This week the S&P 500 closed at a record high, above 7,600 for the first time, after rising nine weeks in a row. A handful of giant American tech companies did almost all of the lifting. Then on Friday a single chip company gave a disappointing forecast, and the market lost a trillion dollars of value in an afternoon.

This whippy, top-heavy thing is the index almost everyone owns. It is my default investment, and it’s where I think most people should start. For good reason — over time it returns around 10% per year, and although it has taken major hits with wars, pandemics, and recessions, it always comes back to new highs.

Vanguard’s S&P 500 fund recently became the first exchange-traded fund in history to hold more than a trillion dollars. Everyone is buying the same index, for the same reason: it keeps going up.

At the turn of this year, I went the other way. I moved my core holding out of the standard, cap-weighted S&P 500 — the one nearly everybody owns — and into an equal-weight version of the same 500 companies.

(At the same time, I also bought a slice of small caps, through a Russell 2000 ETF, but that is incidental to this article).

Let me explain what a cap-weighted index is, and the alternative…

You think you own 500 companies. You mostly own about ten.

The standard S&P 500 is weighted by size: the bigger a company, the more of your money goes into it. After a decade of a few technology giants swallowing the market, the ten largest are now getting on for forty per cent of the entire index — more than they were at the very top of the dotcom bubble.

Seven of them, the ones everyone calls the Magnificent Seven, make up more than a third of the index between them.

So the “diversified” index fund you bought for safety is, actually, a large bet on about ten companies. The other 490 are along for the ride.

Now the counter to this point — these giants are not dotcom fantasies that never earned a penny. They produce around thirty per cent of the whole index’s profits, and they trade at roughly thirty times earnings.

This is expensive, but it’s a long way from the sixty-six times earnings that the biggest names reached in 2000.

Goldman Sachs has pencilled in around three per cent a year forecast for the S&P 500 over the coming decade, against thirteen over the last one, and blames this on the concentration of the index.

So I’m not calling it a bubble. I’m saying something narrower: I would rather not have a third of a fund I bought for diversification quietly turn into a bet on seven companies and an enormous electricity bill — which is roughly what the AI build-out now is.

This week two of those giants said they’re raising tens of billions of dollars to keep paying for it. It might be the best money they ever spend. I just don’t want it to be the thing my whole portfolio rests on, by accident.

Equal weight is the fix. Same 500 companies, same index — but each one gets the same small slice, trimmed back to level four times a year. You still own the giants. You just stop letting a handful of them be the entire story, and you lean towards the 490 that are cheaper.

What the numbers say

Here is what these three funds actually did, in sterling:

Two things stand out. The equal-weight version and the small caps had a poor 2025 — up two and three per cent, while the standard index made eight.

That is precisely what I was buying into at the turn of the year: the unloved stuff. Buying what has lagged always feels wrong, which is rather the point of it.

And so far this year, it has held up. Equal weight has matched the plain index almost to the decimal, and the small caps are up sixteen per cent.

It is barely six months and it proves nothing yet, but I believe the equal weight index will outstrip the cap weight, over the next year or so at least. It has already gone from 2.5% last year to 9.6% year to date — this baby is accelerating, I don’t believe the Magnificent Seven will.

The arguments I won’t make

There are three popular reasons to do what I’ve done. I think two of them are weak, and I would rather say so than pretend my side is airtight.

The first is the one you hear most: concentration is at a record, so it must snap back. This is the weakest argument in investing. A stretched elastic band tells you it is stretched; it tells you nothing about when it lets go.

Concentration like this can persist for years and get worse — it just did, all the way to this week’s record high.

The second was, honestly, half of my original reasoning, and it has come apart. Small companies feel interest rates far more than the giants do, and a year ago I expected falling rates to carry them up. That bet is dead: the Fed has stopped cutting, inflation is the hottest it has been in nearly three years, and the market now expects rates to rise, not fall.

That is a headwind for exactly the small, indebted companies I leaned into. They have risen this year anyway — which tells you the rate story was never the whole story.

The third is that this is a Trump trade: tariffs and tax cuts favouring home-grown American firms. Maybe. But tariffs help the company that builds and sells at home and clobber the many small ones that import what they make things from. Politics is a terrible foundation for a portfolio, and I hold that reason most loosely of all.

It has been called before, and missed

At the start of 2024, Fundstrat’s Tom Lee — a serious analyst, not a chancer — said the small-cap index would jump fifty per cent in a year, on the very argument I have just half-dismantled.

It returned eleven. The standard S&P did twenty-five.

The giants simply kept winning. He is making much the same call for 2026, and this time, so far, it is going his way — which is exactly why I am wary of reading too much into six good months.

Tom Hayes, who runs the Great Hill Capital hedge fund, has spent months making the same broadening case. I think he’s right, time will tell.

One thing I must point out about that small-cap Russell 2000 fund: roughly four in ten of the companies in it make no profit at all — yet. But the Russell trade isn’t the focus of this article, I just mention it because it happened at the same time. And it’s done rather well!

So why switch to equal-weight?

Fair question. Which wins over the next couple of years — equal weight, or the standard index? I don’t know. Nobody does, and the people who sound certain are usually selling something.

What I know is narrower, and more useful. The index I passively owned had quietly turned into an active bet I never actually chose.

Moving to equal weight does not promise me a better return. It just means that whatever happens next, I am not exposed so heavily to the madness of the Magnificent Seven. They have given us fantastic ride up until now, but I fear they may be running out of breath, and I’d rather spread my bets a little.

And no, for anyone who has read me before, I have not stopped picking my own stocks — that is the top layer of what I do, but it’s a smaller one. The boring index core still does most of the heavy lifting. This piece is about that core.

