Welcome to Phase First
I used to spend more on my skincare than I ever thought about my finances. It took a redundancy to make me question that.
I have a Sunday evening ritual. Cleanse, exfoliate, serum, moisturiser, tretinoin. It takes about seven minutes. I know exactly what each product does and why it is there. I did not always know that — I learned it gradually, through conversations, through reading, through paying attention to my own skin and what it responded to.
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.
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.
FREE AND PAID — HOW PHASE FIRST WORKS
The weekly newsletter is free, and it will stay free. The framework — the phases, the environment, the way of seeing — is the foundation everyone should have, and I won’t put a foundation behind a paywall.
For readers who want to go further, a paid tier is coming. It will do what the free newsletter deliberately doesn’t:
A deep analysis of where the market is right now — which phase we’re in, what the environment is showing, and exactly how I read it. Not predictions. The reasoning, shown in full.
And the layer beneath: how to analyse the investments themselves. Financial statements, ratios, valuation — the numbers, taught the same way everything here is taught. One ingredient at a time, in plain language, phase first.
The free newsletter teaches you the framework. The paid tier is watching it applied — and learning the analysis underneath it.
If you want to be told when it opens, you’re already in the right place. Subscribers hear first.
But none of that is where this starts. It starts the same way my skincare did — with one small thing, properly understood. Then another. Then one more.
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.