Clients take our data and feed it to AI

Thank you to everyone who tuned into my live video yesterday! Join me for my next live video in the app.Many of our subscribers take our data and feed it straight into their own AI systems. What goes into this data feed, and how can you see it. The video explains that clearly.That was my answer when the AI question came up on a call Boardy set up for me this week, with a family office in Singapore.It’s a fair question. You can now point a model at public filings and get a tidy, bespoke write-up for a small portfolio in minutes. A lot of that output is genuinely good, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.But a model writes from whatever you give it. Give it the same public information everyone else has and you get a well written version of what the market already knows.So the scarce part is the input. At Helix we rate all 500 S&P 500 companies on eight factors. The signals are built to pick up fundamental quality that is expected to decline quarters before it shows up in the reported numbers. A news search won’t hand you that.The other scarce part is that nobody is in the loop. Our feeds are rules-based and coded onto our server. A subscriber connects their portfolio management system and pulls the data in directly. Nobody at our end is deciding which stock makes it in today. There is no discretion to drift, and no one to second-guess on a bad week.I’ve noticed the AI question changes the temperature in almost every room I’m in right now. Questions about method are easy to talk through. This one lands on identity, because it sounds like it’s asking what the research team is for.My view is that the team’s job moves upstream. You decide what goes into the model, and you hold a process that doesn’t bend when the output looks convincing.If your firm has put AI on top of its research this year, what are you actually feeding it? This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sowmyvj.com/subscribe

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This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.sowmyvj.comThank you to everyone who tuned into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.1. The Hook: A $111 Billion Identity CrisisIn the high-stakes theater of biotech investing, there is no siren song more seductive—or more dangerous—than a blue-chip giant trading at a structural discount. Bristol Myers Squibb ($BMY) currently finds itself in the throes of a $111 billion identity crisis. Trading at a price of $54.80, the company is attempting a “quantamental” metamorphosis: shedding its skin as a legacy pharmaceutical titan to emerge as a nimble, high-science innovator. For the sophisticated observer, the central question is whether this is a generational “deep value” entry point or a structural value trap where the “new” BMY—symbolized by its high-potential schizophrenia therapy, Cobenfy—cannot grow fast enough to outrun the decay of its past.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.sowmyvj.comThank you for tuning in!Helix Investor Briefing: Navigating the Late-Cycle MarketThe Big Picture – Energy, Currency, and Your Purchasing PowerWelcome & The Global Landscape Hello everyone, and welcome to our June strategic update. Thank you for tuning in, whether you’re listening to this on your morning commute or reading the transcript on Substack.We find ourselves in a very fascinating, yet highly complex macroeconomic environment right now. Let’s start with the foundational realities dictating global markets. First, energy. Crude oil is holding firmly at ninety dollars and ninety cents a barrel. High energy costs act as a stealth tax on both consumers and corporations, and it means inflation remains a sticky, persistent force in the background.Second, let’s talk about currencies, specifically the British Pound trading against the US Dollar at one-point-three-four. For those of you tracking our portfolio, you know we manage a Sterling-based fund, but we buy elite, world-class companies listed in the United States.The “Stealth Drag” and How We Fix It When you invest across borders, you are exposed to a hidden variable: currency risk. If the pound fluctuates wildly against the dollar, it can create an artificial drag on our returns, even if the stocks we own are performing beautifully.To protect your purchasing power from this exchange-rate volatility, we have implemented a strict defensive rule. We are maintaining an internal cash buffer of six to ten percent, held entirely in pristine US Dollar cash units. Think of this as an immediate financial shock absorber. It ensures that when currency markets experience downward velocity, our core capital remains insulated, steady, and ready to deploy.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.sowmyvj.comThanks to the institutional allocators and family office CIOs who tuned in. Also a big thanks to our LPs for believing in our research, and strategy.TLDR The market is punishing Visa, driving a 9.58% trailing stock decline despite its flawless 97.8% gross profit margin and pristine accounting integrity. While retail investors look at the supreme 50.2% net margins and scream “undervalued,” they are missing the institutional exit. Berkshire Hathaway completely liquidated its multi-billion dollar stake this year because Visa’s profit engine relies on regressive fee extraction that is drawing an unprecedented, coordinated regulatory attack.

