This week, diesel in Europe hit a new record. The EU average is now €2.24 a litre. In February, before the war with Iran began, it was €1.59. In the UK, it went over £2 a litre for the first time ever. Petrol is up almost 30% too.

Filling a 50-litre tank of diesel now costs around €112. That’s more than €30 extra, every single time.

This is an awful reality for so many people. The parent on the school run who has no other way to get there. The haulier filling up every morning. The farmer who can’t put off the harvest. The family heating their home with oil, watching winter come.

Prices spike all the time. Something happens, prices jump, and when things settle, they come back down. That’s what a spike is.

I don’t think this is one. The question I keep coming back to isn’t how high prices go. It’s how long they stay there. Here’s what’s behind it.

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Diesel is made in refineries, the plants that turn crude oil into the fuels we actually use.

Europe has substantial refining capacity, but it still relies on imported diesel to meet demand. That leaves it exposed when supplies elsewhere are disrupted.

For years, Russia was an important source of that imported diesel. After the invasion of Ukraine, Europe had to find new suppliers, including in the Middle East and the United States.

Then war disrupted the Middle East too.

In a normal spike, supply catches up. Here, there are three reasons it may not catch up quickly.

First, Europe has spent years losing refining capacity. Refineries have closed as fuel demand was expected to decline and the economics of running them became more difficult. That capacity can’t simply be switched back on when the market gets tight. Building new capacity takes years and enormous sums. Africa’s largest refinery, in Nigeria, took more than six years and over $19 billion.

Second, the war has disrupted energy infrastructure, shipping and trade across the region. Even when fighting stops, supply routes and markets don’t necessarily return to nor

mal immediately.

Third, emergency reserves are being used to cushion some of the disruption. But reserves don’t create new refining capacity. They buy time. And stocks drawn today eventually have to be rebuilt.

So even if the war ended tomorrow, which would help, it wouldn’t undo the vulnerabilities that were there before it began.

When prices jump, the natural instinct is to wait it out. Tighten things for a few months and assume it will pass. That instinct is often right, because many price jumps do pass.

But it’s worth asking a different question. Not how bad is this, but what would have to happen for it to end?

Here, part of the answer is refining capacity rebuilt, supply routes settled and reserves refilled. Not all of that happens in months.

A shock doesn’t create a weakness. It finds one. The war is the shock. Europe’s reduced refining capacity and reliance on imported diesel are part of the weakness it found.

Diesel still powers a big part of everyday life: freight, farming, buses, commercial vehicles and industry.

That matters, because a shortage can ease from the other side too. When prices rise, people usually find ways to buy less.

Diesel is harder. Lorries still have to move goods. Farmers still have to run machinery. Businesses still have deliveries to make. Demand can fall, but not always quickly.

So when supply is tight and demand can’t adjust easily, prices can stay under pressure for longer.

And that cost doesn’t necessarily stay at the pump. It can travel into deliveries, farming, manufacturing and eventually the price of other things we buy. That’s one way an energy shock can feed into inflation, the cost of living rising across the board.

When a price spikes, that ripple fades quickly. When the problem underneath takes longer to fix, it can last longer.

That’s not a spike. That’s a squeeze.

The Bank of England expects UK inflation to rise to around 3.75% by the end of this year, driven mostly by energy prices, especially motor fuels. In the euro area, energy prices in September were 18.8% higher than a year earlier, according to Eurostat’s first estimate.

I can’t tell you exactly how long this lasts. But I don’t need to know that to be ready for it. I’ve been following what’s behind these prices for a while, and I’ve thought carefully about how my own investments might behave if energy stays expensive for longer.

That’s what understanding gives you. Not a prediction. A head start.

So the question I’d ask isn’t about the pump.

Do you know how what you own might behave if inflation stays higher for longer than expected?

A spike, you can wait out. A squeeze, you need to understand.

Catherine x

Phase First.

Phase First is for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing here constitutes financial advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any security. All investing involves risk. I am a Fellow Chartered Accountant, not a regulated financial adviser. You are responsible for your own financial decisions.

There is a feeling you get when you check your savings and the balance has gone up.

It isn’t excitement. It’s more like proof. Proof that you’re being careful, that you’re doing the right thing, that you’re okay.

Investing asks you to give that up.

I read a post recently that has stayed with me. Someone had done everything right. Six months of expenses put aside for emergencies. Extra paid off the mortgage. A pension paid into since they started working. And a significant amount saved on top, built month by month through discipline alone.

They wanted to invest. They had thought it through, and they believed it was the sensible next step.

But they couldn’t bring themselves to do it.

They were nervous. Savings just felt more secure. And I understood exactly why.

For years, every time they looked, the number had gone up. Investing meant taking that money and putting it somewhere it would sometimes go down. Knowing that in your head is one thing. Watching it happen to money you worked that hard for is something else.

Saving had always felt safer. And it’s worth noticing what safer meant. Not that the money was protected. That the number never went backwards.

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Saving and investing look like the same skill. They feel close to opposite ones.

Saving teaches you to expect stability. You put money aside and the balance doesn’t move with the market. Every month you do the right thing, the number tends to get bigger.

Do that for twenty years and it builds something deep. A well-earned belief that if the number falls, something has gone wrong. That you’ve gone wrong.

Investing breaks that rule on the first day.

Investing means accepting something saving largely removes. The value can fall, sometimes for months, even when nothing is wrong with what you own. That swing is part of what you accept in exchange for a return.

The possibility of loss and the possibility of return are connected. You don’t get to keep one and remove the other.

So the excellent saver arrives carrying an instinct that has served her perfectly for two decades, and it’s precisely the wrong instinct for the room she has just walked into.

That isn’t a knowledge gap. It’s a rule that worked somewhere else.

This is why telling someone to just start is such useless advice.

It treats the hesitation as laziness, or a lack of nerve. It’s neither. It’s an instinct doing exactly what it was trained to do, in a place where it no longer applies.

And there’s something underneath that.

Someone who has only ever saved may never have watched their own money fall and then come back. They have no lived experience of down being temporary. In everything they’ve done, down was never temporary. Down meant a mistake.

So the first time the number drops, it won’t feel like the market moving. It will feel like they got something wrong.

You can’t argue somebody out of that feeling. It was built over years, and it was right, for the place it was built in.

What helps is knowing where it comes from. Then you can ask a better question. Not, why does this feel wrong? But, has anything actually changed about what I own?

The person in that post wasn’t missing discipline. They had more of it than they probably gave themselves credit for.

They weren’t missing money, or intelligence, or willingness.

And most of what made them a brilliant saver will serve them well as an investor. The discipline. The patience. The habit of showing up every month.

What doesn’t come with them is the rule that a falling number means something has gone wrong.

It’s a different sport, played with the same equipment.

Next time you check your savings, notice how it feels when the balance has gone up.

Now imagine opening an account and seeing a number lower than the one you put in.

Notice what that feels like before you decide what it means.

That drop in your stomach is years of saving, still doing its job.

In investing, the number goes up and down. Getting comfortable with that is the one skill saving never taught you.

Catherine x

Phase First

Phase First is for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing here constitutes financial advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any security. All investing involves risk. I am a Fellow Chartered Accountant, not a regulated financial adviser. You are responsible for your own financial decisions.

Ask almost anyone what their number is and they can tell you quickly.