An index fund isn’t a thing you buy and forget. It is a portfolio that quietly changes shape while everyone admires the returns.

Mine just changed shape on purpose.

This is what I’ve done with my own money, and why. It isn’t financial advice, and it isn’t a suggestion that you do the same — I get things wrong, as the rest of this piece makes clear. Do your own research, and remember the value of investments can fall as well as rise.

The American stock market has hit more than twenty record highs this year, and we’re barely into June. It set the latest one on Monday, shrugging off the hottest inflation reading in nearly three years and a war in the Middle East. As I write, it’s sitting a whisker below the next one.

So, naturally, the question I get most is whether now is a terrible time to start.

It’s a fair question. Everything looks expensive. The sensible-sounding voice in your head says wait for the dip, buy when it’s cheap, and don’t be the mug who piles in at the top.

I understand the instinct, but it’s wrong.

Buying at a record high has, historically, been a slightly better than average idea.

Not a worse one. Better.

JPMorgan ran the numbers back to 1988. If you’d only ever bought the S&P 500 on days it stood at an all-time high — supposedly the worst possible timing — you’d have done a shade better over the next one, three and five years than if you’d bought on a random day.

Five years out, you’d have made 81% buying on the all-time top days, against 75% buying on normal days.

It isn’t a trick. Markets go up more often than they go down, so they spend most of their lives at or near a high. A record isn’t a ceiling the market bangs its head on. New highs lead to more new highs far more often than they lead to ruin.

You don’t need the market to crash before you buy.

Could it fall from here? Of course. It might fall the week after you buy. It’s expensive, the headlines are grim, and anyone who tells you what happens next is just guessing.

But watch what the waiting actually does. It doesn’t buy you a cheaper price — it just keeps you out, because the dip never quite arrives. And when it does, you’ll be more frightened than you are today, not less. A falling market feels far worse than an expensive one.

Nobody selling financial products will say this plainly, so I will.

Forget trying to time the market. You win by being boring: buy a cheap fund that tracks the whole market, put money in regularly, and stop checking whether today was a clever day to buy. The day you buy barely matters.

I sacked my financial adviser years ago and have run my own money ever since. The most useful habit I have isn’t a clever call — it’s refusing to let the market’s mood decide whether I invest. The headlines are always frightening. There’s always a reason to wait.

Is now a terrible time to start?

The figures say not. Even though the price is high at the moment, it could be even higher next week, and higher still the week after — the market goes up more than it goes down. And then you’ll be kicking yourself for the growth you’ve missed out on.

The dip you’re waiting for may never come. And all the time you’re waiting for it, you’re out of the market. You think you’re being smart, waiting for a better deal, but the numbers show you’re actually better off by buying at the highs.

The record high isn’t the risk. The waiting is.

This is what I write about: helping people who suspect they should be doing something with their money finally get on with it — without paying someone 1% a year to hold their hand. It’s free!

This is what I think and what I do, not financial advice. I’m not a regulated adviser and I don’t know your circumstances. Investments can fall as well as rise, and the past is no promise about the future. The decision is always yours.

Last year, British savers piled £69 billion into Cash ISAs, where the interest barely keeps up with inflation.

They put only £31 billion into investments.

Two million people opened a new Cash ISA.

Just under three hundred thousand opened a Stocks and Shares one.

Nearly ten to one, in favour of the option that pays less than rising prices.

There is currently somewhere north of four hundred billion pounds sitting in British Cash ISAs. Not invested. Just sitting. Earning less, in real terms, every year.

Four and a half million British adults have ten thousand pounds or more in a Cash ISA and no stock-market investments at all.

They are perfectly intelligent, rational people. They have chosen the option that loses them money slowly because the option that makes them money felt unsafe.

Why?

My bet — and I'm openly flagging this as a hunch, not a finding — is that we never quite got over the war.

People forget how long it took us to come out of it. Rationing didn't end in 1945. It ended in 1954, nine years after VE Day. Britain was the last country involved in the war to stop rationing food. Sweets came off the ration in 1953. Meat held on until the summer of 1954.

The generation that came out of that did not grow up thinking life was generous. They grew up being told that saving was virtuous and spending was suspect.

Make do. Mend. Don't be flash. Don't get ideas above your station.

They taught their children. Their children taught us.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, the same war ended in suburbs, the GI Bill, and a long, deliberate campaign to convince ordinary Americans they should own a piece of the country they'd fought for.

Two victors. Two completely different settlements. Eighty years on, we're still living in the shape of them.

The phrases give us away:

Saving for a rainy day. Neither a borrower nor a lender be.
If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

All of these sound like wisdom. None of them survives contact with a compound interest table.

Twenty thousand pounds in a Cash ISA at 3%, with inflation running at two and a half, grows to about twenty-two thousand pounds in real terms after twenty years.

The same twenty thousand in a global stock-market tracker, at the long-run average return of around 10% a year, grows to about eighty thousand.

The Cash ISA saver hasn't lost money in the sense their bank statement would recognise. The balance is still going up every year.

But they have lost about sixty thousand pounds in the only sense that matters — the things that money could have bought them, twenty years later.

That isn’t recklessness. That’s caution. The British kind: careful, sensible, slightly proud of itself, and quietly very expensive.

We thought we were being careful.

We were just being scared.

The two aren’t the same…

Long-run figures here are based on historical averages, not predictions. The value of investments can fall as well as rise, and the past is not a guide to the future. I am not a financial adviser — nothing here is personal financial advice. Please do your own research before making any decisions.

You don’t need to be smart to manage your own money. You don’t need to be brave. You don’t even need to be especially interested in investing.

You just need to start.

Let me be specific about what “start” means. And explain why most people don’t.

