Author: Richard

July was a month of making the portfolio more honest about where my conviction actually sits.

This review uses my IBKR ISA only. It is the account represented by the main Portfolio page. My Trading 212 holdings are part of a separate £15k High Growth Challenge and are not included in the figures or commentary below.

The figures are from my IBKR prior-business-day-close snapshot for 31 July 2026. They are a dated record, not live prices or a recommendation for anyone to copy my allocation.

Portfolio snapshot

At the 31 July close, the IBKR ISA was worth £194,538.84, including £49.84 of cash. The invested value was £194,489.00.

The separate Trading 212 challenge was worth £12,132.13 at its 31 July snapshot, including £136.74 cash. I am keeping it separate because the two accounts use different reporting timings and serve different purposes.

The main portfolio remains deliberately growth-oriented and concentrated. That is not a claim that concentration is safe. It is an acknowledgement that my returns, good or bad, will be shaped heavily by a relatively small number of positions.

Biggest changes in July

The biggest decision was increasing my Rocket Lab position from 1,000 to 2,000 shares. To fund that change, I sold Apple, Alphabet, NVIDIA and SoFi, and reduced Uber in the IBKR ISA. I wrote separately about why I made Rocket Lab roughly 50% of my portfolio, including the concentration, financing and execution risks I am accepting.

I also increased Micron from eight to 10 shares and Surf Air Mobility from 10,000 to 13,800 shares. These are material changes to a concentrated portfolio, so I want them recorded rather than quietly absorbed into an evergreen holdings page.

No quantity changes were identified in the Trading 212 challenge between its late-July reporting snapshots. Its three holdings at month-end were Uber, Amkor and AST SpaceMobile.

Current main holdings at month-end

At the 31 July IBKR close, the core positions included:

• Rocket Lab: 2,000 shares at $64.95.
• Palantir: 250 shares at $123.06.
• AbCellera: 3,001 shares at $5.71.
• BETA Technologies: 1,000 shares at $18.93.
• ServiceNow: 150 shares at $111.23.
• Surf Air Mobility: 13,800 shares at $0.76.

Those prices are the values in the dated broker snapshot. The live Portfolio page is the better place for the latest IBKR ISA holdings and indicative GBP values.

What I am watching

Rocket Lab remains the central position to watch, partly because of its size and partly because the investment case depends on execution continuing across several moving parts. The opportunity is why I own it. The concentration is why I need to keep looking for evidence that could challenge my view.

I am also watching whether the smaller positions continue to earn their place. Owning a company is not a permanent vote of confidence. I need to be able to explain what I am underwriting, what has changed and what would cause me to reassess.

For AbCellera in particular, the clinical proof points remain important. My latest AbCellera investment update sets out why the next programme milestones matter to the thesis.

Where I could be wrong

The obvious risk is concentration. A few disappointing outcomes at the same time would hurt this portfolio materially. That is especially true when growth companies can be volatile, funding needs can change and expectations move faster than the underlying businesses.

Another risk is confusing familiarity with understanding. Spending time researching a company can improve a thesis, but it can also make a view feel more comfortable than it deserves. The job is to keep testing the assumptions, not just to keep repeating them.

Finally, a positive month-end snapshot does not settle anything. I want the monthly record to show the decisions, the uncertainty and the areas where I could be wrong, rather than turn every portfolio move into a victory lap.

Final thoughts

July made the main portfolio simpler in one sense and riskier in another. I have fewer positions that matter, and more exposure to the ideas I believe in most. The trade-off is that I need to be more disciplined about reassessment when the screen is red as well as when it is green.

This is a personal portfolio record, not financial advice. The positions, prices and weights can change after the reporting date.

I used to assume the big prize of financial progress would look obvious from the outside.

More choices. Better experiences. Visible independence. Those things matter. But they are not what I have come to value most.

The freedom I did not expect to value most is quieter: the ability to think without constant financial threat running in the background.

