The Vital Signs Academy
Investing taught properly by a GP who learned it the expensive way. Fourteen lessons, three calculators that actually work, and no one trying to sell you a course.
Usually a course, a signal service, or a platform's spread. This is written because explaining things properly is the job I already do all day, and because a concept you actually understand is worth more than a stock tip you don't.
I spent 2022 and 2023 day trading. I was good at losing money at it. What changed was not a better system; it was understanding what I was buying and why the price of it moves. That took reading, and the reading is what is written up below.
Everything here is at roughly the level of the CISI Level 3 syllabus, which is the qualification I am working through myself. Where something is genuinely contested, I say so rather than pretending the textbook settled it.
Start anywhere. The foundations are genuinely foundational, though, and the valuation section makes more sense after them.
The numbers in the lessons are easier to believe once you have moved them around yourself. Nothing you type here leaves your device.
The thing nobody believes until they see the curve bend. Change the monthly amount and watch where the growth stops coming from you and starts coming from the returns.
What the pot is worthWhat you put in
What you actually hand over when you sell at a profit, for shares held outside an ISA or pension. Rates and the allowance are for the 2026/27 tax year.
A P/E on its own tells you almost nothing. Put a growth rate next to it and it starts to mean something. Both numbers are on the lesson pages below.
Seven themes, roughly thirty holdings, one thousand pounds a month, no leverage and no shorting. Published openly on eToro so the record is checkable rather than claimed.
The dominant capital cycle of the decade, held through the companies with the earnings to survive a disappointment.
The sector I understand best from the inside, and the one where a twenty year horizon is genuinely justified.
A thesis with an expiry date, held knowingly. Tension-dependent earnings are not the same as structural ones.
Small positions in something that either works or does not. Sized so being wrong is survivable.
Cheap for reasons, not by accident. Held at a weight that respects the political risk.
Data centres need electricity that does not stop at night. That demand is structural, not a news cycle.
The boring end. It does not make the returns, it makes the risk score survivable while the rest of it works.
I am James. I am a GP with getting on for a decade of post-qualification practice, most of it in general practice with a good deal of out-of-hours work on top. I am the first person in my family to go to university and the first to own a share of anything.
I started investing badly. Two years of day trading taught me that I am not unusually clever, that the market does not care how confident I feel, and that a decision made quickly is usually a decision made emotionally. The portfolio I run now is the opposite of that: slow, public, and built to be held for thirty years.
I write a daily market post on eToro under the name Scalpel to Stocks. This site is the teaching part of it, pulled out of the posts and put somewhere you can actually find it.
Every holding, every weight, every mistake, posted daily before breakfast. If the lessons here were useful, that is where the working out happens.
Read the daily post on eToroCutting through noise. Finding the signal. Getting fat with the stacks.
This is education, not advice. Nothing on this site is a personal recommendation to buy, sell or hold any investment. I am a medical doctor, not a financial adviser, and I am not authorised or regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. I do not know your circumstances, your tax position, your debts or your timeline, and advice that ignores all four is not advice.
Your capital is at risk. Investments fall as well as rise and you can get back less than you put in. Past performance, mine included, tells you nothing reliable about what happens next.
Tax figures go out of date. The calculator uses 2026/27 rates and allowances for UK residents. Rules change, your situation is specific to you, and anything that matters should go past an accountant before you act on it.
If you copy a portfolio, you take the losses too. Copying is not delegation of the risk. It is acquiring somebody else's risk on top of your own.