The starting problem

Most people don’t have an investing problem. They have a starting problem.

A current account they’ve been meaning to do something about for years. A workplace pension they’ve never opened. An adviser who calls once a year, charges them a percentage of everything they own, and shows them a graph that has gone up by less than it should have.

None of these feel urgent. None of them, on their own, seem like anything to worry about. So they sit there, year after year, until one day you look up and realise a lot of money has quietly gone missing.

There are really two ways people fall behind with money. They look very different from the outside, but they end in the same place.

The first is inertia. Money sits in cash, or in a Cash ISA, drifting. The number on the statement doesn’t go down, so it doesn’t feel like a loss. Meanwhile, inflation is busy in the background, quietly making each pound worth a little less than it was the year before.

By the time you notice, you’ve been losing money for a decade without seeing a single red number.

The second is outsourcing. Money is handed to a financial adviser, who charges fees year after year for results that, more often than not, are worse than the market did on its own, without any advice or clever tactics. But the balance on the statement goes up every year, so it looks fine.

The bit that doesn’t make it onto the statement is the money you didn’t earn — the gap between what your portfolio did and what it could have done at a fraction of the cost.

Both feel safe. Both are quietly expensive. And neither problem requires you to know anything clever about investing to fix.

Three things you can do (and the order to do them in)

Once you’ve decided to do something, the next question is what. There are three things, and they get progressively more demanding. I think of them as crawl, walk, and run — three layers, each built on the one before.

The first layer is the one thing that beats most professionals: buy a single low-cost fund that quietly owns a slice of the biggest companies in America. Add to it when you can. Then leave it alone. That’s the whole strategy. Most people who do just this — and nothing else — will do better than the average paid adviser.

That isn’t an exaggeration. It’s a quirk of how the investment industry works, and we’ll come back to it.

The second layer is the first layer plus a small amount of selective diversification. A couple of additional funds, for different parts of the world, or different parts of the economy. Done well, this can quietly add to your long-run returns. Done badly, it just makes things more complicated for no real benefit.

The third layer is individual stocks. Specific companies, bought at the right time, held for a few years, and then sold when the rest of the world has caught up. The aim here isn’t to beat the market by a percent or two. The aim is to double or treble your money on each one. It’s harder, slower, requires more reading, and isn’t for everyone. But when it works, it can work in ways the other two never will.

I do all three. You can too — but if you want to keep it simple, the first layer is all you ever need.

The first layer, in plain English

One fund. Whatever money you can spare, whenever you can spare it. Then don’t touch it.

The fund tracks something called the S&P 500 — the five hundred biggest companies in America. Why those five hundred? Two reasons. They include nearly every American name you’ve heard of — Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Coca-Cola, Visa — plus hundreds more that quietly dominate their industries without you ever noticing. And as a group, they have made their owners considerably wealthier over the last fifty years. There’s no reason to expect that to stop.

Yes, an American market, even though I’m British — why?

The answer is the track record. Over the last 50 years or more, the S&P 500 has averaged around 10% a year. There have been bumps along the way, but it always recovers

Don’t be fooled into investing in the FTSE 100 just because you’re English — that’s gone nowhere for years! It doesn’t matter where you live, investing is global now.

You buy this fund inside a Stocks & Shares ISA, or inside a SIPP, so the gains are sheltered from tax. You decide how to put money in — a monthly direct debit so you don’t have to think about it, lump sums whenever you have them, or both.

The fund company does the rest — buying the actual shares, collecting the dividends, putting them back to work. You don’t have to read the financial press. You don’t have to know what the market did this week. You don’t have to do anything.

A note on cost, because this is where the magic of the first layer really sits. The fund company’s fee for running this is tiny — a fraction of a percent a year. The one I use is 0.07%.

To put it in everyday money: for every £10,000 you have in the fund, they take about £7 a year. A financial adviser doing roughly the equivalent job typically charges around £200 a year for the same £10,000 — and then puts your money in funds that charge a hundred or more on top.

Compounded across a working life, that fee gap is HUGE.

£5,000 left in a cheap fund for 30 years turns into around £85,000. The expensive route gets you to £38,000. Less than half. Same market. Same work. The rest is what gets quietly skimmed off the top before it reaches you.

Here’s the quirk we said we’d come back to. Around 85% of professional active funds fail to beat a simple index tracker over fifteen years. Some years a manager beats the market. Almost none do it consistently — and the ones charging you to try are taking their fee whether they win or lose.

That’s the first layer. It isn’t exciting. It isn’t interesting. It works precisely because it isn’t either of those things.

For a great many readers, this is the whole article. Set up the fund. Set up the contribution. Get on with your life.

What the other two layers are for

If the first layer is enough for most people, why bother with anything else?

Two reasons.

The first is curiosity. Once the first layer is running, and you’ve been ignoring it successfully for a year or two, some readers want to know what else is possible.

Are there other markets worth a slice? Are there parts of the economy that go in and out of fashion in long, predictable waves? Can you do a little better than just owning the index, without taking silly risks?

The answer to all of those is yes. That’s what the second layer is for. It’s still mostly about owning funds rather than picking stocks, but with a thoughtful tilt toward markets and sectors that look better-priced than the rest.

Done patiently, it can add a few percent to your long-run returns, and reduce your downside in the bad times. Not life-changing on its own — but worth the small extra effort if you have the appetite for it.

The second reason is the bigger one: outsized returns. The first layer gives you the market’s return. The second layer gives you a little more than the market and reduces your risk a bit.

But the third — individual companies, bought when they’re out of fashion, held until they’re not — gives you the chance of returns measured in multiples, not percentages.

