Another week, another Trading 212 SIPP top-up, and this one's a nice blend of the deeply familiar and the faintly baffling. Four of the positions I've been building for a long time — more VUAG, more Meta, more Amazon, more Alphabet — plus one brand-new name that I'll get to in a minute, and which I'll happily admit I can't fully explain yet. That's fine, by the way. You don't need to be able to explain everything you own in one sentence on the day you buy it. You just need to be honest about which bucket each holding belongs in, and keep the buckets the right size.
── VUAG: The Weekly Ritual That Never Stops ──
First up, and always first up: more VUAG, the Vanguard S&P 500 UCITS ETF (Acc). This is the engine room. It's the one holding I add to literally every single week, rain or shine, good mood or bad, markets up or markets sulking. Five hundred of America's largest companies at 0.07% a year, dividends reinvested automatically, no decisions to remake, no narrative to keep up with. I've written before that the biggest risk to my returns isn't a crash — it's me, and my own urge to get clever. VUAG removes the cleverness entirely. I don't pick a day, I don't pick a price, I don't wait for a dip. I just keep feeding it, and it keeps quietly owning the most productive corporate sector on the planet on my behalf. Boring. Relentless. Beautiful.
People sometimes ask why I bother topping up an index fund when I could put that money into one of the individual names I'm clearly enthusiastic about. The answer is that VUAG isn't competing with those positions — it's the thing that makes them safe to hold. It's the base layer. Everything else sits on top of it, and the base layer is what means I never have to be right about any single company to do well over thirty years. Every top-up is another brick in the part of the portfolio that doesn't need my opinion.
── META: The Advertising Cash Machine, Topped Up Again ──
Then more Meta. I've lost count of how many times I've added to this one, and honestly I've stopped apologising for it. Roughly three billion people use a Meta product every day, and that attention gets converted into advertising revenue at a scale and margin that almost nothing else in media has ever managed. On top of that you've got WhatsApp, which is enormous and still barely monetised, a genuinely serious open-source AI effort in Llama, the Reality Labs optionality that I treat as a free option rather than a thesis, and a balance sheet that lets them buy back stock aggressively while still spending whatever they want on infrastructure. The bear case — regulatory pressure, teen engagement, the cost of the AI buildout — is real, and I don't wave it away. But every quarter the thing keeps printing, and the multiple still doesn't look silly to me. So I added a bit more. Again.
── AMZN: Four Businesses Under One Roof ──
More Amazon too. I keep coming back to the fact that AMZN isn't one company — it's at least four, and they're all enormous. AWS is the profit engine and still the default cloud for a huge slice of the internet. Retail is the logistics machine that most competitors can't get near on cost or speed. Advertising has quietly become a business bigger than most standalone ad companies on earth, and it's almost pure margin. And then there's the long tail — devices, healthcare, pharmacy, satellite broadband, the whole category. The operating leverage story is the one I find most compelling: for years Amazon reinvested everything into growth, and the margins were thin by design. As that buildout matures, more of each incremental pound of revenue should fall through to the bottom line. That's a multi-year story, which suits me fine, because I'm not going anywhere.
── GOOGL: Still The Most Obvious Mispricing I Can Find ──
And more Alphabet (GOOGL). I've held and topped this up repeatedly, and it remains one of the positions I feel most straightforwardly good about. You've got the search franchise that is arguably the most profitable advertising business ever built, YouTube as effectively the world's second-largest search engine and video platform simultaneously, Google Cloud growing fast and finally contributing real profit, Android and Chrome as distribution most companies would kill for, and DeepMind plus Gemini as a genuine frontier AI lab rather than a marketing department. The market spends a lot of time worrying about AI eating search. My view is that the company with the models, the data, the distribution and the chips is in a better position than almost anyone to eat its own lunch before somebody else does — and if search behaviour does change, I'd rather own the entity most likely to capture the value than bet against it. Not clever. Just the obvious thing, which the market keeps half-pricing as a risk.
── ASST: The Strange One. Small. Deliberately Small. ──
Now the new one. Strive (ASST). This is the holding I can't yet explain properly, so I'll be straight with you about that rather than dressing it up in confident language. Here's what I can say. Strive started life as an asset-management business — the outfit behind the 'anti-woke' ETF range that got a fair bit of attention for taking public stances on corporate politics — and it's since repositioned itself around a corporate balance-sheet strategy where the company's own capital is heavily tied to bitcoin exposure. So what you're really buying is not a fund manager with a fee stream. You're buying a listed vehicle whose balance sheet is levered to the price of bitcoin, run by people with very loud opinions and a lot of conviction. That is a genuinely different kind of thing from everything else on this page, and I want to be honest about that instead of quietly filing it next to VUAG.
Why bother, then? Because I think there's a version of the next decade where a small number of listed vehicles that own scarce assets directly — rather than charging fees to manage other people's exposure to them — turn out to have been an interesting place to be. And because the position is small enough that being wrong costs me something I'll barely notice in thirty years, while being right would be genuinely pleasing. That's the whole test I apply to speculations: never mind the upside story for a second, ask what happens if it goes to zero. If the answer is 'the SIPP doesn't care', you're allowed to buy it. If the answer is 'I'd have to rethink things', you're not buying it, you're gambling. I have no view on where bitcoin goes. I don't need one. It's a small ticket, sized so that it can't hurt me, and I'll find out over a decade whether it was clever. That's honest, at least.
── The Thing That Never Changes ──
Here's what actually matters, and it's the same sentence I write every week. The boring majority of this portfolio — VUAG, and the broad global funds behind it — does the heavy lifting. The individual names are the part I enjoy, and I size them so that my enjoyment never becomes my problem. The speculation is the corner where I let myself be interested in something I can't fully justify, and it's the size of a rounding error against the whole. Nothing about this week's buy needed a big idea, a market call, or a cleverly timed entry. It just needed the habit to keep running, because the habit is what compounds. Not the insight, not the timing, not the conviction. The habit.
As ever, the important disclaimer: this is exactly what I do with my own money in my own SIPP, and it is not advice. I'm not regulated by the FCA, nothing here is a recommendation, and I have no idea what the right portfolio is for you — I only know what works for me. Investments fall as well as rise, ASST in particular could go to zero and I've sized it accordingly, and past performance tells you nothing useful about the future. Do your own research, consider your own circumstances, and speak to someone properly qualified if you need to. Buy less crap. Invest the difference. Give it time. Invest. Wait. Repeat.