Noise Cancelling with Neil Woodford

Is the UK's productivity crisis actually real? The ONS has quietly admitted its Labour Force Survey overstated UK employment, and the HMRC tax data tells a completely different story about the UK economy, your taxes and interest rates.

In this episode, Neil Woodford explains what the tax records really show about UK productivity, why the official survey invented half a million workers who don't exist, and how one wrong number fed b...

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 wo...

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 buye...

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 throu...

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 ...

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 near...

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 Ne...

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 ...

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 phy...

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 ...

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 the...

SpaceX has filed for IPO. OpenAI and Anthropic are next. The biggest AI listings in history are about to hit US markets — together worth more than the entire FTSE 100. Most of the coverage frames this as confirmation that the AI boom keeps running. Neil Woodford's view is different: the trade may already be more concentrated than investors realise, and where the money flows from here is the question almost nobody is asking.

I...

This week the press is unanimous: Britain is uniquely badly positioned, the IMF says so, and the 30-year gilt yield at 5.8% is proof. The Times, the Telegraph and the FT have all run the same story.

Neil Woodford disagrees.

In this episode, Jon Adair and Neil walk through why the 30-year gilt is the wrong number to look at, why the 10-year — which has been moving in lockstep with US treasuries since 2020 — is what actua...

Forget China. The biggest economic imbalance in the world right now is between America and Europe. In 2008, the EU was the same size as the US. Today it is 41% smaller.

This week, Neil Woodford and Jon Adair go through the €220bn surplus the financial press isn't covering, the European savings paradox Brussels can't explain, and why a Labour push to rejoin the EU would be one of the worst economic decisions Britain has made in 50 y...

Brent jumped 7% yesterday to over $120. The consensus says oil is heading higher and the UK is heading into stagflation. We think the consensus is wrong about oil — and wrong in two directions at once.

Underneath this week's headlines, two mechanisms are working agai...

Every major UK forecaster — the IMF, Capital Economics, EY Item Club, KPMG — has downgraded Britain's growth for 2026 and blamed the energy shock. Neil Woodford thinks every one of them is wrong. Not about the numbers. About the diagnosis.

In this week's Noise Cancelling, Jon and Neil break down why the consensus is panicking about the wrong thing. The energy shock everyone is worried about? Absorbable. The £192 billion...

Is the Iran war already over? Neil Woodford explains why Iran has just 13 days before its oil production suffers permanent damage — and why this means oil prices, UK inflation, and interest rates could all reverse faster than markets expect.

The US naval blockade of Iran began this week. Iran has approximately 13 days of oil storage capacity. After that, wells must shut down — and in mature oil fields, the damage to res...

In five weeks, UK markets went from pricing rate cuts to pricing four rate hikes. The word stagflation is on every front page. But did anything in the underlying economy actually change — or did a five-week war make everyone forget what was already happening?   In this episode, Neil Woodford and Jon walk through four structural deflationary forces that were pushing prices down before the Iran conflict started — and...

The Strait of Hormuz is still closed. Oil is above $100. Trump just told the world to reopen it themselves. Every channel is covering what happened — we're giving you a framework for what happens next.

In this episode, Neil Woodford lays out three scenarios for how the Iran war ends, assigns a probability to each, and explains what each one means for oil prices, interest rates, and your money. One of those scenarios ends with...