A worked example from my own portfolio. Last summer I bought shares in a well-known American technology company at a moment when nobody wanted to own them (ok, it was INTEL). The price had collapsed. The headlines were terrible. The underlying business was still sound — it just wasn’t fashionable.

I held it for nine months. I sold it a few days ago, for nearly five times what I paid.

That kind of return doesn’t happen often. It happens because of patience and preparation, not cleverness. And it happens on top of the first layer that’s still running quietly in the background. The third layer doesn’t replace the first. Nothing replaces the first.

I’ll write about the second and third layers in more depth in future pieces. They’re where the interesting reading is. But the foundation is where the money is.

The hard part is the starting

Most of what makes ordinary people genuinely rich over a lifetime isn’t cleverness, or nerve, or insight. It’s having taken the first step many years ago, and then mostly not undone it.

The first step is the hardest one. Not because it’s complicated — it isn’t. Because it requires you to admit you’ve been putting it off, and then do something about it today.

You don’t need to be smart to do this. You don’t need to be brave. You don’t even need to be confident you’re doing it right — once you’re in a low-cost fund that owns the biggest companies in America, “doing it right” mostly takes care of itself.

You just need to start.

I am not a financial adviser. Nothing here is personal financial advice. Investing involves risk and you can lose money. Please do your own research before making any investment decisions.

On Friday I closed my Intel position.

Bought at $20.24 last August. Sold at $99 — a gain of 389% in 269 days, or roughly 528% annualised. Close to five times my money in nine months. I won’t pretend that’s typical. It isn’t. But it didn’t happen by accident either.

This is a worked example of how I pick individual stocks, and — just as importantly — how I sell them.

The model

Every individual stock I buy goes through the same checklist. It’s not original. It borrows heavily from Warren Buffett. Six things have to line up:

1. A good company with a long, credible track record.

2. A share price beaten down well below what the fundamentals justify.

3. A turnaround already in progress — new management, restructuring, a real strategic shift.

4. A specific catalyst, in place or visible on the horizon.

5. Macro or cyclical tailwinds the market hasn’t fully priced in.

6. Realistic potential for at least a 2-3x return in 2-3 years.

That last point is the threshold. If a stock can’t reach it, I’m not interested. The whole point of this part of the portfolio is excess returns — not 10% or 20%.

Last summer, Intel hit every box.

Why Intel was the buy

To most people, Intel looked finished.

The stock was below $20, well off its recent highs. The company had reported multi-billion-dollar losses. Its manufacturing nodes were a generation behind TSMC. The new CEO, Lip-Bu Tan, three months into the job, was laying off 15% of the workforce just to keep the lights on. The financial press wrote about Intel the way it writes about businesses that don’t survive.

What I saw was different.

A 50-year-old American semiconductor giant, trading at the price of a struggling start-up. Already promised billions of dollars in CHIPS Act money for domestic chip manufacturing. A new CEO with a serious turnaround track record. And — the part most investors weren’t pricing in — a US administration that had decided, openly, that semiconductor sovereignty was a matter of national security.

You don’t let your only domestic leading-edge chipmaker fail. Not on Trump’s watch.

The question wasn’t whether Washington would backstop Intel. It was how, and how visibly.

I bought on 5 August at $20.24.

The catalyst, when it came, was bigger than I’d modelled. In late August, the Trump administration announced it had taken a 9.9% stake in Intel — buying 433 million shares at $20.47, $8.9 billion in total. SoftBank followed with a $2 billion investment. Nvidia announced a $5 billion collaboration. The stock did what stocks do when the market suddenly realises the floor is concrete, not sand.

By the end of April 2026, with Q1 results beating expectations and AI revenue up 22% year-on-year, Intel was trading around $99.

Why I sold

Here’s the part that matters more than the entry.

I didn’t sell because I think Intel is finished going up. It probably isn’t.

The President was on Truth Social last week claiming a $45 billion paper gain on the government’s stake, and showing no sign of letting the story end there. Tan’s turnaround is starting to deliver real numbers. The fundamentals are catching up with the share price for the first time in years.

But — and this is the discipline the financial industry hopes you’ll forget — the position had hit my exit price. About two years ahead of schedule. The thesis I bought has now played out. From here, Intel is a different bet at a different valuation.

It might double again. It might not. What I know is that the easy money — the gap between a beaten-down share price and a fundamentals-justified one — has been closed. Anything from here is harder-earned.

I’d rather take the profit and put it to work somewhere that gap is still wide open.

Where the cash goes

I’m not opening any new positions. The proceeds are going into existing positions in the portfolio — specifically the ones that haven’t run yet.

Some are still close to where I bought them. A handful have drifted lower since I opened them, which means I get to pick up more shares at a lower average cost.

This is how the strategy compounds. Take a profit when one position resolves quickly. Use it to lower the cost base on the ones that haven’t.

Why this matters

A 389% return in nine months wasn’t what I modelled when I bought Intel. The model called for 2-3x in 2-3 years. We got nearly 5x in nine months. Sometimes the catalyst lands harder and faster than expected.

But the return is downstream of the process. You don’t pick stocks like Intel by accident. You don’t sell them at the right time without a plan. The checklist is the foundation. The discipline to take profit when the thesis is done is what turns the foundation into a result.

The full process — the actual positions, the buy and sell decisions, the reasoning behind each — is what my paid subscription will cover. It’s launching shortly.

Free readers get the framework. Paid subscribers see the portfolio and the trades.

I am not a financial adviser. Nothing here is personal financial advice. The Intel position described is one of mine, shared as an illustration of how I think — not as a recommendation. Individual stock picks can go wrong as easily as they go right; a 389% gain in nine months is not typical, and you should not assume similar results from any other stock. Please do your own research before making any investment decisions.

Most people’s relationship with their pension goes like this.