The salary that would feel comfortable. The figure in an account that would let them stop calculating. The amount at which the low hum of financial worry would finally switch off.

What interests me is the speed of the answer. It means the arithmetic has already been done, privately, by people who have never once said it out loud.

I have had several numbers over the years. I have reached some of them.

Reaching them did not feel the way I expected.

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There is a piece of research I think about often.

Michael Norton, a professor at Harvard Business School, worked on a study of more than four thousand millionaires. They were asked to rate their happiness out of ten, then asked how much more money they would need to reach a ten.

The answers varied enormously. Some said twice as much. Some said six times. A quarter of them said around eleven times more.

What did not vary was the pattern. It made no difference how much they already had. Summarising it afterwards, Norton said that basically everyone says they would need two or three times as much.

The reason is something behavioural economists call a reference point. It means we do not judge amounts against a fixed standard. We judge them against where we are currently standing.

A reference point: the position you are measuring from, which is almost always your own current situation rather than any objective marker.

We do this with everything. A room feels cold depending on where you have just come from. A sound feels loud relative to the quiet before it.

Money works the same way. Which means the number is not a destination sitting still in the distance.

It travels with you at exactly the speed you approach it.

This matters more than it first appears, because a great deal of financial happiness is organised around a number that cannot be reached.

If the goal is the figure, then no portfolio ever arrives. There is always a version of the calculation where you are still short.

But I think something else is going on underneath it, and it took me a long time to see.

The number is usually standing in for a feeling. What is actually wanted is not the amount, it is the security the amount is supposed to deliver. And security is not a quantity, so no quantity ever quite settles it.

If you do not understand what your money is doing, it becomes much harder to know whether it is enough.

So the easiest answer is more. More saved. More earned. More accumulated.

Not necessarily because more is what you need, but because you cannot yet see what the money you already have might become.

That was what changed for me. Not the amount. The seeing.

There are months where a chunk of what I hold goes down together. It happens, because a lot of what I own sits in similar areas, so a single piece of news can move all of it on the same day.

It does not affect me the way it used to.

Not because I am relaxed about money. Because I know what I own, I know why I own it, and I know roughly how long I expect to hold it. So a bad month is not news. It is a thing I already knew would happen at some point along the way.

I have often thought the more interesting question is one the study did not ask.

Not how much more would you need. But how confident are you about where what you already hold is heading, and why.

Perhaps they named a number because a number was the only thing available to point at. If you cannot describe what your money is doing, the figure is all you have left to measure yourself against.

I could not give you my number. But I could tell you why I hold what I hold, what has to be true for it to work, and roughly how long I am prepared to wait. That turns out to do the job I once expected a figure to do.

The number keeps moving. Understanding the movement is what keeps your happiness out of it.

Think about whatever your goalpost actually is. Retirement, or ten years from now, or the thing you are quietly working towards.

Do you have a sense of what you are likely to arrive with?

Not to the euro. Nobody has that. But roughly, given what you hold, what you are adding, and how long you have.

Or is it closer to this. Money going in every month, a general trust that it will be enough, and no real picture of what is waiting at the other end.

They feel very different to carry. And what separates them is understanding, not the number.

Catherine x

Phase First.

Phase First is for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing here constitutes financial advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any security. All investing involves risk. I am a Fellow Chartered Accountant, not a regulated financial adviser. You are responsible for your own financial decisions.

In my twenties I was, by every measure available to me, doing it right.

Money went into the current account each month. The balance grew. I had started a pension, which felt like the responsible grown up thing, and it was ticking along quietly in the background.

Saving felt like the whole of it. Spend less than you earn, keep the rest somewhere safe, contribute to the pension.

It was not that I had never heard of investing. I had.

I just understood, without anyone ever having to say it, that it was not for me.

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Investing was for wealthy people. For older people. For men in offices who already had money and knew what to do with it.

I was twenty something with a salary and a current account. The category simply did not apply.

Nobody had told me that. There was no moment where someone said this is not for you. It was quieter than that, and more effective.

Nobody in my circle talked about it. Not once. Not at dinner, not at work, not among friends. So there was nothing to test the assumption against, and I never thought to question it.

That is how this kind of belief survives. Not by being enforced, but by never being contradicted.

And it does not feel like a belief at the time. It feels like a fact about the world. Investing existed, in the way that yachts existed, and both were things other people had.

So I saved, which everybody talked about, and I contributed to a pension, which my employer had set up for me. Both of those felt like the whole of what was available.

I was not avoiding investing. I did not experience myself as deciding anything at all.

It changed because of a conversation I was not expecting to have.

I was out with colleagues, including two people considerably senior to me. Money came up, as it does, and I mentioned that I would probably use a sum I was due to receive to pay down the mortgage. Just as I had been doing with all the extra money I had leftover from my monthly salary.

One of them stopped and asked why.

I gave the obvious answer. To clear the debt.

"That's cheap money," he said. "You'd do better putting it to work in the market."

He said it the way you would mention the weather. Not as advice to someone struggling. Not as a favour. As though it were simply the ordinary thing an adult with a sum of money would consider.

I had always understood a mortgage as something around my neck. A thing to be cleared as fast as possible. He was treating it as something that could be used. I had never once heard it spoken about that way.

That was the whole conversation. It lasted a minute.

And an assumption I had carried since my twenties quietly fell over.

I had been waiting for permission I never needed. I just did not know that until someone accidentally gave it to me.

I could easily have used the money to pay down the mortgage and never questioned whether another option existed. The door was there, but I had come very close to walking past it.

Nothing to look up this week.

Just a question.

Have you quietly decided that investing is for other people? Not because anyone told you. Because it has simply never been in the room.

If so, I would like this to be the thing that puts it in the room.

You do not need more money first, or more confidence, or a particular age. The door is always open. I spent years not knowing that, and the only thing that changed was someone mentioning it in passing.

And if you are at the start of your working life, that is not a reason to wait. Time is the one advantage that cannot be bought back later.

Catherine x

Phase First.

Phase First is for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing here constitutes financial advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any security. All investing involves risk. I am a Fellow Chartered Accountant, not a regulated financial adviser. You are responsible for your own financial decisions.

In my twenties my head was completely full. Building a career, working every hour, learning how to be an adult. I had started a pension, which felt like the responsible thing, and as far as I knew it was the whole of it. Money was going somewhere sensible. That seemed like enough.

In my thirties it was babies. Prams, cots, sleepless nights, and the enormous logistical operation of small children. The pension kept going quietly in the background. I was entirely rooted in the present, which is where small children keep you, and the future was something I contributed to rather than something I thought about.

Then I turned forty, and something shifted. Not the busyness. That got worse. There are still children, still work, and now perimenopause arriving in the middle of it with its own particular fog.

What shifted was the arithmetic. I was suddenly closer to retiring than to starting, and I realised I could not tell you a single thing about where the twenty years of contributions had been investing into.

Here is what I notice looking back. There was never a decade where my head was empty. My financial future was so easy to leave for later as it felt like another thing to learn in an already packed schedule.

The present was always louder. There was always something that needed me now, while the future felt comfortably far away. Until one day, it didn’t. The thing I had been putting off for later had quietly become now.

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I want to say something clearly, because I think this carries a lot of shame for women.

When investing gets put off, it is rarely because someone cannot do it.

Capacity and capability are not the same thing, and we confuse them constantly.

