I am not a financial professional. I am something more useful — an investor who got tired of being handled.
For years I handed my financial decisions to people who were supposed to know better. Advisers who spoke in a language designed to make me feel dependent. Funds that charged fees I couldn't evaluate to make choices I couldn't interrogate. Statements that arrived quarterly to tell me very little about what was actually happening to my money. I was a client. I was not a participant.
What frustrated me most was not the complexity. It was the pretence that complexity was necessary. That serious investing required either a professional intermediary or hours I didn't have. I have a full life. A career. Children. I cannot spend evenings inside earnings reports and analyst briefings trying to reconstruct what I should be doing with my own capital. I needed a process — not a hobby.
So I went looking for one.
I went back to the people who had actually built wealth through investing — not through selling investment products, but through owning great businesses. Graham. Greenblatt. Buffett's letters. I read them not as theory but as methodology. And what I found was not secrets. It was discipline. A consistent set of questions, applied the same way, to every company, every time. No opinions. No forecasts. No one telling you what to feel about a market.
I built the criteria list first. Then I built the screener. I started running the companies I'd always assumed were good investments through it — and some of them didn't pass. That was clarifying in a way nothing else had been. The opacity lifted. I knew what I owned and why. I knew what I would no longer own, and why that too.
What I understood eventually — and this took time — is that I was never buying a return number. I was buying compounding. A business that earns more each year, generates real cash, and carries manageable debt builds value steadily, whether the market acknowledges it that week or not. The price catches up. Over time, it always does. What the screens gave me was not a prediction. They gave me confidence that what I owned was the kind of business that compounds — and that I had not paid a price that would steal that compounding before it had a chance to work.
Then my son — who had worked hard, saved his earnings, and was ready to invest for the first time — came to me and asked how.
I didn't want to hand him a guess. I didn't want to point him toward a fund and tell him to trust it. I wanted to give him what I had finally found for myself — a framework. A way of looking at a business that didn't require faith in someone else's judgment. A process he could understand, apply, and hold accountable.
VETTD is that framework.
It began with US companies — but discipline follows quality wherever it leads. When Buffett deployed capital into Japan's trading houses, he was not making a geographic bet; he was applying the same methodology to a different market. That observation is what expanded VETTD to six markets: the United States, Canada, Japan, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Australia. Established economies. Transparent financial reporting. Companies that have been compounding value for decades. And when I think about what I am building for my son — not just a way to invest, but a global perspective on what quality looks like across the world — that expansion felt not only logical, but essential.
It is built for the investor who doesn't have unlimited time but refuses to invest without rigour. For the woman who has spent too long being told this world wasn't designed for her — and has decided to stop waiting for it to change. For the parent who wants to pass on something more durable than a tip or a hunch.
Men who invest this way are equally at home here. But I built this first for the investor I was — the one who knew she was capable of more than she had been given the tools for.
She turned out to be the most serious investor in the room.
— V
VETTD is a financial publisher, not a registered investment adviser. Nothing here constitutes investment advice.