Neil Woodford has been answering questions about investing for 35 years – and every one of them comes down to seven decisions. In part one of this three-part series, Neil and Jon Adair cover the funnel: the three decisions that take you from every company in the world down to a shortlist worth owning.

You'll learn why reported profit tells you almost nothing about whether a business is any good, the only three numbers Neil would keep if forced to choose (PE, debt to EBITDA, and return on capital employed), how to judge a moat and a management team, and why Neil calls valuation "an educated, informed guess" – and means it as a compliment.

Part 2 covers position sizing and portfolio construction. Part 3: when to sell, and how to hold your nerve. Subscribe so you don't miss them.

Read the framework:

The Seven Decisions, Explained – every piece on Noise Cancelling is tagged to the decision it belongs to: 

The Noise Cancelling app is free to join, and it will read Neil's pieces to you: 

This video is for information and education only. It is not investment advice, and nothing in it is a recommendation to buy or sell any investment. Capital is at risk. Seek independent financial advice before making investment decisions.

Britain's housing crisis is a myth. Neil Woodford has run money for over 35 years, and in this episode he tests the UK housing market's most repeated story against 55 years of data: mortgage payments as a share of take-home pay are close to their long-run average, buying costs less per month than renting the same home, and real house prices have been falling for five years.

So why can't young people buy? The average first-time buyer was 23 in 1960 and is 34 today. The answer is not affordability. It is a banking rule written after the financial crisis: capital requirements that make high loan-to-value mortgages uneconomic for banks to write. Nobody banned the 95% mortgage. It died of unprofitability, and UK mortgage approvals have run 40% below normal for 15 years.

Then the investment question. Housebuilders trade at roughly 70p per pound of assets while the banks have re-rated back above book. Is the market right about the builders, or is it pricing a suppressed market as a dead one? Neil gives his position, what would change his mind, and what he is watching: the regulator's decision on loan-to-income caps, due within months.

Is UK wealth inequality actually rising? Wes Streeting calls inequality "the fracture running through modern Britain", and the coming budget leans on the same story. Neil Woodford has spent weeks in the data, and it says something very different.

In this episode, Neil and Jon work through what the official numbers show: the top 10 percent's share of British wealth was 56 percent in 1980 and 57 percent four decades later, flat through the biggest asset boom in the country's history. They explain why compounding means wealth gaps should widen automatically, and what cancelled it: the occupational pension revolution, faster pay growth at the bottom, and a tax system where the top 1 percent of earners now pay 28 percent of all income tax.

Then the measurement problem. The gap between Britain's richest and poorest fifth is 12 to 1 before taxes and benefits, and 3.3 to 1 after. Same country, same year, same statisticians. Which number you get quoted depends on who is quoting it.

Finally: does inequality actually damage growth? Neil's answer, and what it means for the tax rises now being floated ahead of the budget.

The UK has announced $59 billion of data centre investment since 2023, and the National Grid cannot power it. 140 data centres are sitting in the connection queue asking for 50GW; the UK's peak demand this year was 45GW. In this episode of Noise Cancelling, Jon explains how the grid connection queue actually works, and Neil Woodford explains why he believes this is an energy policy failure decades in the making.

We cover the three things that make the queue unfixable on current policy: connection waits stretching past 2035, why no large gas plant has been built since 2016, and why industrial electricity in the UK costs four times what it does in the US. OpenAI has already put its UK Stargate project on hold.

Then the investor question: if announced capacity is not delivered capacity, where does the capital actually have to go first? Transmission, grid supply chains, nuclear including SMRs, and gas peaking. Watch the queue, watch Ofgem reform, and watch which hyperscale campuses actually break ground.

Neil Woodford says UK interest rates are heading below 3% next year, and the new Prime Minister has almost nothing to do with it. The consensus says Britain has a structural growth problem. The data says something different: the UK economy is waiting on one number.

In this episode, we explain who actually buys Britain. Households account for roughly 60p of every pound of UK GDP, and since the pandemic, they have been saving at nearly double the American rate. British banks now hold over £500 billion more in deposits than they have lent out. That savings mountain, not Westminster rhetoric, is what decides whether Britain grows.