A woman in her twenties working every hour to establish herself is not lacking the ability to understand markets. Neither is the woman in her thirties running a household on broken sleep, or the woman in her forties holding a career, a family and her own health together at once.

None of them lack the ability. What they lack is the room to think about it.

Not the hour. The room.

So it gets handed over. To a partner, to a default fund, to a decision made once and never revisited.

That is not a failure of intelligence. It is a rational response to a mind that is already full.

But here is the part that took me twenty years to understand. There is very little room in any given week. There is a great deal of room across twenty years. Understanding accumulates the way money does, and the years spent not learning something are the years it is not working for you either.

I began learning investing properly in my forties, later than I would have liked.

What surprised me was not the knowledge itself. It was what the knowledge did to everything around it.

Financial news stopped being noise and started being information. A falling market stopped being frightening and started being a thing I could describe. I stopped waiting to be told what was happening and started being able to see it for myself.

For years it looked like one more thing to learn. Another demand on an already full week.

I kept assuming there would be a quieter year. There was not. There never is.

So I stopped waiting for one.

What I had wrong was the size of the thing. I thought investing was a subject you had to sit down and learn, the way you would learn a language. One enormous item that needed an enormous amount of room.

It is not. It is one question, then another, then another.

The whole point of this issue is that your head is already full, so I am not going to ask you to clear it.

This week, find out the name of the fund, or funds, your pension is invested in. Just the name. Five minutes.

Next week, find out what is inside it.

The week after, look at what it costs you.

That is how understanding begins. With one small question at a time, at whatever pace your life allows.

Because understanding compounds the same way money does. Each piece makes the next piece easier, until the thing that looked like a mountain becomes something you can read in a glance.

And unlike almost everything else you are carrying, learning this becomes easier with time. Once you understand something, you don’t have to learn it again. It becomes knowledge you carry with you, and the load gets lighter.

Catherine x

Phase First.

Phase First is for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing here constitutes financial advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any security. All investing involves risk. I am a Fellow Chartered Accountant, not a regulated financial adviser. You are responsible for your own financial decisions.

Last week, I asked what environment your money is built for.

It is a fair question, but an almost impossible one to answer without the tools to examine what you own.

So this week, I want to give you two.

Together, they answer two fundamental investing questions: how highly is this index valued, and where is its risk concentrated?

I am using the S&P 500 because its history is long and the figures are publicly available. The same questions can be asked of other stock market indexes, although CAPE data may not always be available and their historical comparisons will differ.

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The first measure. How the market is valued.

Price on its own tells you nothing. A company at $50 a share is not expensive or cheap until you know what you receive for that $50.

The usual comparison is price against earnings. But earnings can swing significantly from one year to the next, which can make a single year misleading. In 2009, company earnings collapsed so severely that the ordinary measure made shares look exceptionally expensive, even as prices had fallen dramatically.

The Yale economist Robert Shiller addressed this with something called the CAPE ratio. It compares price with the average earnings of the previous ten years, adjusted for inflation. Ten years covers good times and bad, so you are comparing price with a decade of results rather than one unusual year.

CAPE ratio: the current level of a stock market index with the average inflation adjusted earnings of its companies over the previous ten years.

The long term median for the S&P 500 since 1881 is about 17. As of late August 2026, it sits at approximately 42.

Here is the part that matters most. Historically, ten year periods beginning with a high CAPE reading have tended to deliver lower average returns than those beginning with a low one.

CAPE cannot tell you what happens next week. It can show whether an index is valued highly or lowly relative to its earnings history, helping to set more realistic expectations for the long term.

Valuation tells you what you are paying. But it does not tell you how widely your investment is spread.

The second measure. Where the risk sits.

An index fund holding five hundred companies sounds like five hundred evenly sized pieces. It is not.

Most indexes are weighted by size, which means the largest companies occupy the most space. But it means the label and the contents can differ more than you might expect.

Concentration: how much of an index sits in its largest holdings.

At the height of the technology bubble in 2000, the ten largest companies represented roughly a quarter of the S&P 500. Today, that figure is close to 40%, a level not seen since the 1960s.

In practical terms, $1,000 invested in the index would place close to $400 in ten companies, with the remainder spread across the other 490.

That does not mean those ten companies will perform badly. It means more of the index’s outcome depends on a small group. If market leadership changes or those businesses struggle, the effect travels through the wider index more strongly.

That is concentration risk. The investment may contain hundreds of companies, but its performance is not evenly spread across them.

Index investing is often presented as a way to remove the decisions. Pick a fund, set a monthly amount and leave it alone. That approach has genuine merit.

But passive describes how the fund is managed. It does not mean valuation and risk stop mattering.

The price paid still shapes long term return potential. Concentration still determines how much of the outcome depends on a small number of companies. Automating an investment does not make either condition disappear.

A fund can be passive. Your understanding should not be.

The conversation usually begins with what to buy.

It rarely begins with two more important questions: what am I paying, and where is the risk?

Valuation matters because the price paid shapes the return available. Concentration matters because it shows how much of the outcome depends on a small number of companies.

An index may contain five hundred companies and still be highly valued and heavily dependent on ten.

The name tells you what you bought. These measures tell you what you are paying for and where the risk sits.

Pick an index you have heard of. It might be the S&P 500, the FTSE 100 or the Euro Stoxx 50.

Find its current CAPE ratio, where one is available, and compare it with its historical median. Is the index valued above or below the level that has been typical across its history?

Then find the percentage held in its ten largest companies. Is the weight spread widely, or does a large part of the index depend on a small group?

One measure helps set your long term expectations. The other shows how widely your risk is spread.

Together, they tell you far more than the name of the index ever could.

This brings the first part of Phase First to a close.

Over eleven issues, we have moved from seeing the market as one thing to recognising the cycles, forces and decisions underneath it. This week, we added two questions for examining an index: how is it valued, and where is its risk concentrated?

The first layer of the foundation is now in place.

From here, we begin using it. We will look at what is happening in markets, the forces underneath them, and the conversations around money that are worth having.

Catherine x

Phase First.

Phase First is for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing here constitutes financial advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any security. All investing involves risk. I am a Fellow Chartered Accountant, not a regulated financial adviser. You are responsible for your own financial decisions.

Last week we watched gold’s cycle end in the past. This week, the force that drove it appeared in the present.

The people who manage America’s debt made a decision that shaped the whole environment for money. It did not lead the news. It moved through the financial world while the rest of the week carried on as normal.

Here is what happened. The yield on America’s 30-year government bond, which reflects the return investors demand for lending to the government for three decades, climbed to its highest level since 2007.

Against that backdrop, the Treasury stepped in. It announced that it would double the amount of its own older long-term debt it buys back from the market, starting in September. Officially, the purpose was to improve liquidity in the bond market. But the timing revealed something important. Rising long-term borrowing costs had become difficult to ignore.

Long-term yields fell as soon as the announcement was made.

Then something more interesting happened. Within a day, they rose again. By the end of the week, borrowing costs were higher than before the intervention began. The market, in effect, pushed back.

And here is the line worth holding onto, and it came from the analysts themselves: this was not a repayment of the debt. The total owed did not shrink. It recently passed forty trillion dollars. What changed was not the debt.

What changed was the response to it.

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If that phrase sounds familiar, it should. It is exactly where we ended last week.

