From childhood budgets to AI-driven investing: Heloïse Greeff’s financial journey

In collaboration with eToro.

As one of eToro’s top investors, Heloïse Greeff is on a mission to help other women gain financial freedom and lead the life they want.

As a child Heloïse Greeff’s financially-savvy mother would only give her pocket money if she had submitted a monthly budget and expense spreadsheet.

I quickly realised that if I budgeted for toiletries, and used them sparingly, next month's budget could be used for something else. So it was like a game. Part of the game meant investing in mutual funds. I was investing 20 rand – less than a pound – when I was eight years old. But when I turned 28 I looked at it and thought, ‘Wow, this is money I never thought I would have had. It helped me understand compound interest and the value of it over the long term.

Her radiographer mother’s innovative approach to money - along with growing up in South Africa with double-digit inflation - meant finance was often at the forefront of Heloïse's mind.

It sparked her interest in figures and Maths was her favourite subject at school, after which she chose to study Mechatronics Engineering (a combination of mechanical and electronic engineering) at the University of Cape Town, where she was one of just three women in a class of 240.

Excelling academically (she also squeezed in an MPhil in inclusive innovation), she won a prestigious place as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, where she completed an MSc in Biomedical Engineering and an MBA, before returning for a DPhil.

I love the practical parts of building stuff and convinced myself that biomedical engineering (a combination of medicine biology and engineering to make healthcare medical breakthroughs) would allow me to help more people than if I had gone into medicine, which was the traditional route in South Africa.

This practical approach led to her co-inventing two ground-breaking patents for AI systems to remotely monitor patients, also to working with Microsoft in Hyderabad in India, and helping develop credit scoring models for unbanked customers at a startup in East Africa.

She puts her desire to work on multiple projects down to being ‘hyperactive’. At school when everyone else was doing six core subjects, Heloïse did 10. And she even found time to swim competitively.

“That’s just how I kept myself out of trouble,” says Heloïse, who is now 34.

It was during her time at Oxford that she found herself surrounded by other students who were investing.

The guys in my MBA class would be on their phones saying, 'Oh, I've just bought this stock, I've just bought that stock.' I thought if these people are doing it so easily, surely I should also be looking into it.

However, it took Greeff two years to build up the confidence to start investing herself.

And then - channelling what she had learnt from her mother - she started with a spreadsheet.

I read all the books that I could find on investing and then I made a spreadsheet to compare the different platforms which were available in the UK. Then I opened a couple, and just tried them out. eToro was the one that stuck, partly because they had no fees.

Heloïse also liked being able to see other people’s portfolios - eToro investors can choose to make their portfolio public - and also the fact you can open a ‘virtual account’ to try out trading with $100,000 in virtual money.

I think that transparency of seeing what people are saying and what they're actually investing in was a key part for me.

So in 2016 she began with $300 – money she'd ironically originally earmarked for an investing course – and found that she could invest in fractional shares (a fraction of a whole share in a company) to help her build a diversified portfolio.

If you don't have as much money, fractional shares mean you can still get stocks in really good companies.

At first she invested in commodities, particularly oil, but after a few months, when she lost a lot of her money, realised her expertise lay elsewhere.

It was a fun place to start because it moves a lot, so I could learn quickly, but it was also terrible because as an engineer, I didn't know much about geopolitics.

She then shifted her focus to tech and healthcare stocks, areas she understood from her studies and work.

But she says her experience in commodities helped her learn the difference between trading and investing.

Investing suited me much more than trying to do these daily, or hourly, trades. So I now consider myself an investor, and I stay away from trading. Trading would usually be in forex (the global market where currencies are traded) or commodities (raw materials used in manufacturing) and people could be doing multiple trades in a day. Whereas investing is much more long term - I think in a five year view.

Today Greeff is one of eToro's top ‘Popular Investors’, as thousands of investors worldwide who copy her portfolio, with combined assets of tens of millions of dollars.

In fact Heloïse has over 125k followers and 6.6k copiers.

For the last two and a half years she has turned investing into a career, using AI-driven strategies she developed herself, and travelling around the world to meet her investors.

She also runs her own consultancy, Greeff Invest, conducting due diligence on AI startups for venture capital firms or angel investors.

Being a Popular Investor has made me a better investor because I now have to justify and explain in a sensible way why I'm investing in something.

And does she enjoy it?

Yes, I love it. I love seeing my money grow. As Einstein said, compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world.

But, for Heloïse, it is not just about growth, she is also committed to making investing more accessible, particularly for women.

It is her belief that women tend to invest less than men, not because they are risk averse, but because they like to gather more information before they make financial decisions.

She also thinks that women prefer to rely on word-of-mouth recommendations from an inner circle of friends and - if that circle isn’t discussing finance - that is where the problem lies.

I've made it my mission to ask women if they're investing, if they're thinking about investing, if they have somebody to talk to.

Her tip for women starting out?

Just get started. You can start with a couple of hundred pounds – or it could just be £50 that you didn’t spend on a pair of shoes. There’s no need for it to be this big barrier because you think it needs to be thousands. The second thing would be to take it seriously, and pay yourself first. I always say put it on an automated direct debit at the beginning of the month and it’s all sorted.

For Greeff, investing has provided more than just financial returns – it's given her independence and the life she wants.

She works from the Oxford home she shares with her partner and her beloved French bulldog Pepper and cat Gatsby, whom she describes as her "best investments" for the daily joy they bring.

I don't think I would have gone into finance if it wasn't for something like eToro, which I can do from behind my screen in the comfort of my own home. Investing is so much more accessible and inclusive now – I hope that motivates more women to start their journey to financial freedom.

I see investing as the gateway to helping me reach absolute equality. It's given me that decision-making power in my household, and in my life. It has allowed me to pursue things I am passionate about, to focus on the things that really matter, which isn’t really anything that money can buy.

Her mother will be proud.

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