So far, 2026 has been a fantastic year for my Stocks and Shares ISA, which has already surged by 21.1% since January. By comparison, FTSE 100 index investors have only reaped around 7%, and even the tech-heavy S&P 500 has managed just 9%.
To be fair, those sorts of returns from index funds in the space of six months are still pretty impressive. But it’s hard for me not to smile at earning more than double. So, how did I do it?
The strategy that’s driving my returns
These gains haven’t been achieved by chasing speculative penny stocks. Instead, they come as a result of prudent risk management in the second half of 2025.
As valuations ran ahead of fundamentals in several of my favourite holdings, including Shopify, I made the deliberate decision to trim positions and raise cash. It wasn’t that I’d lost faith in those businesses. I simply recognised that some of them had become too expensive to justify holding at full weight.
That discipline paid off when markets sold off sharply at the start of 2026. A panic-driven rotation out of SaaS and high-growth technology stocks gave me the buying opportunity I’d been waiting for.
I promptly redeployed cash into names I knew well and already owned, including CrowdStrike, Datadog, Axon Enterprises, and Cellebrite. And even Shopify ended up back on the buy list after a more reasonable price emerged.
Since then, most of these investments have rebounded sharply and, in turn, my ISA has followed.
My next tempting idea
Out of all the US stocks in my ISA, Intuitive Surgical (NASDAQ:ISRG) is among the more interesting right now.
As a quick introduction, Intuitive Surgical is the world’s leading robotic surgery company. Through its flagship da Vinci surgical systems and its Ion endoluminal platform for lung biopsies, the firm has quietly built one of the most defensible businesses in the world. And the latest quarterly results seem to reflect that.
Through its razor-and-blade business model, management has crafted a powerful growth flywheel that keeps existing customers coming back for more. And by leveraging the organic pricing power this provides, revenue across the first quarter of 2026 climbed 23% to $2.77bn.
Digging deeper, it’s da Vinci procedures grew 16%, Ion procedures surged 39%, and the installed base of its systems expanded 12% to 11,395 globally.
In other words, not only is Intuitive selling more machines, its customers are using them more as well, pushing earnings to come in ahead of analyst expectations.
Yet despite all this business momentum, the shares are still down 24% since the start of the year. Why?
With the bulk of its consumable instruments and accessories manufactured in Mexico, US tariffs are adversely pressuring margins. And when the company announced it had suffered a data breach in March, investor sentiment continued to sour for a premium-priced stock.
So with that in mind, it’s not too surprising to see the shares suffer.
Time to buy?
The data breach and macroeconomic risk factors can’t be ignored. But overall, I remain optimistic about what the future holds for this industry leader. And with the robotic surgery market steadily starting to disrupt traditional healthcare, today’s share price looks tempting.
That’s why I’m seriously considering buying more in my Stocks and Shares ISA.
Should you invest £5,000 in Intuitive Surgical right now?
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Zaven Boyrazian owns shares in Axon Enterprise, Cellebrite, CrowdStrike, Datadog, Intuitive Surgical, and Shopify.
This story originally appeared on Motley Fool
