Deep-dives on individual stocks the TGI ranking system surfaces — what the framework brings into focus, why it exists, and how to read what these pages show.
Stock spotlights are demonstrations of the Total Growth Investing framework applied to a single company. The point is to make the ranking system visible and concrete: which scores brought the company to the top, what the underlying numbers look like, how the position would fit a TGI portfolio under the diversification rules.
These are not stock picks. The ranking system surfaces opportunities; the portfolio rules govern action. A spotlight describes what's there. Whether to act on it depends on your own portfolio, sector exposure, and risk tolerance.
Total Growth Investing was developed by Chad, a Seattle-based investor, after twenty years of learning the hard way what doesn't work. The first ten years were spent throwing darts at stocks that showed up in the news. The next ten years were spent hunting high dividend yields, looking for shortcuts that didn't exist. Neither approach built a portfolio that could carry through retirement.
TGI is what came out of starting over in 2020. A rules-based ranking system that identifies companies growing in both dividends and price across multiple timeframes, with diversification rules that govern action and remove discretion from buy and sell decisions. The framework is shared publicly because nobody should have to lose twenty years rediscovering the same lessons.
Most investing advice asks you to choose between growth and income. Total Growth Investing rejects the trade-off. The ranking system identifies companies that grow their dividend and their share price over multiple timeframes — the rare overlap where compounding works on both sides at once. Stocks are scored quantitatively; lower scores mean higher purchase priority. The system removes discretion from buy and sell decisions: you buy from the top of the list, sell what falls off the bottom, and let the math handle the rest.
The same inputs are weighted four ways. Total Growth (TGI) is the headline score — dividend growth, price growth, yield characteristics, and payout discipline across 1-, 3-, 5-, and 10-year timeframes. Healthy Income (HII) re-weights toward sustained yield, for portfolios closer to or in retirement. Price Growth isolates the appreciation component, and Dividend Growth isolates the income-growth component — for readers optimizing for one dimension at a time.
The ranking surfaces opportunities; the rules govern action. The 5% rule: no single position exceeds 5% of portfolio value. The 10% rule: no single sector exceeds 10%. Buy from the top, sell from the bottom: new capital flows into the highest-ranked stock that hasn't hit a cap, and positions that fall to the bottom are sold and redeployed. The ranking itself is the buy/sell signal.
That's the short version. For the full methodology, see How TGI Works and Understanding Scores.
TGI is one lens — the Economic field lens — within a larger project called Living Civilization, currently being written as a book. Living Civilization explores how civilizations coordinate, using a framework built around four fields (Tribal, Jurisdictional, Economic, Cultural) and four pillars (Capital, Information, Innovation, Trust). The Economic field happens to be the easiest one to instrument first, because markets generate dense, time-stamped, comparable data that other fields don't.
If TGI works as a working instrument of the Economic field, the rest of the framework becomes easier to demonstrate. The book is in progress; the spotlights begin to show what the framework looks like applied in practice.
Spotlights are published on stocks and funds that catch my attention for various reasons. I share them with TGI members first, then add each new page to the site navigation. If you'd like to get access to them early, please join the membership!
The ranked watchlists are public and updated regularly:
The TGI community lives across several platforms. The watchlists are public; the discussions happen wherever the conversation goes:
Discipline builds, speculation crashes.Total Growth Investing