On a recent episode of Thoughtful Money with Adam Taggart, 29-year-old investor Peter Slegers described how he tracks his 18-company portfolio. He ignores price ticks and instead totals the free cash flow generated by his shares. His goal, stated plainly: “I want to create an investment portfolio where I can generate $1 in free cash flow per minute for myself.”
That works out to over half a million dollars a year and requires roughly a $10 million portfolio. His current haul is about $100,000 in annual FCF. The stakes for anyone copying him are real: confuse the FCF a company generates with the FCF that lands in your account, and you can spend a decade chasing a number that never pays a bill.
The verdict: right framework, wrong scoreboard
Slegers’s method is the correct lens for a long-horizon investor, but the “$1 per minute” figure mixes two different things. His math is straightforward: if you own 100 shares of Apple generating $30 in free cash flow per share, “you are making $3,000 of your Apple investment.” That holds at the corporate level. The brokerage-account level works differently.
Use real numbers. Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL | AAPL Price Prediction) produced nearly $99 billion in free cash flow in fiscal 2025 and trades at a recent $271 with a market cap of nearly $4 trillion. Of that FCF, only $15.4 billion went out as dividends; $90.7 billion went to buybacks. The annual cash you actually receive on 100 shares is the $1.03 per share dividend, or about $103. Buybacks shrink the share count and lift your claim on future FCF, but they do not pay rent today.
That gap matters more when capex is climbing. Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) generated $136 billion in operating cash flow in fiscal 2025, but capex surged to about $65 billion, and free cash flow actually declined 3% year over year. In the December 2025 quarter, capex hit nearly $30 billion, up 89% YoY, consuming roughly 83.5% of operating cash flow. Azure backlog of $625 billion in commercial RPO may justify it, but the FCF-per-share you book today is shrinking even as the business grows.
Where the playbook fits, where it breaks
The approach works for an investor who looks like Slegers: 29, decades of compounding ahead, no need to convert FCF into spending money for 25 or 30 years. Buybacks compound silently, FCF per share rises, and the “$1 per minute” total functions as a directional target rather than a paycheck.
It breaks for a 60-year-old who needs $50,000 a year in actual cash next January. For that profile, dividend cash matters more than reported FCF. Johnson & Johnson (NYSE: JNJ) is the cleaner template: $19.7 billion in 2025 free cash flow, a quarterly dividend raised 3.1% to $1.34 per share, and a 64-year streak of annual increases. The FCF and the cash payout move together, so the per-minute number you calculate is closer to the cash you can spend.
What to do with this
Run the calculation Slegers runs, but split it into two. For each holding, multiply shares owned by FCF per share to get your “owner” FCF. Then multiply shares by the trailing dividend per share to get your “cash” FCF. Track both. The first tells you whether the businesses you own are getting more valuable. The second tells you what hits your account.
Slegers is right that “if the stocks go down, but the intrinsic value and the free cash flow the portfolio is making for me goes up, well, I have nothing to worry about.” The single thing to remember: a dollar of corporate FCF and a dollar of cash in your brokerage are not the same dollar until management decides they are.
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