Stop Buying the Story. Start Buying the Cashflow.If your idea of green investing is buying an ETF that holds Apple, calls it carbon neutral, and lets you sleep better at night, stop reading right now. We can’t help you. If you are looking for Dogecoin moonshots or safe, index-hugging returns that lag behind inflation, this isn’t for you either.This is for the investors who are flat-out tired of underperforming. You’ve watched mainstream funds destroy your capital for several years while chasing feel-good fairy tales. I have spent 30 years in financial risk, and I can tell you the market is fundamentally broken. It treats sustainability like a public relations exercise.I don’t care if a company saves the planet. I am not an activist, and I am definitely not an evangelist. I am a fiduciary. My job is to preserve wealth and compound it. But here is the secret the mainstream guys keep missing: the most massive, overlooked value opportunities over the next decade sit exactly where sustainability intersects with boring, high-margin economics.We don’t care about the story. We care about the unit economics.In the video above, I walked through the OctoFactor Model. It is a proprietary framework I have built, tweaked, and used over the last 25 years. It takes what used to be 14 messy factors and condenses them into eight hard filters. Six of these factors—market risk, size, value, profitability, investment, and momentum—are just our risk stabilizers. They are the baseline. They keep us from doing something stupid, but they don’t generate alpha.The real magic happens in the final two factors: Forensic Integrity and Eco-Efficiency. This is where we extract the juice.Factor 7: Forensic Integrity (The IHF Signal)Let’s be honest. We are living in a stagflationary regime right now. The financial media loves to pretend we’re in a roaring growth stage, but they are lying to you. Look at the data. Unemployment is creeping, interest rates are sticky, and GDP growth is scraping the floor quarter-on-quarter. In a regime like this, corporate margins get absolutely squeezed.So what do corporate executives do? They start cooking the books.Our Integrity and Health Factor (IHF) combines three sub-scores into a brutal stress test.First, we look at Solvency. Do they actually have the hard cash to execute their massive expansion plans, or are they funding it with toxic debt? Second, we look at Fundamental Quality. Is their operating efficiency actually good, or are they losing pricing power as inflation bites? Third—and this is the main thing—we run the M-Score. This is our earnings manipulation detector.Here is a truth bomb: a company has three financial statements—the balance sheet, the profit and loss, and the cash flow statement. Nearly 90% of listed companies try to manipulate at least one of them to keep Wall Street happy. But they can never successfully cook all three. The M-Score catches the mismatch. If the manipulation is too high, it’s a hard stop. We don’t touch it.When you apply this forensic test globally, 93% of all listed companies fail. Think about that. The index fund you are passively holding is stuffed to the brim with corporate zombies that failed our integrity test.Factor 8: The Eco-Efficiency TrapNow let’s layer on the second alpha generator: Eco-Efficiency.Since 2015, almost every major company has put out a glossy sustainability report filled with perfect ESG scores. Don’t believe the propaganda. ESG scores are not a validation of a business model. They are exactly like credit scores. A rating agency hands out an “AAA” ESG rating simply because management ticked a bunch of corporate compliance boxes.I analyze this gap constantly. There is sustainability talk, and then there is sustainability work. When a company spends millions hiring PR firms to write eco-reports but isn’t hiring actual engineers to fix their supply chain, the gap is massive.Look at Airbnb. They have some of the highest ESG scores in the entire market. But their business model is fundamentally unsustainable for the communities they operate in because it aggressively drives up local rent prices and compresses housing stock.Or look at the tech darlings like NVIDIA. Wall Street drools over their ESG metrics. But if you strip away the marketing, their core business is a ticking structural time bomb. They are 100% dependent on a single manufacturer in Taiwan, and their AI chips devour insane amounts of electricity and require massive, unsustainable cooling infrastructure. As they scale, their core operations become more and more fragile.Our model actively punishes companies where the gap between narrative and reality is too wide. If they are faking it, we short them or give them a basement-level valuation. If their sustainability actually improves their unit economics—meaning it drops their cost of capital or expands their margins—we go long.Connecting the Dots: The Line in the SandTraditional factor models like CAPM or Fama-French were built for a market that quite literally no longer exists. They assume stock returns follow a neat, normal distribution. They don’t. Stock returns are fat-tailed. One massive year in the right asset makes your entire decade.By combining Forensic Integrity with Eco-Efficiency, we are able to spot fundamentally mispriced, boring businesses roughly 12 to 18 months before the rest of the market wakes up. We buy them when they are 60% to 80% undervalued. And by the time the financial media starts hyping them up, we have already extracted the juice, taken our profits, and walked out the door.We are simply publishing our current position. This isn’t a recommendation for you to buy or sell anything. It’s a reality check.The Binary Choice: You either believe that corporate narratives and ESG checkboxes will dictate market returns forever, or you believe that structural economic tension will eventually force a brutal re-rating of the balance sheet. If you believe the marketing stories, keep buying your index funds; if you believe the data, it’s time to change how you look at risk.The installer with the worst marketing and the best repeat customer rate is the one worth owning. Most people will never find it. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sowmyvj.com/subscribe