Neil explains why the Bank of England's sticky inflation fears have been wrong all year, why the household savings ratio is the single most important number in the UK economy, and where inflation and interest rates land over the next 12 months. Plus: the sectors that look mispriced if he's right, and the data releases that would confirm the view or kill it.

Neil Woodford on the war the market refuses to price. Missiles are hitting the Gulf, America is back at war, and the S&P 500 finished the week up 1%. The institutions that modelled this conflict predicted catastrophe. The market looked at the same war and said no. One of them is wrong.

Jon and Neil unpack the biggest forecasting failure since Brexit: how the IEA, the Bank of England and the EIA all got the oil shock wrong, and how the market repriced the war line by line while the models stood still. Neil explains why complex economic models fail structurally, what he uses instead (one number, no model), and the scenarios that would prove him wrong, from a Bank of England rate rise to the closure of a second strait.

🔗 Links & Resources

About The Noise Cancelling Podcast

Hosts: Neil Woodford, Jon Adair

UK stocks are being taken private at a record pace: this year, takeover bids for London-listed companies have run at roughly £60bn against under £600m raised in new IPOs, and Neil Woodford argues that this wave of M&A is the clearest sign in years that UK equities are undervalued. In this episode, Woodford and Jon Adair break down why the FTSE and London stock market trade at such a deep discount to the US, what a 75% takeover premium reveals about UK share prices, whether British stocks are cheap or a value trap, and where Woodford sees value across UK banks, oil and housebuilders.

We posted a companion explainer on the cyclically adjusted PE ratio – what CAPE is, why the US reading of 42x matters, and how to read it: https://www.noisecancelling.co/read/what-the-shiller-cape-tells-you-about-the-next-ten-years 

Oil hit $144 a barrel in April, the highest price ever paid for physical crude, and underlying inflation barely moved. This week, Neil Woodford explains why the oil price doesn't work the way most people think, and why three central banks tightened into a shock that was already reversing.

Jon and Neil mark Neil's December calls honestly (the wins and the misses), then get into the mechanics: why paper barrels set the price, not physical ones; the difference between headline and core inflation; and the base effects that mean the inflation number scaring central banks is about to fall on its own.

Then the mistake. The ECB raised rates the day before the peace process went public. The Bank of Japan gets Neil's sympathy as the one bank tightening into genuine wage inflation. And in Washington, new Fed chair Kevin Warsh has picked headline inflation as his fight; Neil takes the 4.2% apart and explains why the September hike never arrives, and why the Bank of England may cut before year-end.

Neil also names the one number that would prove the whole call wrong.

Inflation just hit a three-year high, and the consensus has decided the era of cheap is over for good. Neil Woodford thinks that's exactly wrong — and that the inflation in the headlines is mostly one war showing up in the oil price.

Jon Adair and Neil Woodford take apart the Financial Times' "end of cheap" argument and make the case that three of the most powerful deflationary forces in modern history are building at the same time — and that a single oil shock is hiding all of them.

In this episode:

This week, a single American memory chip company became worth more than AstraZeneca, HSBC and Shell combined. So why has Britain never built one of its own?

Neil Woodford has spent more than 30 years as one of the largest shareholders in some of Britain's biggest companies. He was a top-five holder of GSK for over a decade. He helped see off Pfizer's bid for AstraZeneca. He's sat across from board after board, telling them what they had to do to be worth more. In this episode of The Noise Cancelling Podcast, he tells the story of how Britain keeps building world-class companies and then throws them away.

We cover:

The Noise Cancelling Podcast is a weekly show with Neil Woodford and Jon Adair. Each week we take a piece of confusion in the financial press, teach the mechanism behind it, and give Neil's specific view on what it means for investors.

If you got something from this, please subscribe. It helps the channel more than you'd think. And leave a comment below with the British company you reckon should have been a global giant but never made it.

Important: Nothing in this video is investment advice. Companies are discussed for educational purposes only. You should consult a regulated financial adviser before making any investment decision.

#NeilWoodford #UKStocks #Investing #FTSE100 #StockMarket