A workplace pension statement arrives once a year. It lists a number. The number goes up most years. You glance at it, file it somewhere, and go back to thinking about the other 11 months of your life.

That’s it. That’s the whole relationship.

Now, the number going up is good. But if that’s the sum total of your engagement with the most important tax wrapper the UK government has ever created, you are almost certainly leaving a significant amount of money on the table.

The thing nobody tells you

A pension isn’t a product. It’s a wrapper.

That’s it. That’s the whole concept. The pension industry has spent decades making it sound like something complicated — with jargon about “funds” and “lifestyle strategies” and “default options” — because if it sounded as simple as it actually is, nobody would pay them the fees they charge.

Here’s what a pension actually is: a tax-advantaged account you can hold investments inside. The investments do the work. The wrapper shelters them from tax.

Your workplace pension is one kind of wrapper. A SIPP — a Self-Invested Personal Pension — is another. The money inside can be the same money. The investments inside can be the same investments.

The difference is who gets to decide what those investments are.

In your workplace pension: it’s usually someone else.

In a SIPP: it’s you.

Why this matters, in numbers

For the 2026/27 tax year, you can contribute up to £60,000 into your pensions (that’s all of them, combined, not per pension) and receive tax relief on the whole lot — provided you’ve earned at least that much. The standard annual allowance is £60,000.

Tax relief means the government tops up your contribution to reflect the tax you paid to earn that money in the first place. The rates are straightforward:

• If you pay basic-rate tax (20%), every £800 you put in becomes £1,000 in the pension. HMRC adds the £200.

• If you pay higher-rate tax (40%), you can claim an additional 20% through self-assessment. That £1,000 in the pension effectively costs you £600.

• If you pay additional-rate tax (45%), the effective cost drops further — around £550 per £1,000 in the pension.

Let me say that again in case it didn’t land.

If you’re a higher-rate taxpayer, the government gives you, for free, forty pence of every pound you put into a pension.

There is no other investment in the UK that starts you off with a guaranteed 67% return on your money before the markets do anything at all.

So why doesn’t everyone max it out?

Two reasons, and they compound.

First: most people’s only exposure to pensions is their workplace scheme. And workplace schemes, by design, give you very limited visibility and even more limited control. You fill out a form on your first day of work, you tick the default box because reading the alternatives feels like homework, and you don’t look at it again until retirement is actually visible in the distance. The industry likes it this way.

Second: the word “pension” has a specific emotional weight. It feels like something for retirement, which feels like something for later, which feels like something for a future version of you who you don’t yet have to worry about. The tax relief is invisible — you don’t see it hit your bank account the way you see a salary. Your employer’s contribution is invisible too. So it doesn’t feel like “money” in the way a bank balance or an ISA does.

The result is that the most powerful tax wrapper available to ordinary people in the UK is also the most underused.

What I do

I hold the same ETFs in my SIPP that I hold in my ISA.

That’s not a complicated strategy. It’s not a clever one. It’s just the observation that if a low-cost global equity ETF is the right long-term home for the money in my ISA, it’s also the right long-term home for the money in my SIPP. The investments don’t need to be different just because the wrapper is.

What changes is the tax treatment. My ISA grows free of income tax and capital gains tax, which is excellent. My SIPP grows in the same way — but I also got tax relief on the money going in, which is even better.

The only trade-off is access. ISA money I can touch whenever. SIPP money is locked away until at least 55 (rising to 57 from 2028). For the portion of your savings you genuinely won’t need until you’re older, that’s not a trade-off. That’s just the right wrapper for the job.

What to actually do

If you don’t have a SIPP yet, open one. The major UK providers — Interactive Investor, AJ Bell, Hargreaves Lansdown — all offer them. The account-opening process is similar to opening an ISA. You need your National Insurance number and a few details about your existing pensions. It takes about 20 minutes.

Once it’s open, you decide what to hold in it. If you don’t want to think too hard, a low-cost global equity ETF or an S&P 500 ETF is a reasonable default. It’s what I use. Your circumstances may differ.

If you have old workplace pensions from previous employers sitting around — the kind most people forget about entirely — consider whether transferring them into a SIPP would give you more control, more visibility, and lower fees. Sometimes it will; sometimes the old pension has valuable benefits that would be lost on transfer. This is a question to think carefully about before acting, and for some people it’s worth paying for one-off professional advice.

For the 2026/27 tax year, think about how much of your annual allowance you’ve already used through your workplace contributions, and whether you can top up directly to take more advantage of the tax relief.

The bottom line

You already know how to run an ISA. You can run a SIPP too. The mechanics are the same. The investments can be the same. The only thing that’s different is the tax treatment — and the tax treatment is in your favour.

Most people’s pensions are run by someone else, in funds they didn’t choose, charging fees they don’t see. That’s a default, not a decision. You can make a different one.

You’re probably already giving the taxman money you didn’t have to.

I am not a financial adviser. Nothing here is personal financial advice. Pension rules are complex and the right approach depends on your individual circumstances — particularly if you have old workplace pensions with guaranteed benefits, or if your earnings put you near the tapered annual allowance threshold. Tax treatment depends on your individual circumstances and may be subject to change. Please do your own research, and consider seeking qualified independent advice before making any pension transfers.

The first time the market really tests you, you will want to do something.

Late March 2020. The S&P 500 had fallen roughly a third in five weeks. The FTSE was down about the same. Every headline was apocalyptic, every forecast worse than the last, and nobody knew how bad it would get. If you had an ISA or a SIPP, it looked like a crime scene.

The temptation to sell was enormous. Millions of people did.

They were wrong. Not because the worry was unfounded — it wasn’t — but because selling is the easy half of the trade. Once you’re out, you have to decide when to get back in. Most people never find a good answer to that question.

