A physician-investor's framework for evidence-based portfolio construction — scoring businesses on durable economics, sizing positions with macro awareness, and acting only when quality, tide, and timing agree.
Every equity in the universe is scored against the same five pillars on a 0–1000 scale. Scores above 700, paired with a favourable Tide and an open Gate, become actionable. Everything else waits.
Moat width, returns on capital, customer captivity, and durability of demand. The question we ask first.
Balance sheet, cash conversion, leverage discipline, and resilience through a credit cycle.
How management deploys retained earnings — buybacks, M&A, dividends, reinvestment. Track record over rhetoric.
Free cash flow yield, multiple discipline, and entry price relative to the next decade — not the last quarter.
Earnings trajectory, relative strength, and the near-term path that confirms or refutes the thesis.
Most portfolios live or die not on stock selection but on whether they were leaning in or leaning out at the moment the cycle changed. The Tide is a single composite score — built from Treasury yields, the 2s/10s curve, IG and HY credit spreads — that translates macro reality into one of six postures.
| Band | Score | Posture |
|---|---|---|
| Tide A | 0 – 54 | Full deployment. The wind is at your back; lean in. |
| Tide B | 55 – 88 | Normal allocation. Methodical buying of high-Q names. |
| Tide C Mild | 89 – 121 | Quality only. Reduce position sizing. Build optionality. |
| Tide C Severe | 121 – 143 | Reduce equity exposure. Build cash. Stop adding. |
| Tide D | 143 – 158 | Active defence. No new equity. Hold the line. |
| Tide E | > 158 | Crisis posture. Deploy the prepared cash buffer — methodically. |
Twenty years inside Canadian healthcare and capital markets, distilled into one framework. The Independent Investor is the textbook for the HVIF™ method — accessible enough to read straight through, structured enough to live on a desk as a working reference.
HVIF™ is the work of Dr. Thomas J. Kinahan — urologist, Clinical Professor at UBC, and the founding physician behind Accuro EMR.
After twenty-plus years of clinical practice and a parallel career building Canada's largest physician-facing electronic medical record platform, the framework emerged out of necessity: a way to manage personal and corporate capital with the same rigour applied to surgical decisions and product engineering.
"I built HVIF™ because I needed it. Then I realized other clinicians and operators needed it too."
The method draws on evidence-based investing — factor research, Dimensional-style discipline, and the work of writers like Ben Graham, Charlie Munger, and Howard Marks — and translates it into something a working professional can actually execute, across registered, corporate, and non-registered accounts, with a Canadian tax lens.
The Independent Investor launches in 2026, with companion HVIF™ tools to follow. Leave an email and you'll be the first to know — pre-orders, early excerpts, and framework updates. No noise, no marketing churn.