── Three Juggernauts Walk Into a SIPP ──
Today was one of those buy days that just felt right from the moment I opened the app. You know the ones — when you're not dithering, not second-guessing, not staring at charts trying to divine the exact bottom. You just know what you want to buy and why you're buying it, and the only question is how much. Microsoft. Meta. BlackRock. Three companies at three very different points in the compounding journey, but all sharing one thing in common: they own the infrastructure of modern capitalism. Not the shiny bits. Not the hype-cycle darlings. The actual plumbing. The platforms. The tollbooths. The things that everyone uses whether they know it or not, and that generate cash whether the market is up or down.
── Microsoft: AI-First, Enterprise-First, and Just Getting Started ──
I've written about Microsoft before — I own it, I add to it, I don't plan to stop. MSFT is, in my view, the single best-positioned company in enterprise technology right now. Not the most exciting. Not the one that will double in six months (probably). The one that will still be here in 30 years, still growing, still returning capital to shareholders, still deeply embedded in the way every business on earth operates.
Azure is the cloud platform that enterprises actually trust — the one that integrates with the Active Directory they've been running since the 1990s, the Office 365 they use every day, the Teams meetings they're sitting in right now. The Copilot AI integration across the entire Office suite — Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams — is the most practical, revenue-generating deployment of large language models in enterprise software. Every knowledge worker on the planet is about to get an AI assistant baked into the tools they already use. And Microsoft gets paid for every seat, every month, forever.
Then there's GitHub Copilot, the dominant AI coding assistant. LinkedIn, the dominant professional network, quietly printing money with its own AI-powered recruiting and advertising tools. Windows, still running on most of the world's desktops. Gaming (Xbox, Activision Blizzard). The OpenAI partnership — Microsoft owns roughly 49% of the economics of arguably the most important AI company on the planet. The list goes on and every item on it is a recurring-revenue, high-margin, deeply moated business. Microsoft is not a bet on AI hype. It's a bet that AI will be deployed through enterprise software, and Microsoft owns the enterprise. Always has. Probably always will.
── Meta: The Advertising Engine Nobody Can Replicate ──
If Microsoft owns the enterprise, Meta owns attention. Facebook. Instagram. WhatsApp. Messenger. Threads. 3 billion people across the family of apps, logging in daily, scrolling, liking, sharing, messaging, buying. The attention is the product, and the product is absolutely enormous.
Meta's advertising business is a compounding machine within a compounding machine. Every ad dollar spent on Meta platforms feeds data back into the targeting algorithms, making the next ad more effective, which attracts more ad dollars, which feeds more data. It's a flywheel that gets stronger every quarter, and the numbers back it up — revenue growing, margins improving, free cash flow pouring in. The AI investments Meta is making — not the chatbot kind, the 'make our ad targeting 2% more effective across 3 billion users' kind — are the kind that generate real, measurable returns. A 2% improvement in ad targeting across a user base the size of Meta's is billions of dollars in incremental revenue. Not theoretical billions. Actual billions.
And then there's the optionality people don't talk about enough. WhatsApp has 2 billion users and is barely monetised — the business messaging platform alone could be a $10-20 billion revenue stream inside a decade. Llama, Meta's open-source AI model, is one of the leading foundation models and gives Meta AI independence most competitors don't have. Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses are the early frontrunner in wearable AI — still tiny, still experimental, but if there's going to be a post-smartphone computing platform, Meta has a seat at the table. I keep buying Meta because the core business is a fortress and the optionality is free. That's a combination I can live with.
── BlackRock: The Tollbooth on Global Capitalism ──
And now for something completely different — my first ever BlackRock (BLK) purchase. BlackRock is the world's largest asset manager with over $11.5 trillion in assets under management. Eleven and a half trillion. To put that in perspective, that's roughly the combined GDP of Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom. All running through BlackRock's platform, all generating fees, all compounding.
BlackRock is not just an asset manager — it's the operating system of institutional finance. Its Aladdin risk management platform is used by central banks, sovereign wealth funds, pension funds, and insurance companies around the world to manage their portfolios. Aladdin doesn't just manage BlackRock's money — it manages trillions of dollars of other people's money too, generating licence fees that are sticky, recurring, and nearly impossible to rip out once installed. It's the financial equivalent of SAP — not glamorous, not consumer-facing, but embedded so deeply in the infrastructure that switching is practically unthinkable.
And the ETF boom? BlackRock owns iShares. Every VWRP, every VUAG, every EQQQ I buy — those are Vanguard and Invesco products. But the biggest ETF provider on the planet, by a wide margin, is iShares. As the world continues its relentless shift from active management to passive indexing — the SPIVA trend I write about constantly — BlackRock collects fees on an ever-growing pool of assets. It's a tollbooth on the flow of global capital from expensive active funds to cheap passive ones. And tollbooths, as investments, have historically worked out rather well for their owners.
── Three Different Bets, One Simple Theme ──
Microsoft owns the enterprise. Meta owns attention. BlackRock owns the plumbing of global finance. They're different companies in different sectors with different risk profiles. But they share one thing: each is deeply, structurally embedded in the way the world works. You don't run a modern business without touching Microsoft products. You don't reach 3 billion consumers without Meta's ad platform. You don't manage institutional money at scale without BlackRock's infrastructure. These are not 'hoping for a catalyst' stocks. These are 'the catalyst is just being alive in 2026 and participating in the global economy' stocks.
The SIPP keeps growing. The compounding keeps doing its quiet work. One good buy day at a time. One 'I believe in this business' decision after another. No drama. No panic. No clever timing. Just buying pieces of things I believe in, holding them, and letting the years do the rest. Happy days ahead indeed.
As always, nothing on this site is financial advice. I'm a 66-year-old UK investor sharing what I do with my own SIPP. All investments carry risk, including the risk of losing money. Individual shares carry concentration risk and can be significantly more volatile than diversified funds. Microsoft, Meta, and BlackRock are all individually large positions that could underperform the market or lose value. BlackRock's business is tied to asset prices — if markets fall, assets under management fall, and fee revenue falls with them. Meta faces regulatory risk, user privacy concerns, platform competition, and the constant risk that advertising budgets shift elsewhere. Microsoft faces antitrust scrutiny, cloud competition from AWS and Google, and the risk that its AI investments don't deliver the returns expected. Do your own research, understand what you're buying, and never invest money you can't afford to lose. Past performance doesn't guarantee future results. I'm comfortable owning all three. You might not be. That's fine. Make your own decisions.