The number that should terrify you

Here’s what selling in a crash tends to cost.

J.P. Morgan looked at the S&P 500 over the twenty years from 2004 to 2024. Put $10,000 in at the start and leave it alone: you end up with about $70,000 — an annualised return of 10.5%.

Miss just the ten best trading days — out of roughly five thousand trading days in the period — and the return drops to 6.2%. Your $10,000 becomes about $35,000 instead of $70,000. Miss the twenty best days and you’re down to 3.6%.

Half your wealth. Gone. Not because you were unlucky — because you sat in cash for two weeks at exactly the wrong time.

Here is the sting. Those best days are almost always right next door to the worst days. In one eight-day window in March 2020, the S&P 500 had three of its thirty best trading days and five of its thirty worst trading days of the last thirty years. The pain and the rebound happen within days of each other.

You cannot miss the bottom without also missing the bounce.

Why we sell anyway

Knowing this doesn’t help as much as you’d hope, because we aren’t wired to sit still.

Daniel Kahneman won a Nobel Prize partly for showing that losses hurt about twice as much as equivalent gains feel good. A 30% drop doesn’t register as a 30% drop. It registers as excruciating.

On top of that there’s action bias: when something goes wrong, doing anything feels better than doing nothing. Football goalkeepers dive left or right on penalties because standing still looks ridiculous, even though standing still would save more penalties. Investors sell in a crash for the same reason. Doing something feels like taking control. It usually isn’t.

The news cycle doesn’t help. Headlines in a bear market are not designed to calm you down. They are designed to keep you watching.

What doing nothing actually looks like

Let me be specific, because “do nothing” is a lazy phrase.

Doing nothing is not the same as never putting any more money in. When I have spare cash, it goes into my ISA or SIPP. When prices are low, that money buys more units. That’s a feature, not a problem.

Doing nothing is not the same as never looking at your portfolio. It means looking at it rarely enough that you don’t feel obliged to act on every wobble.

Doing nothing does not mean ignoring everything. It means ignoring the specific noise — daily headlines, doom-laden forecasts, the bloke at the pub who’s just discovered gold — that tempts you to abandon a strategy that works.

Take the last few weeks. The US–Iran war sent the market down about 9% in March. I didn’t sell a thing. Nothing fundamental had changed in the underlying economy — this was geopolitics, not earnings. The S&P 500 closed at a new all-time high last week. If I’d sold, I’d have missed the recovery.

The 2022 Ukraine war was the same story. The market dropped, and went on to set successive new highs. The war is still going on.

Wars happen. Markets recover.

The real tests

In 2007–09 the S&P 500 fell more than 50% peak to trough. It took until 2013 to get back to its previous high. The people who sold at the bottom locked in a historic loss. The people who held, and kept buying, ended up owning much more of the market at the bottom — and watched it triple over the decade that followed.

In 2020 the S&P fell more than 30% in five weeks, the fastest crash on record. It took about twenty weeks from the bottom to a new all-time high.

There will be another one. I don’t know when, and neither does anyone else. What I do know is that when it comes, it will feel like every other crisis has felt: unique, unprecedented, and uniquely terrifying.

It won’t be. And your strategy, if you have one, will be to not sell.

The market rewards patience. It does not reward cleverness, or nerve, or insight. It rewards the people who sat there when everyone else was moving.

Not occasionally. Consistently.

Past performance is not a guarantee of future results. I am not a financial adviser and nothing here is personal advice — do your own research before you act on any of it.

There is a version of personal finance that sounds responsible, feels safe, but quietly costs you a fortune. It goes like this: “I don’t want to risk my savings in the stock market, so I’ll keep it in a cash ISA where it’s safe.”

Three-quarters of all ISA money in the UK is sitting in cash accounts. Which means three-quarters of ISA holders are doing something that feels prudent but isn’t.

This isn’t a criticism of the people who made that choice. Nobody told them otherwise. The financial industry makes far more money from complexity than it does from telling you to do something simple — and “just invest in a low-cost index fund” is devastatingly simple. So they never tell you that.

What “safe” actually costs you

A cash ISA paying 4.5% sounds decent. Inflation is running at around 3.5%. Your real return — the actual increase in your purchasing power — is roughly 1%. In a good year.

That’s not safety. That’s just a slow death.

Now compare that to a Stocks & Shares ISA invested in a low-cost S&P 500 ETF. Over the past ten years, the average stocks and shares ISA has returned around 9–10% per year. Not every year — some years more, some years less, occasionally negative. But compounded over time, the gap becomes almost painful to look at.

Here’s a comparison that makes it concrete. Someone who has put their full annual ISA allowance into cash every year since 1999 would have, by early 2026, roughly £470,000. Impressive.

Someone who put the same money into a stocks and shares ISA — using a simple low-cost S&P 500 ETF — would have around £1.58 million. More than three times as much. Same money. Same tax wrapper. Completely different destination.

The cash ISA didn’t protect their money. It just stopped it growing.

“But what about the risk?”

Yes, a Stocks & Shares ISA can go down. It will go down — probably several times over a long investing life. There will be crashes. There will be headlines. There will be a period where your balance is lower than it was.

A cash ISA doesn’t do that. The number on the screen never falls.

But here’s the thing most people miss: that stability has a price tag. The price is everything above inflation that you didn’t earn. The price is the compounding that never happened. The price is the gap between £470,000 and £1.58 million.

Risk isn’t just the chance your investments fall in value. Risk is also the chance you end up with far less money than you could have had. That risk is invisible in a cash account. It doesn’t show up as a red number. It just quietly happens.

Safe is just another word for slowly losing money.