Gold fell for four years while the debt it was supposed to protect against kept growing, because gold was never pricing the debt itself. It was pricing the response to the debt. Cheap money. Low rates. The actions taken to make the borrowing bearable.

Last week, that was history. This week, you watched the same force operate live.

When a system carries a great deal of debt, there is pressure to keep the cost of that debt down. And that pressure now has a number attached to it. This year, for the first time in its history, America will spend more paying interest on its debt than it spends on Medicare. The interest bill alone has reached a trillion dollars a year, and it is the fastest growing item in the entire federal budget. Every rise in yields makes that bill larger.

That is the pressure. It is not abstract. It is arithmetic.

This week, the pressure showed itself. Borrowing costs hit a twenty-year high, and within days the people who manage the debt stepped in to hold them down.

The intervention worked for about a day. The market pushed yields straight back up, as if to say the debt is still there, the spending is still there, and one announcement does not change that. Which tells you the pressure has not been resolved. It is still building. Which tells you the pressure has not disappeared. As long as it remains, further responses become more likely.

It points towards a different kind of environment: one in which the size and cost of the debt increasingly shape the decisions made around it.

That ongoing response, not any single announcement, is the condition that assets read. It is the exact force gold spent a decade responding to. It has not gone quiet. It has only just become visible again.

Here is what is easy to miss, and what separates someone who reacts from someone who understands.

The number on the screen this week was a distraction. Yields fell, then rose, and they will move again next week. If you watched only the number, you saw noise.

But underneath the number, a condition surfaced. The pressure of the debt reached the point where the people who manage it felt they had to act. That is not a headline that fades. That is the environment showing itself.

A single announcement is weather. The pressure that produced it is the season. And this week, for a moment, you could see the season directly.

This is worth your attention, because environments like this do not stay contained in the bond market. They shape what does well and what struggles for years at a time. If your money is invested, in a pension, in a fund, in anything, it is invested inside this environment, whether you chose it or not. Understanding the conditions is how you check that what you own still makes sense inside them.

For four weeks it looked like we were studying gold.

We were not.

We were learning to read a force that reaches far beyond gold, told through one asset that happened to read it clearly. And the week we finished the story, that force stepped out of history and into the news.

The cycle we studied is not a story about the past. It is the world you are investing in now.

This week, take one thing you own, your pension, a fund, a tracker, and ask a question you may never have asked of it before. Not “how is it performing?” but “what environment is it built for?” You now have evidence that something in the environment is shifting.. The question is whether what you own knows it too.

Next week: You were just asked what environment your money is built for. Next week, we answer it for the most owned investment in the world. The S&P 500, read through the framework you now have.

Catherine x

Phase First.

Phase First is for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing here constitutes financial advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any security. All investing involves risk. I am a Fellow Chartered Accountant, not a regulated financial adviser. You are responsible for your own financial decisions.

September 2011. Gold at $1,921.

Twelve years of rising prices. Central banks buying. Debt everywhere. The story had never looked stronger.

The fall that followed did not happen overnight. It took years, and it did not move in a straight line.

By December 2015, gold had fallen 46%, to around $1,049.

The debt did not disappear. It grew.

Central banks did not stop buying. Some of their largest purchases came in the years that followed.

Everything that had made gold feel essential in 2011 was still there in 2015.

And here is the question that took me years to properly understand.

If the debt was still growing, why did the price fall so far?

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Here is what actually happened. And it is more interesting than the price simply running out of steam.

Three things happened at the same time. None of them alone would have been enough. Together, they turned a twelve year rise into a four year fall.

The first thing. Almost everyone who wanted gold already owned it.

For a price to keep rising, new buyers have to keep arriving. Someone has to be willing to pay more than the last person did.

Through the Build years, there were always more people still to come. Early investors. Then institutions. Then central banks. Then, finally, everyone at the dinner party.

But by 2012, the people who believed in gold had largely acted on it. The queue of new buyers had thinned out.

The second thing. Early holders began taking profits.

Investors who had bought years earlier were sitting on enormous gains. At some point, a gain that exists only on paper becomes a gain you want in your hand.

Some began taking profits. Not in panic. Quite the opposite. Calmly, and by choice.

But that selling arrived at exactly the moment new buying was thinning. More gold for sale. Fewer people wanting to buy it.

The third thing. The conditions that made gold essential began to reverse.

Gold pays you nothing. No interest, no dividend, no rent. Its value comes from what someone is willing to pay for it, rather than income it produces while you hold it.

That is an easy trade to accept when savings accounts pay nothing either, and when money is being created on a scale that makes people question what their currency will be worth. Both of those were true after 2008. Gold gave up nothing, and it protected against something real.

By 2013, both of those supports were expected to weaken. The American economy was recovering. Equities began a powerful run. The dollar strengthened. And investors started to believe that interest rates, frozen near zero for years, would eventually rise again, and that the money printing would eventually stop.

Suddenly gold had competition.

Then came the sparks.

In April 2013, Cyprus was told by its European creditors to consider selling part of its gold reserves. Cyprus held barely enough gold to matter. But the fear was never really about Cyprus. It was that other struggling European countries, holding far more, might be forced to do the same.

A month later, in May 2013, the Federal Reserve signalled that its stimulus programme would eventually slow. This became known as the taper tantrum.

Neither event created the Breakdown. The conditions were already in place. These were the moments the market finally noticed.

Gold fell 28% that year, its worst annual performance in decades. The decline continued for two more years.

The Breakdown: the phase where the price falls, not because the reason to own it disappeared, but because the conditions supporting it changed.

In the Reset, few people own it, and the conditions are turning in its favour.

In the Breakdown, most people own it, and the conditions are turning against it.

Same asset. Opposite environment.

The Breakdown is where being right stops feeling like being right.

You can explain exactly why you own something. The reasoning is sound. And the price falls anyway, for months, then for years.

That is a specific kind of difficulty. Harder in some ways than being wrong, because being wrong at least makes sense.

And here is what makes it harder still.

A falling price looks identical whether your thinking was wrong or whether the conditions around it changed.

The price will not tell you which one you are in.

Understanding the phase is what helps you tell the difference.

Gold fell 46% between 2011 and 2015, while the debt it was supposed to protect against kept growing.

That only looks like a contradiction if you believe gold was pricing the debt.

It was not.

Gold was not responding to the level of debt alone. It was responding to the monetary conditions surrounding it. Cheap money. Near zero interest rates. A currency expanded to accommodate the borrowing.

Those were the conditions that made gold essential. And when they were expected to reverse, gold lost its support.

The debt was untouched.

The condition does not have to disappear for the phase to end.

The response to it only has to change.

This is the pattern that repeats. A story is true. The story stays true. And the price falls anyway, because what changed was never the story. It was the environment the story was living in.

Think of an investment you have heard described as a sure thing.

Ask what conditions are supporting it right now. Low rates. Cheap borrowing. Strong demand. Whatever they are.

Then ask what would have to change for those conditions to end.

The story tells you why an investment could rise.

The conditions tell you whether the environment still supports it.

You have now walked the full cycle. Reset. Build. Crowded. Breakdown.

Next week I show you the pattern that connects all four, and why you already understand it better than you think.

Catherine x

Phase First.

Phase First is for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing here constitutes financial advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any security. All investing involves risk. I am a Fellow Chartered Accountant, not a regulated financial adviser. You are responsible for your own financial decisions.

It was 2010 and gold was finally in the conversation.

