Models addressing the naturalness of a light Higgs boson typically employ symmetries, either bosonic or fermionic, to stabilize the Higgs mass. We consider a setup with the minimal amount of symmetries: four shift symmetries acting on the four components of the Higgs doublet, subject to the constraints of linearly realized SU(2)xU(1) electroweak symmetry. Up to terms that explicitly violate the shift symmetries, the effective lagrangian can be derived, irrespective of the spontaneously broken group G in the ultraviolet, and is universal in all models where the Higgs arises as a pseudo-Nambu-Goldstone boson (PNGB). Very high energy scatterings of vector bosons could provide smoking gun signals of a minimally symmetric Higgs boson.

17 pages, no figure; v2: minor changes; matched to the published version