The timing matters more than usual right now

A quick note on what’s changing. The government has signalled that from April 2027, the amount you can put into a cash ISA each year will drop significantly for under-65s. The policy is deliberate: it’s designed to push more money into stocks and shares, where it can actually work for you.

Whether you agree with that policy or not, the direction of travel is clear. The window to park large sums in a cash ISA is closing.

The current tax year — 2026/27 — gives you £20,000 in ISA allowance across all ISA types. The question is simply: what do you do with it?

So what should you actually do?

A cash ISA isn’t always wrong. For money you might need within the next two or three years — an emergency fund, a house deposit, a planned large expense — cash is fine. That’s what it’s for.

But for long-term wealth — money you won’t need for ten years or more — keeping it in cash isn’t conservative. It’s expensive.

The alternative is straightforward. A Stocks & Shares ISA, holding a low-cost S&P 500 ETF, costs almost nothing to run and has historically delivered returns that cash can’t touch. You set it up once, invest regularly, and leave it alone. The less you fiddle with it, the better it tends to do.

You don’t need to be an expert. You don’t need to pick stocks or read financial reports or understand macroeconomics. You just need to stop treating “safety” as the absence of volatility and start treating it as the presence of long-term growth.

The most expensive financial decision you can make isn’t a bad investment. It’s not investing at all.

One more thing

Everything I’ve just described — the ISA wrapper, the low-cost ETF, the compounding arithmetic, how to actually buy this stuff — is laid out step by step in my free ebook, Make Yourself Rich.

It’s the complete guide I wish someone had handed me twenty years ago. It’s what I’ve learned over the last twenty years, condensed into a two hour read.

You can get the first few chapters free when you subscribe to Tim’s Wealth Letter. When you’ve read that, and want the rest, you can buy the full book here: Get your copy of Make Yourself Rich here.

The book will show you step by step how to take advantage of the two huge opportunities we now have: tax free investing and low-cost ETFs.

The third magical ingredient is time — the sooner you start, the more you’ll end up with. I’d start now if I were you…

I am not a financial adviser. Nothing here is personal financial advice. Please do your own research before making any investment decisions.

One of the most expensive mistakes in investing is to underestimate fees.

People hear 1% or 1.5% a year and think it sounds trivial. They imagine it’s a small cost of doing business. A minor detail. The sort of thing only obsessive people worry about.

That is a very expensive misunderstanding.

Because fees do not just reduce your returns once.

They reduce them every year.

And every pound lost in fees is not only gone today. It is also gone from every year of future compounding that pound could have enjoyed if it had stayed invested for you instead.

That is where the real damage lies.

A low-cost ETF may charge a tiny annual fee. A managed product or adviser-led portfolio may charge much more once you add up the layers: adviser fee, platform fee, underlying fund fees, trading costs, and all the other little nibbles that mysteriously appear.

Each one sounds tolerable on its own.

Together, they can do extraordinary damage.

Suppose you invest £5,000 for 30 years at 10% a year.

At that rate, you end up with roughly £87,000.

Now knock just 1% off that annual return, so instead of 10% you get 9%.

You finish with around £66,000.

That is roughly £21,000 gone.

And what changed? Not the market. Not your intelligence. Not your discipline. Just the annual drag of fees.

Increase that drag further, and the gap becomes uglier still.

This is one of the quietest truths in investing: a lot of people do not fail because they chose terrible investments. They fail because too much of their return leaked away before it ever had the chance to compound.

John Bogle, the founder of Vanguard, put it beautifully:
“Every pound you pay in fees is a pound that doesn’t get to grow”

That line is worth remembering.

Because there are many things in investing you cannot control.

• You cannot control next year’s returns.

• You cannot control elections.

• You cannot control wars or recessions

• You cannot control interest rates or market panics.

But you can control what you pay.

And because you can control it, low fees are one of the most reliable advantages available to an ordinary investor.

A lot of people go looking for sophisticated edges.

They imagine the answer must lie in some advanced strategy, specialist knowledge, or hidden opportunity.

Very often, the edge is much duller than that.

It is simply refusing to overpay.

That may not sound exciting.

But over a lifetime, it can make you vastly richer.

Thatis what this newsletter is about:

I’m not a financial adviser, and nothing I write is personal financial advice. But I am someone who has done this with real money, for real, over a long period of time — and I think that counts for something.

Every week I’ll share ideas, insights and practical guidance on how to manage your own investments — and do it better than most people who pay professionals to do it for them.

If you’re just getting started, my eBook — Make Yourself Rich — will give you everything you need to get set up, step by step. It takes a couple of hours to read, and by the end of it you’ll have a complete investment strategy you can put into action straight away.

You can get the eBook here…

And if you want to follow exactly what I’m investing in, why, and how it’s performing — including the individual stocks I hold alongside my core ETF portfolio — that’s what the paid subscription is for. More on that soon.

Compounding is one of the most powerful ideas in money, and one of the most widely underestimated.

It sounds almost too simple to matter.

Your returns earn returns. Then those returns earn returns of their own. Then, if you leave the process alone long enough, the numbers begin to grow in a way that feels almost absurd.

That is compounding.

It is not flashy. It does not make for dramatic dinner-party conversation. It does not provide the thrill of trying to pick the next big winner.

But over time, it quietly does something far more important.

It builds real wealth.

Let’s keep it simple.

If you invest £5,000 and it grows by 10% in the first year, you make £500. So now you have £5,500. In the second year, you are no longer earning returns on £5,000. You are earning them on £5,500. In the third year, more still.

At first, the effect seems modest.

That is why so many people miss it.

In the early years, compounding feels slow. Almost disappointingly slow. You look at the numbers and think, Is that it? You start wondering whether you need a more exciting strategy, a cleverer plan, or some sort of market shortcut.