Not just the financial pages. The front pages.

Dinner parties. Morning radio. The colleague who had never mentioned investing asked if you had any gold.

For the first time in a decade, everyone agreed. Gold was going up. It felt obvious. It felt safe. It felt like the smart thing to do.

This is what the Crowded phase looks like.

Not panic. Not chaos.

Consensus.

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To understand the Crowded phase, you have to understand what was driving gold higher in the first place.

After 2008 the world changed.

The financial crisis exposed unsustainable debt within the private banking system. Governments stepped in to stabilise it, taking on enormous debt of their own in the process and launching emergency stimulus programmes on an unprecedented scale. The Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, the Bank of England and the Bank of Japan all created trillions of new digital dollars, euros, pounds and yen to inject into the financial system. This is what quantitative easing means.

More money in circulation can erode the purchasing power of paper currency over time. Gold has historically been seen as a store of value in that environment. And that is exactly what investors in 2009 and 2010 were acting on.

Investors who understood this moved into gold early. Then institutions followed. And according to the World Gold Council, central banks themselves became net buyers of gold in 2010 for the first time in nearly two decades. Before 2009 they had been net sellers of an average of 400 tonnes per year.

And then the public arrived.

This was the part of the story I learned from most. The opportunity had not changed. Only the number of people who could see it had.

Nothing had suddenly become true in 2010. It had simply become obvious.

The Crowded phase begins when everyone can explain why the price is rising.

Here is what makes it dangerous.

By the time everyone agrees, the uncertainty has gone.

So has most of the opportunity.

Gold started this cycle at $270 in 1999, unloved, ignored, and held only by those who understood the Reset.

In the Reset, you are early and uncomfortable.

In the Crowded phase, you are late and comfortable.

That feeling of comfort is the signal.

Think back to the last investment everyone seemed to be talking about. The one that suddenly appeared in every podcast, every newspaper, every dinner conversation. That moment is worth paying attention to. Not because the story is wrong. But because everyone finally agrees.

By September 2011 gold reached $1,921.

It had risen from $270 in 1999 to $1,921 in twelve years.

The Reset investors knew why they owned it.

The Build investors held through doubt and were rewarded.

The Crowded investors finally felt safe.

The crowd doesn’t create opportunity.

It confirms it has already happened.

Think about the investments people in your life are talking about right now.

Not twelve months ago. Right now.

Is the conversation excited? Confident? Does it feel obvious?

When investing feels obvious, stop asking what everyone is buying.

Start asking which phase you’re in.

Next week — every cycle has a final phase. And the most important to understand before it arrives.

Catherine x

Phase First.

Phase First is for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing here constitutes financial advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any security. All investing involves risk. I am a Fellow Chartered Accountant, not a regulated financial adviser. You are responsible for your own financial decisions.

Let me take you back to where we left off.

It is 2002. Britain has just sold half its gold, near the lowest price in twenty years. The metal sits where it has sat for what feels like forever. Unloved. Unwatched. The asset no one wanted.

And then, quietly, it begins to move.

Not in a way anyone notices. A little higher one year. A little higher the next. No headlines. No crowd. Just a slow, patient climb, with almost no one watching.

After the Reset comes the Build.

The Reset is the bottom. The quiet. The years when an asset is cheap and ignored. The Build is what comes next. The asset starts to work. The price starts to rise. The reason you were early begins, quietly, to prove itself.

You would think this is the easy part. It is not.

Because the Build does not feel like winning. It feels like waiting. Gold rose about a quarter in 2002. About a fifth in 2003. Year after year it climbed, from the low 250s at the start of the decade toward 800 by 2007. But it climbed in silence. No excitement, no front pages, no one telling you that you were clever to be there.

And then came the test.

In 2008, the financial crisis arrived. The exact event gold existed for.

Gold fell 34 percent.

When I first learned this, I couldn’t quite believe it. The asset that existed for a moment like this fell exactly when it seemed most needed.

It dropped from around 1,000 to under 700, as people sold everything they owned, good and bad, simply to raise cash. The asset that was about to be proven right first had to fall hard enough to shake out everyone who did not understand why they held it.

Those who stayed watched gold triple over the next three years, to a new record high in 2011.

That is the Build. It works. It just tests you first.

Here is the part the price chart never shows you.

Someone who bought gold in 2002 and held it to 2011 made several times their money. On paper, an obvious win. But live it forward instead of backward, and it is a different experience entirely.

For years it barely moved while everything else looked more exciting. Then, in the one year it should have soared, it fell by a third. Imagine holding something through that. Watching it drop 34 percent in the middle of the very crisis you were supposedly right about.

Two people owned gold that year. One bought it because it had been going up. The other bought it because they understood why. When it fell, the first one sold, certain they had been wrong. The second one asked a different question. Not is it down, but has anything actually changed.

Nothing had. The reason was still true. Only the price had moved.

That is the whole skill. Knowing the difference between a price falling and a reason breaking.

I used to think the hard part was choosing the right thing. Now I see it. The hard part is holding it while it makes you feel like you were wrong.

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This is week two of four. Come with me for the rest.

Look at one thing you own that has fallen since you bought it. Not today. Over months.

Ask yourself one question. Has the reason you bought it changed? Or has only the price?

Prices move every day. Reasons rarely do.

Next week

The phase where everyone finally arrives. Gold on every front page, the crowd pouring in, and why that is the most dangerous moment of the whole cycle.

Catherine x

Phase First is for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing here is financial advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any investment. All investing involves risk.

Gold peaked in January 1980, at $850 an ounce.

Eighteen years later, the average price was under $300. Plenty of movement in between, rallies and falls and long stretches of nothing, but the direction of travel was down for the better part of two decades.

Long enough for gold to stop being interesting. Long enough for some of the most sophisticated holders in the world to look at it and decide it was finished.

In May 1999, the British government announced it was selling half the nation’s gold.

The timing turned out to be remarkable, and not in a good way.

For the next four weeks we are going to stay with gold. One asset, one full cycle, from 1999 to 2011. Four phases, in order, with the benefit of knowing how it ended.

This week, the phase that sale was made in.

Last week we met the four phases. Now we start with the first one.

The sale was 395 tonnes of gold, over seventeen auctions, running from July 1999 to March 2002.

The published reasoning was not stupid. Gold paid no interest. It had lost value for twenty years. Foreign currency would earn something. The Treasury’s stated aim was to achieve a better balance in the portfolio.

The weighted average price achieved across those auctions was $274.90 an ounce.

Gold’s low the summer of 1999 was $252.80.

They sold at the bottom. Not near it. At it.

By 2011, gold traded above $1,800.

Now the question worth asking. Why was gold so cheap in the first place?

Not because the market was being irrational. There were real conditions holding it down, and two of them explain most of it.

Supply had flooded. Between 1980 and 1999, annual gold mine production rose from 34 million ounces to 85 million. Two and a half times as much gold coming out of the ground every year. The high prices of the seventies had funded a wave of new mines, and all of that metal eventually arrived.

And cash was paying handsomely to wait. By mid 2000, the US interest rate was 6.5%. Gold pays no interest at all. When money sitting in a bank earns you that much, holding something that earns nothing is genuinely expensive.

There were other factors. But those two alone explain most of twenty years.

Which brings us to the part that matters.

Every one of those conditions was real. Measurable. Documented. The people selling in 1999 were not ignoring the evidence. They were reading it accurately and carrying it forwards.