What that freedom feels like

It feels like more patience. More ability to wait. More capacity to say no. More room to make decisions based on fit rather than immediate pressure.

That is very close to what I described in What Financial Independence Actually Feels Like (So Far). The win is often less panic, not more spectacle.

Why I missed it earlier

Early on, I overweighted visible rewards and underweighted internal state. I thought freedom would announce itself through lifestyle. Instead, it showed up as reduced urgency.

That also changed how I think about enough. If the goal is psychological room, endless escalation makes less sense.

The trade-off

There is a less discussed side too. Once survival pressure drops, bigger questions get louder. Identity. Ambition. What work is for. What a good day looks like.

I dig into that more directly in The Part of Financial Independence No One Talks About.

What I protect now

I am more protective of calm than of optics. I care more about whether a decision increases room to manoeuvre than whether it photographs well.

That principle flows into spending, investing, and the way I run my portfolio.

The unexpected freedom was not a montage. It was mental oxygen.

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I share more of this journey on X.

Related reading

• What Financial Independence Actually Feels Like (So Far)
• Why I Now Care More About Enough Than More
• The Part of Financial Independence No One Talks About
• Investment Portfolio

Some of the best investing decisions I have made look, from the outside, like I did nothing at all.

No trade. No panic adjustment. No clever reaction to the latest headline. Just sitting still while the noise tried to pull me into motion.

That skill did not come naturally. For a long time, activity felt like competence. If markets moved, I felt I should move with them. If a story was loud enough, I felt I needed a response.

Why reaction feels productive

Reacting feels useful because it creates a sense of control. When prices fall or narratives shift, doing something can temporarily reduce anxiety. You feel less passive. You feel like you are managing the situation.

The problem is that not every situation needs management in that moment. Often the better move is to let a well-built plan absorb the noise.

This is closely tied to what I wrote about in what financial independence actually feels like. A lot of progress is not excitement. It is reduced urgency.

When I chose not to act

There have been moments where the urge to act was strong. A sharp drawdown. A sudden narrative change around a holding. A stretch of underperformance that made me question whether patience was conviction or stubbornness.

In those moments, the most valuable question has often been simple: has the long-term thesis actually changed, or has only my comfort level changed?

If it is mostly comfort, reaction is usually expensive.

That is also why I now think differently about volatility. Noise is not always information. Sometimes it is just movement.

What not reacting is not

Not reacting does not mean never changing your mind. It does not mean ignoring risk. It does not mean defending a bad position out of pride.

It means creating space between stimulus and decision. It means refusing to let temporary emotion pretend it is analysis.

That distinction matters. Blind hold is not wisdom. Deliberate non-reaction is.

How I try to practice it

• I revisit the original thesis before making changes
• I ask whether new information is actually new
• I separate price movement from business quality
• I give myself time before acting on discomfort

This is one reason I care about process tools as well as holdings. Cleaner portfolio context, research discipline, and fewer impulsive inputs all help. That is part of why I keep a public Investment Portfolio and why I review the tools around my process in Tools & Reviews.

The real power

The quiet power of not reacting is that it protects compounding. It protects judgement. It protects you from turning temporary discomfort into permanent mistakes.

I still get the urge. I still feel the pull. But I trust the pause more than I used to.

If you want a related story on how close I came to doing the opposite, read When I Almost Sold at the Worst Possible Time.

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I share more of this day-to-day thinking on X. For broader money reading, see Wealth Resources.

Related reading

• I Used to Think Volatility Was the Enemy
• When I Almost Sold at the Worst Possible Time
• The Rule I Now Follow After Getting It Badly Wrong
• Investment Portfolio

Milestones feel clean in hindsight. At the time, they are usually messy.

Around £50k net worth, I thought I understood more than I did. I was serious enough to be progressing, but still early enough to waste energy on the wrong things.

Here are three lessons I wish I had understood sooner.

