual stocks. Which is absolutely insane. And they overtook in 2025, last year. So returning to the model, I can show you a group of just 8 ETFs, one of which is cash, that the model rotates between. All of the stuff that you see on here, I took a step further to try and determine the best or most optimal expression. So when it was in stocks, which type of stocks? Was it quality? Was it value, etc.? For every single regime and then repeated across every single asset class. So then for bonds, when we should have been going defensive, I had a whole nerdy field day. It was one of my bright spots of the year. But thankfully you don't have to go through all of that. So you can see here, for example, it rotates within the equity portion between small caps, growth, and then the broad S&P 500 ETF. So we're talking things like IJR for small caps, IVW for growth, and then of course SPY, or you can maybe use VIO for the S&P 500. So these are all ETFs that you could find on any platform, and you've probably looked at yourself. And it just so happens that these are the optimal tools for the job for expressing these views. Now I won't go through the remaining list, but you've basically got a combination of bonds, inflation-protected bonds, gold, and then cash. Now the biggest thing to emphasize is how despite there being a list of ETFs, we've gone from thousands down to 8. The model selects just one and it holds it for the entire month. Meaning that you never have to hold multiple positions. And per the history here, you can be in the same ETF, well, not only for months but potentially for years. So there's not too many signals, and this is only going to be updated once a month. That's the beauty of it, guys. And there's no more discretionary analysis or having to worry about the news headlines and all these competing analyst opinions. So now you have a process that you can actually stick to, but imagine if you could get even better returns by picking the best stocks within the index instead of using a market-tracking ETF. Well, watch this video next where I'll show you exactly how to do that so you can get even more from this model, like you're running your own mini hedge fund. See you in the next one.