What they were not asking was whether those conditions could last.

Because a wave of new mines eventually stops being new. And an interest rate of 6.5% is not a permanent feature of the world.

Notice, too, how long all this went on. Gold had been cheap and largely ignored for well over a decade before that sale, and it was still cheap and ignored for two years afterwards.

Phases do not take equal time. A breakdown can be over in a couple of years. A reset can outlast most people’s patience.

That is the Reset. An asset held down by conditions so persistent that everyone assumes they are permanent, at the point those conditions are running out.

And here is the difficulty, the part that stops this being a story about buying cheap things. Plenty of assets are quiet because they are finished. Companies fail. Industries end. From the outside, a Reset and an ending look identical. Both are cheap. Both are unloved. Nobody is recommending either at dinner.

The difference is never in the price. It is in whether the conditions holding it down can last.

Which is exactly what the next three weeks are for. You cannot see a phase turning while you are staring at the price. You can see it in the conditions, and gold’s conditions did reverse, slowly and visibly, for anyone who knew to look.

Understanding the conditions explains the market. Understanding the psychology explains why almost nobody acts on it.

So imagine holding gold in 1999.

No headlines. Nobody at dinner asking what you think. Twenty years of being wrong behind you, and no way of knowing how many more are ahead. Your own government selling theirs, publicly, with reasons attached.

This is why the Reset is the phase almost nobody occupies. Not because it is hard to spot afterwards. Because there is nothing to hold onto while you are inside it.

A crowded phase gives you constant reassurance. Everyone agrees. The price confirms you daily. The story is everywhere. The Reset offers none of that.

Being early and being wrong feel exactly the same from the inside. And they can feel that way for years.

Which is why understanding matters more here than anywhere else in the cycle. Conviction built on the price will not survive a decade of the price saying nothing.

The people who sold in 1999 had good reasons, written down, with twenty years of evidence behind them.

They were reading the conditions correctly.

They just assumed those conditions would hold.

A price tells you what has already happened. It cannot tell you whether the thing keeping it low is permanent or simply running its course.

Once you know phases exist, cheap stops meaning finished, and it stops meaning opportunity too. It becomes a question instead.

Not: is this cheap. But: can the reason it is cheap continue?

That question rarely has an obvious answer. It is still a far better question than the price alone allows you to ask.

Every new cycle begins while the old story still feels true.

Think of something you own that has done nothing for a long time. A fund, a holding, a sector you bought into and then stopped looking at.

Is the reason you bought it still true?

Not: is it working. Not: what did it do last month.

Is the reason still true.

And if the honest answer is that you never really had one, that you bought it because it was what people do, that is worth knowing too. It is the most common answer there is.

Those are completely different questions, and only one of them can be answered by looking at the price.

Next week, the Build. The years when the conditions quietly reversed, and almost nobody noticed.

Catherine x

Phase first

Phase First is for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing here constitutes financial advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any security. All investing involves risk. I am a Fellow Chartered Accountant, not a regulated financial adviser. You are responsible for your own financial decisions.

In January, gold hit a record high.

You probably heard about it. It was on the news, in the papers, in the group chats of people who never normally mention gold. $5,405 an ounce. A number nobody had ever seen.

Then it fell. Not dramatically, it just stopped going up, drifted sideways, and the conversation moved on. By spring, hardly anyone was talking about gold at all.

But something else happened in those same months, and it did not make the news.

The world's central banks bought 244 tonnes of it.

Not despite the fall. Through it. They bought more than they had the previous quarter, and more than their five-year average. And in June, a survey of the people who manage those reserves found that 89% expect to keep buying.

So which one is the story? The price that went quiet, or the buyers who never stopped?

They are two different things. And this week is about the difference.

Last week we saw that markets move in cycles, that conditions build long before events announce them.

This week: what those cycles actually look like.

A market cycle has four phases. Four repeating stages that markets move through, in order, again and again.

The Reset. The asset is quiet. Prices are low, attention is elsewhere, and nobody is recommending it at dinner. It still exists. It is simply out of season, and the people who are not watching have stopped noticing it is there.

The Build. Conditions start to change. Money moves in quietly. Not headlines yet, just flows. Prices begin to lift. It is the least dramatic phase and the most consequential, because almost everything that happens later is decided here.

The Crowded. Now everyone knows. It is on every screen, in every conversation, and the story is repeated so often it stops sounding like a story and starts sounding like a fact. By now attention is everywhere, and prices have usually risen a long way too.

The Breakdown. The conditions that supported it fade. Money leaves, and attention follows, usually in that order. And then, eventually, it is quiet again. Back to the Reset.

Four phases. Always in that sequence.

One thing worth knowing straight away: nothing moves through a phase in a straight line. A market in the middle of a long rise will still have weeks where prices fall, and months where price goes nowhere at all. Those are pauses inside a phase, not the end of one.

Knowing the four phases is the easy part.

The hard part is that you never get a label. No alert tells you a Reset has become a Build, or that a Crowded phase is running out of room. You are always standing inside one without a sign on the wall.

Which is why the phases are not really about prediction. They are about not panicking at the wrong moment. Not mistaking a quiet phase for a dead one, or a loud one for a safe one.

The calm investor isn’t calm because she predicted what came next. She is calm because she knows where she is now. You cannot control what the market does, but you can know which phase you are in. That is what keeps you steady.

The price of gold fell. The buyers who hold it for decades kept buying.

One of those is weather. The other is season.

Most of us learn to watch prices. We never learn to ask what phase those prices belong to.

That’s why a falling price can feel frightening. We don’t know whether it’s a normal pause within a phase or the start of a new one.

A price tells you what happened today.

A phase tells you where you are.

Once you understand the phase, the number on the screen becomes one piece of information, not the whole story.

Think of the money you have invested right now — the fund, the pension, the account you check occasionally.

Do you know what phase it is in?

Not what it did last month. What season it is in.

You would never choose a serum without looking at your face first.

Nobody ever told you your money had a face to check too.

Next week — the Reset. The phase nobody notices, and the one that decides the most.

Catherine x

Phase First

Phase First is for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing here constitutes financial advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any security. All investing involves risk. I am a Fellow Chartered Accountant, not a regulated financial adviser. You are responsible for your own financial decisions.

Events in the Middle East this year have been devastating for countless people and families. That reality sits above any market observation, and it is important to say so.

But markets respond to the world around them. And what is happening in energy prices right now raises a question worth sitting with.

Inflation in the United States has just hit a three-year high. Petrol prices are up 30% since February. Fruit and vegetables are 6% more expensive than a year ago. The cost of living is rising — and it is being felt.

US Consumer Price Index — the spike you can see above is inflation hitting a three year high. Source: MacroMicro.me

The conventional explanation is simple: conflict disrupted oil supply, oil prices rose, and everything else followed.

But here is the question I keep returning to.

Was the supply already tightening before the conflict began? Were the conditions for this price environment already building — and did the conflict simply accelerate something that was already in motion?

That question is at the heart of how cycles actually work.

Events don’t create cycles. They reveal them.

So what is a market cycle?

A market cycle — the repeating pattern of expansion, peak, contraction, and recovery that economies and markets move through over time.

Think of it like the seasons. Summer does not arrive because of a single event. It arrives because the conditions have been building — the angle of the earth, the accumulating warmth, the lengthening days. Winter does not end because of one warm afternoon. The cycle turns gradually, then all at once.