1. Behaviour beats trivia

I spent too much attention on details that felt smart and not enough on the behaviours that actually moved the needle: savings consistency, lifestyle creep control, and not interrupting compounding.

A cleaner process would have beaten a slightly cleverer opinion stack. That is still true now in how I think about systems and the role of tools in Tools & Reviews.

2. Enough needs a definition early

Without a personal definition of enough, every raise becomes a new baseline and every upgrade becomes normal. Progress turns into a treadmill.

I write about that shift more fully in Why I Now Care More About Enough Than More and the status side of it in Why I Stopped Buying Things to Look Successful.

At £50k, defining enough would have made later decisions cleaner.

3. Freedom compounds before full FI

I used to treat financial independence like a distant destination. In reality, every layer of resilience changes your life before arrival: emergency buffers, lower anxiety, more choice at work, more patience in markets.

That is the heart of What Financial Independence Actually Feels Like (So Far).

What those lessons would have changed

I would have simplified sooner. Compared less. Automated more. Obsessed less over looking advanced. Focused more on the boring infrastructure of wealth.

I would also have been gentler with myself. Early progress is fragile and valuable. It does not need theatrical intensity to count.

If you are around that stage now, build systems you can keep. That includes how you invest, how you track, and how you protect attention.

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More milestone thinking on X. Useful external reading lives on Wealth Resources.

Related reading

• What Financial Independence Actually Feels Like (So Far)
• Why I Now Care More About Enough Than More
• Why I’m Deliberately Slowing Down My Savings Rate
• Investment Portfolio

A review of Sharesight for investors who want performance tracking with a stronger focus on tax and reporting clarity.

Quick take: This is my practical review of Sharesight, based on how I would actually use it as a UK investor rather than a feature checklist written for SEO alone.

What it is

Sharesight is a portfolio tracking service designed to help investors track performance, dividends, and tax-related reporting more accurately.

Why I care about it

Brokerage apps are rarely enough if you care about clean performance history and better reporting over multiple years.

Best for

Investors who want structured portfolio records and cleaner long-term reporting.

What works well

• Strong portfolio performance tracking
• Useful for dividends and tax-related reporting
• Better long-term record keeping than most brokerage apps
• Helpful if you hold across multiple accounts

Where it falls short

• Pricing can become a factor as portfolios grow
• Setup takes some effort
• Not every investor needs this level of tracking
• Still only as good as the data you feed it

How it fits into my stack

I do not judge tools in isolation. A broker, tracker, charting platform, or AI assistant only matters if it improves decision quality, reduces friction, or helps me stay consistent. That is also why I keep my Investment Portfolio public and separate from tool hype. The portfolio is the outcome. Tools are just infrastructure.

If you want more of the broader money and investing context around these choices, start with What Financial Independence Actually Feels Like (So Far) and the rest of my Tools & Reviews section.

Comparing options? Read Snowball Analytics vs Sharesight.

Related reviews

• Snowball Analytics Review: Portfolio Tracking Without Spreadsheet Pain
• Interactive Brokers Review: Why I Use IBKR as a UK Investor

Verdict

Sharesight is a strong option if you want serious portfolio records rather than a casual holdings overview.

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Official site: www.sharesight.com. If you want the shorter day-to-day version of how I think about tools, markets, and building wealth, follow me on X.

I recently recorded a short YouTube video explaining the background to my journey so far, why I share what I share, and how investing became tied up with a bigger question about freedom.

If you want to watch the original video first, you can do that here: The background to my £1M journey.

It did not start with a master plan

From the outside, a strong portfolio can look clean and deliberate. The truth is usually messier than that.

I had a decent job, a decent life, and the kind of setup that should have felt reassuring. But there was a gap between being comfortable on paper and feeling fulfilled in reality. That gap ended up mattering more than I expected.

Before I became serious about building wealth through stocks, I had already had two experiences that stayed with me. I made some money in Bitcoin early, but not enough to change my life. I also bought Tesla years ago, watched it fall, got nervous, and sold far too early.

