The healthcare entrepreneur using AI to inspire more people to invest

Heloïse Greeff was an investing novice until she realised that the use of data-heavy machine learning, which supported her groundbreaking work in healthcare, could also be applied to capital markets.

Her interest in the stock market began when she moved from South Africa to study at the University of Oxford. She completed an MBA, then a PhD in Machine Learning, and became a specialist in artificial intelligence (AI).

For the first three years, Heloïse kept her portfolio private, but was so successful that in 2019 social investment platform eToro asked her to make her trades public for others to copy. Today, more than 175,000 individuals follow her work. She has held e-Toro’s Elite Pro status since 2021, which means she invests more than $100,000 of her own funds and has a monthly average of over $10 million of ‘assets under copy’ by other investors.

Heloïse believes investing should be understood by everyone. In this interview she explains her motivations, strategy and why her mission is to help underrepresented groups build their financial independence.

1. How did your childhood shape your attitude to wealth and investment management?

Heloïse: Talking about financial awareness was a big theme in my house when I was growing up. My mum would ask us to submit budgets and expenses before we got our pocket money! It quickly taught us the value of money and how to be resourceful.

I was encouraged to invest small amounts in Rands in a mutual fund. When I was 20, I looked at that amount, and I understood the impact of compounding over a long period of time. That really thrust me into taking action.

2. What principles do you use to guide your investments?

Heloïse: While I was doing my MBA, a lot of my classmates were investing, so I became interested. I started with investments in oil because I was building investment strategies and wanted to test them rapidly, and oil has good intra-day movements. I burned my fingers quite badly!

When I started investing, I didn’t have any traditional training. I had written a couple of algorithms for my PhD and really wanted to apply them. That’s how I started in 2016 with my original investment thesis. Over time, it culminated in an approach that is very much supported by AI but has human decision-making at its core. I think common sense is still quite underrated and easily forgotten.

I like to invest in things I understand. My background is in clinical machine learning or biomedical engineering, so I tend to steer towards healthcare and technology stocks.

I use sustainability as a lens for risk management, while making sure that any decisions align with my strategy, goals and long-term vision for my portfolio.

3. Why did you choose to incorporate AI into your strategy?

Heloïse: I don’t necessarily think I had a choice – rather, it chose me. I patented my first algorithm with David Clifton [who is now Chair of Machine Learning at the University of Oxford]. My early work with him was on predicting failure in Boeing aircraft manufacturing. I then translated the same methods to hand pumps in rural Kenya and to patient care in Vietnam. There are many similarities in data modelling, even though from the outside it doesn’t look like there are.

It was a natural step for me to look at financial data. I was one of the first people to do sentiment analysis with natural language processing [this classifies whether blocks of text are positive, negative or neutral in order to analyse people’s mood and opinions].

4. What is your view on cryptocurrency and other types of alternative investments?

Heloïse: The engineer in me really appreciates crypto’s underlying blockchain network. I can see use cases for blockchain in many industries, such as healthcare, where we are starting to adopt it.

Within my overall portfolio, I see both crypto and alternative assets as hedges to offset other losses, but not the engine that will drive the returns – that is very much the equities.

5. What would you say have been your most and least successful investment decisions?

Heloïse: Other than the obvious one of being an earlier adopter of AI, I’d say it was when I first bought Nvidia shares in my public portfolio in 2017. More recently, I bought AST SpaceMobile shares earlier this year and the value grew 40% within two weeks.

As for the worst ones, I’d say it would be a view of the market that I took in 2022 when the market and my portfolio were down. I took a view that the supply chain shock and recovery after Covid-19 would be longer-lasting. So, the recovery of my portfolio was slower than average. It was a good learning experience that I have taken into my investment thesis.

6. What does success look like for you as a professional investor?

Heloïse: Success means having risk-adjusted returns, having compounded growth and sticking to the investment thesis that I have set out, and people have chosen to copy or follow.

More broadly, success would be looking at how we change the ecosystem around being an investor and the conversation around investing. I am currently working on establishing the Share Institute in the UK, where share ownership is generally lower compared to the US. We consider questions such as, ‘how do we make investing less daunting?’ And, ‘how do we get more women or underrepresented groups participating in the capital markets?’.

7. Education is key for you in terms of financial literacy – what role would you say social media and publishing a portfolio play in that?

Heloïse: Social media is key in education. And as we are seeing, AI is becoming a larger part of daily life. The average retail investor has access to more information than hedge fund managers had ten years ago. But we are seeing much more misinformation, and it is going to become harder for us to discern what is real.

8. Do you believe investing should be for everyone?

Heloïse:  Investing has driven my financial independence and allowed me to choose careers and projects that I want to work on. There is no reason why it shouldn’t be something that everyone strives for, if it is financially appropriate.

Owning fractional shares has made the barrier to entry lower than it used to be and we’ll see that continuing to change in the future. AI will speed that along. I hope to see more AI-assisted decision making. AI will also make investing more personalised – up until now, we have had very standard off-the-shelf solutions.

9. How can investors approach risk management or get started?

Heloïse: Having good financial habits is at the core. Ensuring that you have an emergency fund or savings is important, as is understanding the difference between savings and investments.

Only expose yourself to risks that make sense for you and invest money that you are happy to expose to capital markets for the long term. If that means seeking professional advice, then that would be the way to go about it.

10. How could society encourage more investing?

Heloïse: In the UK, there is no benchmark to look at financial literacy – the government doesn’t publish one. Recently, research showed that three-quarters of the UK population is not investing or comfortable with their finances, which is staggering really – it is one of the lowest rates of engagement in developed countries.

For me, it comes down to education, which should be in the primary school curriculum and taught from early on.

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