Markets work the same way. The conditions build quietly, beneath the surface, long before the headlines catch up.

Inflation rising is not the cause of a cycle change. It is a signal that you are already in a specific phase of one. The energy crisis did not create the conditions — it made them impossible to ignore.

This is why understanding the cycle matters more than watching the news.

The news tells you what has already happened. The cycle tells you where you are.

The investor who understands the cycle doesn’t need the headlines to tell them what’s happening. They already knew the environment was shifting. The headlines are confirmation — not a surprise.

That calm doesn’t come from predicting the future. It comes from understanding the pattern.

We will come back to this thread throughout the coming weeks. For now — just notice how differently you feel reading financial news when you have a framework versus when you don’t.

Every time prices rise, the conversation turns to who is to blame. Governments blame companies. Companies blame supply chains. Supply chains blame geopolitics. And the cycle turns quietly underneath all of it, largely unnoticed.

It was turning before the energy crisis. Before the headlines reached your morning news. Before the price rises showed up in your weekly shop.

The question worth asking now is not who caused this.

It is — where are we in the cycle?

Think about the last time a financial headline made you feel anxious.

Rising prices. A market drop. A warning about inflation.

Now ask — did you have a framework to read that moment? Or were you relying on the headline to tell you how to feel?

That gap — between reaction and understanding — is exactly what the coming weeks will begin to close.

Next week — now that you know markets move in cycles, the four phases themselves — and what each one means for the money sitting in them.

Catherine x

Phase First.

Phase First is for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing here constitutes financial advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any security. All investing involves risk. I am a Fellow Chartered Accountant, not a regulated financial adviser. You are responsible for your own financial decisions.

Last week, capital rotation moved through a supply chain. AI needs chips. Chips need factories. Factories need materials. Materials need mining. Everything needs energy.

This week, the same thing — at the scale of governments.

Tavi Costa, one of the most respected macro analysts in the world, published a chart this week that stopped me in my tracks. Foreign governments now own the lowest share of US Treasuries in history. In 2008 they owned roughly 35% of all US government debt. Today that number has fallen to 12.5%.

Chart: Tavi Costa, Crescat Capital — tavicosta.substack.com

That is not a small shift. That is a twenty year rotation playing out in one of the most important markets on the planet.

And almost nobody is talking about what it means.

First — what is a US Treasury?

When the American government needs money, it borrows it. It does this by issuing bonds called US Treasuries. A bond is simply a loan. You lend the government money. They promise to pay you back with interest after an agreed period of time.

For decades, foreign governments — China, Japan, Saudi Arabia, and others — bought enormous amounts of these bonds. It was considered one of the safest investments in the world. You were lending money to the United States. What could go wrong?

But that is changing.

Foreign governments are now buying far fewer US Treasuries than they used to. The share they own has fallen from 35% to 12.5% over twenty years — and it is still falling.

So the question is — where is that money going instead?

That is capital rotation.

Capital rotation — when large amounts of money move from one type of asset into another, following shifts in the global environment.

For twenty years the environment rewarded financial assets. Stocks. Bonds. US debt. Paper promises.

Something is shifting.

When governments stop buying bonds, that money has to go somewhere. Historically, when confidence in paper assets falls, capital moves toward hard assets — things with physical value that exist regardless of what any government decides.

Gold. Commodities. Real assets. Energy. Land.

How far that shift runs, nobody knows. But it is already twenty years in the making — and it is still moving.

For the last fifteen years the advice was simple. Put your money in a broad fund. Leave it alone. Trust the long run.

That advice was built for a specific environment. An environment where financial assets were winning.

That environment is changing. Not overnight. Not in a crash. Slowly — the way all big things change.

And it is the kind of change you can only see if you know to look.

Your money is sitting somewhere right now.

Probably in financial assets. A pension. A tracker fund. Savings.

Ask yourself — was that decision made for the environment we are in today?

Or was it made for the environment of ten years ago?

Next week — there is a framework that explains exactly how markets move through environments. It has four stages. Once you understand them, you will never look at a market chart the same way again.

Catherine x

Phase First.

Phase First is for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing here constitutes financial advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any security. All investing involves risk. I am a Fellow Chartered Accountant, not a regulated financial adviser. You are responsible for your own financial decisions.

THE PHASE PULSE

Tim Cook said something recently that stopped me in my tracks.

Apple is raising prices. Not because they want to. Because AI companies need so much memory and storage that there simply isn't enough left for consumer products. Cook called it a hundred-year flood. Something he said he's never seen anything like in his entire career.

Here's what's actually happening.

When demand is bigger than supply, one of two things has to happen — prices rise to slow the demand down, or supply increases to meet it. Since supply can't increase overnight, prices rise first.

Your next iPhone will cost more because of it.

That is not a story about Apple. That is capital rotation — and you just watched it happen in real time.

So where does the money go next?

When a supply chain can't keep up with demand, money flows backwards through it. All the way back to the beginning. Think of it like a queue that's too long — eventually someone opens more tills. But first they have to build them.

Most people see AI.

Investors look one step behind.

AI needs chips.

Chips need factories.

Factories need materials.

Materials need mining.

Everything needs energy.

That is capital rotation. Money moving through a system — backwards up a supply chain — until supply catches up with demand.

Not a theory. Not a prediction. Something already happening right now, if you know where to look.

The market is not one thing. It never was.

It is a whole system — equities, bonds, commodities, gold, energy, materials — all connected. All moving. And right now, a lot of the movement is happening far away from the S&P 500.

The S&P is one corner of the room.

There is a whole room — and it can be watched.

Think about the last thing you bought that cost more than it used to.

Groceries. A phone. A flight. A laptop.

Now ask — who benefited from that price increase? Where did that money go?

Follow the money backwards. That is how investors think.

Next week — now you know money moves backwards up a supply chain. But this happens across every market, every asset, all the time. Next week, the bigger picture — and once you see it, you will never look at markets the same way again.

Catherine

Phase First

Phase First is for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing here constitutes financial advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any security. All investing involves risk. I am a Fellow Chartered Accountant, not a regulated financial adviser. You are responsible for your own financial decisions.

New here? The full story and the framework live in the welcome →

There is a question I could not stop thinking about after I was made redundant in 2020.

I had spent years building a skincare routine I actually understood. Not just following instructions — understanding. I knew why vitamin C brightens. I knew why retinol needs to be introduced slowly. I knew that SPF is not optional, it is the foundation everything else builds on.

Nobody handed me that knowledge. I sought it out because my skin mattered to me and I wanted to look after it properly. Not outsource it entirely to a facialist and hope for the best. Actually understand it.

And yet there I was — Fellow Chartered Accountant, twenty-five years in finance — holding a lump sum and realising I had never applied that same curiosity to my money. The advice I had received my entire career was the financial equivalent of: just use this one moisturiser. Leave it. Do not overthink it.

We would never accept that for our skin. I decided I was not going to accept it for my finances either.

That is when I started learning. Really learning. And the first thing I discovered — the thing that changed everything — is that markets, like skin, work in cycles. There is a rhythm. A pattern. A framework underneath the advice everyone gave me.

In skincare, we understand our skin before we choose our products. We do not start with the retinol and hope for the best. We check what our skin actually needs first. In investing, the rule is exactly the same. We understand where the market sits before we choose our investments.