Neither decision was a disaster. Both still taught me the same thing: being early is not enough if you cannot hold your nerve.

The emotional cost of selling too soon

One of the hardest parts of investing is not finding interesting ideas. It is living with the emotional discomfort that comes after you buy them.

In the video I talk about putting around £5,000 into Tesla, seeing it drop, then eventually selling around £6,000. At the time that felt sensible. Looking back, it was a classic case of protecting myself from short-term pain at the cost of long-term upside.

That experience, combined with an earlier brush with crypto, left me with a feeling that I had seen opportunities without really backing myself. The money mattered, but the bigger issue was what those decisions said about conviction.

That is part of why themes like what financial independence actually feels like and defining what enough means have become so central to how I think now.

Rocket Lab changed the scale of the journey

The real turning point came later when I started doing deeper research and came across the Rocket Lab story. It was not just a case of hearing a tip and buying a ticker. It was the combination of hearing a compelling thesis, doing my own work, and feeling that I understood enough to take the risk seriously.

I come from an engineering background, so some parts of the company and its culture made intuitive sense to me. That did not make the investment risk-free. It did mean I felt able to judge it with more confidence than I had in the past.

In the video I explain that I built a large position in Rocket Lab and that decision ended up changing my financial trajectory in a very real way. It is still one of the clearest examples in my own life of what can happen when research, timing, conviction, and luck line up together.

If you want the fuller stock case rather than the personal background, I have a separate post on my Rocket Lab investment thesis.

This is bigger than stock picks

The video is not really about trying to prove I was right on one company. It is more about why I started documenting all of this in public.

For me, the portfolio is tied to a broader question: what does freedom actually look like when work no longer has to dominate your life?

That is why a lot of my content sits at the overlap between money, investing, work, identity, and fulfillment. I am interested in the numbers, but I am just as interested in what the numbers are for.

That is also why I increasingly prefer to talk openly about the emotional side of the process. Missing opportunities, selling too soon, feeling isolated, wondering whether you have enough, and trying to work out what you actually want your life to look like all matter just as much as the ticker symbols do.

Why I am sharing this publicly

I want to be very clear about what this is and what it is not.

I am not trying to present myself as a guru. I am not selling a dream. I am not pretending there is a formula that, if copied closely enough, guarantees the same outcome.

I am documenting a real process in real time. That includes the parts that went well, the parts I got wrong, and the parts I am still trying to understand.

That is also why transparency matters to me. Over time I think my website will work best if the evergreen stock theses stay in place while the changing reality of what I own, how I think, and what has shifted gets documented through dated portfolio reviews and more personal reflections.

The real point of the journey

Reaching a number is not the whole story. The harder question is what you do with the freedom that number might create.

I am still figuring that out. That is probably the most honest way to put it.

If this topic resonates, the video is worth watching because it shows the thinking behind the account in a more direct and personal way than a written post can. You can watch it here: The background to my £1M journey.

You can also follow more of the day-to-day thinking on X, where I share portfolio thoughts, reflections, and updates as the journey continues.

A high contribution rate to your investment portfolio is one of the strongest wealth-building tools available.

It is also possible to treat it like a moral contest and miss the point.

There are seasons where I deliberately slow my contribution rate, not because I have abandoned the goal, but because the goal includes a life I can actually inhabit.

Why this can be rational

If every year becomes an exercise in compression, you can hit numbers while hollowing out the present. That can create a strange outcome: progress on paper, resentment in practice.

I care about financial independence because I want a freer life, not because I want to win an austerity competition. That is the same philosophy behind caring more about enough than more.

What I am not saying

This is not an argument for uncontrolled lifestyle inflation. Spending can drift quickly from intentional to automatic.

The distinction matters:

• intentional spending that improves life
• unconscious spending that only raises the baseline

I am willing to do the first carefully. I still push back on the second, for the reasons in Why I Stopped Buying Things to Look Successful.