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sowmyvj.com/subscribe

It’s surprising to note that most analysts and financial media, don’t go back in time to tick back on what the company CEO said a few quarters back. They just take the earnings call at face value, and worse, a number of them don’t even analyse it against what they wrote four quarters back. And we beleive them, we buy and sell based on that. Don’t pat yourself on your back, for not following the folly. Even if you don’t, your fund manager does, and you depend on them to deliver your pension.Cloud contracts are a famous example; there are lesser and lesser of those five or ten year contracts coming through, nowadays. But the cost of executing their contract keeps accumulating today for a contract signed in 2020, at the height of the pandemic. What did they tell us back then? Cost of compute, or whatever it was called, was going down, but they were smart to get customers locked in, for five years. They quietly stopped talking about it afterwards, if you see.I am not saying every company does that, but it is not illegal to do so. Your fiduciaries don’t care to look back, at the earnings call from four quarters back. You can, but can you? You have a binary choice. Either continue to leave things as is, or start looking at how your investments are doing. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sowmyvj.com/subscribe

So passive investors are mostly locked into a tax wrapper. So they keep buying, with the hope of withdrawing at some point in time. More on the sequence of returns risk, later.But, they are actually going against two major factors that generate stock returns - Size and Valuation.Since a vast majority of passive investors use market cap weighted index tracker funds (go look at your brokerage statement; you are no different!), when momentum increases stock prices, they often buy the largest, most expensive stock, at the peak. This is your usual ‘bull year’, my investments are growing case. And their banks, and brokerages are going to tell them, that markets are volatile, so stay invested.Even if they wanted to, they can’t exit so easily. They will face all the brakes and speed humps when they try. Good for us, stock pickers, and fund managers, you see.If we just snip out the most overvalued, mega cap stocks, the rest of the index stocks, gives us an opportunity to beat the market. In the case of the S&P 500, snip out the magnificient seven tech stocks. They take 35% of the index anyways. The remaining stocks are still fairly valued. Pick five, or ten, and build a portfolio. That beats the market by breakfast tomorrow.Easy peasy investing! But a smarty pants way. What do you think? This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sowmyvj.com/subscribe

The NarrativeThe market loves a good story, and right now, the story is that Airbnb is an ESG darling. Analysts point to their “top-notch” ESG scores as proof of a sustainable, forward-thinking company. They’ve managed to convince the world that they represent the “sharing economy,” a phrase that sounds great in a marketing deck but means nothing on a balance sheet. Because of this halo effect, the market has tacked a massive premium onto their stock. It’s the classic 2021 clean-energy bubble playbook: if it feels good, pay more for it.The DataI’ve spent 30 years watching funds destroy capital by chasing narratives instead of numbers, and this is a textbook case. Let’s look at the actual unit economics vs. the story. Airbnb currently enjoys a 20% valuation premium solely attributed to its ESG rating.Their business model exists to chase renters out of the market and gentrify your area. When you look at the mechanics, the valuation is 20% higher because of an unjustified ESG rating. If you peel that rating off, the valuation drops massively. That is the reality the market is choosing to ignore.The Helix ViewI am amazed at how easily investors get blinded by a “green” sticker. At Helix, we don’t care about saving the planet; we care about whether the unit economics make sense. This is a “smoke and mirrors” play where the social component of ESG is actually a liability disguised as an asset. We are publishing our position because we believe the most overlooked opportunities sit at the intersection of sustainability and boring, high-margin economics—not in companies that rely on regulatory blind spots and social displacement to juice their margins.We might be early on this, and being early often looks exactly like being wrong. We will likely underperform the index for the next 12 months while this thesis ripens, but we are trading short-term pain for structural alpha. If you need quarterly dopamine hits, this trade will make you miserable.The Binary Choice: You either believe that ESG ratings will continue to be disconnected from the actual social impact on housing markets, or you believe the market will eventually price in the regulatory and social cost of gentrification. If you don’t believe the latter, don’t take the position.The next decade of alpha won't come from following the herd into overpriced ESG darlings. It will come from finding the structural advantages others are too blind to see. Reply to this email to receive a copy of our factsheet. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sowmyvj.com/subscribe