That is often the exact moment people go wrong.

Because compounding only becomes spectacular if you give it enough time.

The early years are the quiet years. The later years are where the snowball gets big enough to really start gathering speed.

That is why patience matters so much more than people realise.

Most people assume wealth is built by dramatic decisions: finding the perfect stock, buying at exactly the right moment, making a bold move nobody else saw coming.

Usually, it isn’t.

Usually, wealth is built by doing something sensible, repeating it consistently, and then having the discipline to leave it alone.

That may sound less glamorous, but it is much closer to reality.

A one-off investment of £5,000 at 10% a year over 30 years grows to around £87,000. Add just £200 a month to that, and suddenly you are talking about well over £400,000.

• Not because you were a genius.

• Not because you timed the market perfectly.

• Not because you knew something nobody else knew.

But because you gave time a chance to work for you.

This is why compounding changes the way you think once you truly understand it.

You stop asking, “How can I get rich quickly?”

And you start asking, “How can I avoid interrupting this process?”

That is a much better question.

Because the real secret in investing is often not what you do. It is what you stop yourself from doing: panicking, tinkering, chasing excitement, and constantly interfering with something that was quietly working just fine.

That’s what this newsletter is about.

I’m not a financial adviser, and nothing I write is personal financial advice. But I am someone who has done this with real money, for real, over a long period of time — and I think that counts for something.

Every week I’ll share ideas, insights and practical guidance on how to manage your own investments — and do it better than most people who pay professionals to do it for them.

If you’re just getting started, my eBook — Make Yourself Rich — will give you everything you need to get set up, step by step. It takes a couple of hours to read, and by the end of it you’ll have a complete investment strategy you can put into action straight away.

You can get the eBook here…

And if you want to follow exactly what I’m investing in, why, and how it’s performing — including the individual stocks I hold alongside my core ETF portfolio — that’s what the paid subscription is for. More on that soon.

Most people think that investing is complicated, risky, and best left to professionals. Pretty much everybody you will talk to has the same view.

That is not an accident.

The financial services industry has spent decades building an image of itself as essential. The language is technical, the products are confusing, and the people selling them are very good at making ordinary investors feel out of their depth. The overall message is always the same: this is all terribly difficult, so you must pay us to do it for you.

But for most people, that simply isn’t true.

Successful investing does not require brilliance. It does not require inside information. It does not require staring at charts all day, making dramatic trades, or paying somebody a percentage of your wealth to put your money into products you could buy yourself.

What it requires is much simpler than that:

• A basic understanding of a few key ideas.

• A sensible, low-cost investment approach.

• The discipline to leave it alone long enough for it to work.

That’s it.

Now, to be fair, there are people with genuinely complicated financial lives. If you have a large estate, multiple businesses, a complex tax situation, inheritance planning issues, trusts, divorce complications, or cross-border assets, then proper specialist advice may well be worth paying for.

But that is not most people.

Most people do not need an expensive adviser to build them a labyrinth of mediocre funds wrapped in jargon and annual charges. Most people just need to know how to open the right account, buy sensible investments, keep costs low, and stay invested.

Once you understand those things, you are no longer helpless.

In fact, you are already in a better position than many people who are paying for “expert” help and not getting expert results.

That is the part the industry would rather you didn’t notice.

A lot of financial advice is really just expensive reassurance. It is there to make you feel looked after, not necessarily to make you richer. And if the adviser underperforms a simple market tracker while charging you for the privilege, you are not really being advised. You are being milked.

Warren Buffett (the world’s most famous investor, and the richest man in the world before he gave away half of it) said that for most people the best approach is simply to buy a low-cost S&P 500 index fund, add when you can to it over time, and leave it alone to grow.

The S&P 500 is an index that measures the performance of the top 500 companies in America. These are global businesses, that you have heard of, and that you use every day. Most of them have been around for decades and have survived recessions, wars, pandemics, and social changes. Although they are American companies, they operate globally, and the S&P 500 is a good proxy for the stockmarket as a whole.

Over the last 100 years, it has averaged around 10% growth per year. Sometimes more, sometimes less, sometimes negative, but whatever has happened it always comes back to make new highs. Even after Covid. Even after the great financial crash.

If you simply buy a low-cost tracker fund that mirrors the performance of the S&P 500 and do nothing more, you will outperform the majority of managed portfolios, and professional advisers.

Here is a shocking fact:

Most professional advisers, and fund managers, despite charging extortionate fees, fail to outperform the S&P 500 over time.

Whilst typical adviser fees of 1% or 2%, don’t sound like much, over time they have a massive effect on your actual returns, diminishing them still further.

Over a lifetime, this could cost you tens of thousands of pounds, if not a lot more.

I am not saying nobody ever needs professional advice. Some people do have complicated situations.

But most people can do far more for themselves than they realise.

You do not need to become a financial wizard.

You just need to understand enough to stop handing over your future to people who benefit from keeping you dependent.

That is the idea behind Tim’s Wealth Letter.

I’m not a financial adviser, and nothing I write is personal financial advice. But I am someone who has done this with real money, for real, over a long period of time — and I think that counts for something.

Every week I’ll share ideas, insights and practical guidance on how to manage your own investments — and do it better than most people who pay professionals to do it for them.

If you’re just getting started, my eBook — Make Yourself Rich — will give you everything you need to get set up, step by step. It takes a couple of hours to read, and by the end of it you’ll have a complete investment strategy you can put into action straight away.

You can get the eBook here…

And if you want to follow exactly what I’m investing in, why, and how it’s performing — including the individual stocks I hold alongside my core ETF portfolio — that’s what the paid subscription is for. More on that soon.