How I think about the balance

I ask whether a lower contribution rate in a given period funds something real: health, relationships, recovery, capability, or a memory that will still matter.

If yes, it can be aligned. If it is just leakage, it is not.

This is part of a broader maturity I wish I had earlier, especially around milestones like those in Three Things I Wish I’d Understood at £50k Net Worth.

Where I have landed

Maximal contributions to my investment accounts can be strategic. Permanent maximal deprivation usually is not.

I still care about building wealth and keeping the portfolio moving in the right direction. I just refuse to pretend that the only virtuous number is the highest possible contribution rate every month of my life.

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I write more about these trade-offs on X and keep practical references on Wealth Resources.

Related reading

• Why I Now Care More About Enough Than More
• What Financial Independence Actually Feels Like (So Far)
• Three Things I Wish I’d Understood at £50k Net Worth
• Investment Portfolio

We talk about money constantly in abstract form: markets, rates, houses, careers.

We talk much less honestly about how money shapes private conversations, friendships, family dynamics, and the things left unsaid.

Even now, money still stops me from having some conversations as openly as I would like.

Where the silence shows up

It can show up around lifestyle differences. Around ambition. Around what feels expensive. Around the fact that financial progress can create distance as well as security.

People are not only comparing incomes. They are protecting dignity, avoiding envy, and managing identity.

That social friction is one reason financial independence is more complicated than a spreadsheet suggests.

Why this matters

If your plan for wealth ignores relationships, it is incomplete. Money decisions happen inside families, friendships, and cultural expectations.

This is also why status pressure is so sticky. Spending is sometimes communication. That is part of the pattern I unpacked in Why I Stopped Buying Things to Look Successful.

What I am trying to do better

• be honest without a superiority complex
• stay curious about other people's constraints
• avoid turning personal strategy into moral judgement
• accept that not every relationship can hold full financial transparency

None of that is tidy. It is still better than pretending money is only technical.

The deeper point

Some of the hardest parts of the journey are not market drawdowns. They are identity and belonging. I explore that more in The Part of Financial Independence No One Talks About.

Money can buy options. It cannot automatically create ease in every human conversation.

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I continue these reflections on X.

Related reading

• The Part of Financial Independence No One Talks About
• What Financial Independence Actually Feels Like (So Far)
• Why I Now Care More About Enough Than More
• Investment Portfolio

Changing your mind is not a branding failure. In investing and money, it is often a survival skill.

Over the last three years, several of my beliefs have shifted in ways that now feel obvious, but did not at the time.

1. From more at all costs to clearer enough

Old belief: acceleration is always good.
New belief: direction matters more than pure speed.

I still care about progress. I just care more about whether the progress is aligned. That is the core of Why I Now Care More About Enough Than More.

2. From volatility as danger to volatility as path

Old belief: smooth is safe and choppy is bad.
New belief: for long-term capital, volatility is often the fee, not the failure.

I unpack that more in I Used to Think Volatility Was the Enemy.

3. From confidence as strength to confidence as a risk input

Old belief: strong conviction means strong process.
New belief: strong conviction can also mean strong bias.

Being wrong while feeling smart left a mark. That is why I wrote about the investment I was most confident about and the process rule that followed.

What caused the shifts

Lived experience. Market cycles. Watching behaviour under stress. Getting far enough into the journey to notice that internal state matters as much as external metrics.

Also, writing in public forces clearer thinking. So does maintaining a real portfolio rather than a theoretical one.

What has not changed

I still believe long-term ownership, thoughtful risk, and personal responsibility matter. I still think tools and systems help. I still think honesty beats performance.

The details evolved. The direction did not reverse so much as mature.

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I share ongoing mindset shifts on X. For tools that support the process, see Tools & Reviews.

Related reading

• I Used to Think Volatility Was the Enemy
• Why I Now Care More About Enough Than More
• The Investment I Was Most Confident About (And Why I Was Wrong)
• Investment Portfolio