THIS WEEK’S LESSON

Here is the clearest way I can explain what Phase First actually means.

Skincare — Check your face first → then choose your products. Dry skin? Sensitive skin? Acne? Rosacea? Ageing? Then choose: Retinol. Hyaluronic acid. Vitamin C. Niacinamide. You don’t start with the product. You start with the face.

Investing — Check the phase first → then choose your investments. Reset? Build? Crowded? Breakdown? Then choose: Stocks. ETFs. Gold. Commodities. Cash. You don’t start with the investment. You start with the phase.

Understand first. Then choose. Same logic. Different canvas.

You do not need to know what Reset or Build or Crowded means yet. That is what the next few weeks are for. Right now I just want you to hold this one idea: there is a question you should be asking before you do anything else with your money. And almost nobody taught us to ask it.

That question is — what phase are we in?

And by the time we are done you will ask it automatically. The same way you check your skin before you choose your products.

And here is the thing about first questions — once you know they exist, you cannot stop asking them. You will catch yourself doing it in the mirror tonight without even noticing: a quick read of your skin before you reach for anything.

That instinct took years to build. The money version starts now, with one question. Do not worry about answering it yet — a few weeks from now, you will.

◆

Next week — We are told the market is one thing that goes up or down. It is not. Next week I show you what it is actually made of — and why that single piece of knowledge changes everything.

Catherine x

Phase First is for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing here constitutes financial advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any security. All investing involves risk. I am a Fellow Chartered Accountant, not a regulated financial adviser. You are responsible for your own financial decisions.

I love that I know it. It makes me feel capable. Like I am properly looking after something that matters.

In 2020 I was made redundant after twenty-five years as a Fellow Chartered Accountant. I walked away with a lump sum, a professional background in finance, and the sudden realisation that I had absolutely no idea how to make my money work the way my skincare routine works. I knew how to account for other people’s money. I had no real framework for my own.

The advice was simple: put it in the S&P 500 and leave it. It compounds over time. You will be fine.

And whether it’s a severance payment, savings built slowly, or the first spare money you’ve ever had — that advice is where the explanation usually stops.

And I thought — would I ever accept that for my skin? Just put something on it and walk away? Never look at the ingredients? Never understand what is actually happening underneath? Never adjust as the situation changes?

I would not. So I decided I was not going to accept it for my money either.

What followed was four years of daily learning. Podcasts on every commute. Books at the weekend. Charts at the kitchen table after the kids were in bed. Slowly — the same way skincare started to make sense once I understood the ingredients — markets started to make sense too. And what I found underneath it all was a sequence. An order to learn things in. Nobody had ever shown me the order.

Since applying the Phase First framework two years ago, the money I have invested has grown by more than 180%. Not because I am exceptional. Because I finally understood what I was doing and why — and because I gave my finances the same consistent attention I give my skin.

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THE FRAMEWORK

Phase First is built on one idea taught in a deliberate order:

Environment → Investment → Behaviour.

Most investing education starts with “what should I buy?” I start one step earlier: what environment are you investing in? Markets move through four phases — Reset, Build, Crowded, Breakdown — the way a year moves through seasons. You will learn each one properly, in order. The phase is the season. The price is the weather. Once you can read the season, everything else finally has context.

Only then does it make sense to look at individual investments — what makes a business worth owning, and whether it suits the environment you are in. And only when you understand both does the last piece work: the behaviour. Staying calm when prices fall. Knowing the difference between the weather changing and the season changing.

Environment first. Investment second. Behaviour always.

WHAT PHASE FIRST IS NOT

You will never get a stock tip here.

Not because I have no opinions — I have plenty. But a tip makes you dependent on the tipper. You buy without understanding why, so you have no way of knowing when to hold, when to question, or when the environment underneath it has changed. The tip feels like a shortcut. It is actually the long way around, because it teaches you nothing you can use next time.

I believe financial freedom is understanding, not following.

So instead of telling you what to buy, I teach you how to see: what environment you are investing in, what makes something worth owning inside it, and how to stay steady while you own it. Understanding compounds just like money does — every concept you learn here makes the next one easier, and none of it expires.

Follow a tip and you have borrowed someone else’s decision.

Understand the framework and every decision after that is yours.

HOW THE WEEKS BUILD

This newsletter teaches the framework one concept at a time, in sequence. No week assumes anything you have not already learned here.

We start with the foundations: what the market actually is (it is not one thing), the different places money can live, and how money moves between them. Then the heart of it: markets move in cycles, and those cycles have four recognisable phases. We walk through each phase properly — what it feels like, what tends to happen, how to recognise it. Then we apply it: what the framework says about the investments you already hold, starting with the S&P 500 itself.

Each issue takes three minutes and follows the same rhythm: The Phase Pulse (one observation to start your week), The Lesson (one concept, one ingredient at a time), The Aha (the thing you will still be thinking about on Friday), and Your Money Moment (one question connecting the lesson to your own financial picture).

By the end of this year you will know what the four market phases are and how to recognise them. You will understand why the S&P 500 is not the whole market — just one part of a much bigger picture. You will be able to look at your investments and understand what they are actually doing and why. The financial equivalent of a skincare routine you actually understand.

That is the promise. One week at a time. Starting now.

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A year from now, the market will still be moving through its phases. The difference is, you’ll know how to read them.

I’m glad you’re here.

Catherine x

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Phase First is for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing here constitutes financial advice. I am a Fellow Chartered Accountant, not a regulated financial adviser. Past performance — including my own — is not a guarantee of future results. You are responsible for your own financial decisions.

I know my skincare routine inside out. The vitamin C in the morning, the retinol at night, the SPF that is non-negotiable regardless of the weather. I did not learn any of this in school. Nobody handed me a manual. I figured it out through friends, the internet, trial and error. And now I do it without thinking — because I understand why each step matters.

For a long time I did not give my finances the same attention. And I am a Fellow Chartered Accountant. Twenty-five years in finance. If anyone should have known what to do with a lump sum, it was me.

But when I found myself with one in 2020 after being made redundant, the only advice I received was — put it in the S&P 500 and leave it. No detail. No why. No here is what is happening underneath and here is why it matters to you personally.

Imagine if that was the skincare advice. Just buy a moisturiser and leave it alone. We would never accept that. So I decided I was not going to accept it for my money either.

I spent four years learning what nobody had translated. The knowledge existed — it filled entire books — but it was written in jargon, by professionals, for professionals. Nobody in my life had ever talked about money in plain language. And what I found underneath all of it was a sequence that was actually simple: markets move through four phases, the way a year moves through seasons — and once you can read the season, everything else finally has context. Since applying the Phase First framework two years ago, the money I've invested has grown by more than 180%. Not because I got lucky. Because I finally understood the order.

Phase First is where I teach that framework — for women who have money and want to understand what to actually do with it. One concept a week. Three minutes. No jargon. Environment first, investment second, behaviour always.

You will never get a stock tip here. Financial freedom is understanding, not following.

If you want the full story — the framework, how the weeks build, and where this is going — it’s all here:

That’s where the whole journey starts.

Catherine x

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Phase First is for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing here constitutes financial advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any security. All investing involves risk, including the loss of capital. I am a Fellow Chartered Accountant, not a regulated financial adviser. Past performance — including my own — is not a guarantee of future results. You are responsible for your own financial decisions.