There Is No "Trump Put" For Wall Street

At Porter & Co. we are determined to be your best source of investing, economic, and financial insight, and your first choice for information about what to do with your money… in the entire world, bar none.

This is Porter & Co.’s Sunday Investment Chronicles. Every week, the Porter & Co. research team pores over thousands (and thousands) of articles, reports, social media posts, analyses, regulatory filings, and anything else we can get our hands (and eyes) on to understand what’s happening in the world of investing and finance – and to uncover the most original, compelling, and double-head-fake ideas…

… and we curate the best of those here. We do it all the old fashioned way: Hours of reading and brainpower (no AI curation here). We read everything – for you.

In Case You Missed It

(Partner Pass members can keep up with our latest report releases and recommendation updates – as well as fast-breaking ideas – on our Direct Line service… go here to see it.)

On Monday, Porter reviewed subscribers’ replies to his query about their biggest financial mistakes. Porter condensed those errors into three broad buckets: 1) following bad advice, or paying too much for bad advice; 2) taking a big loss on a speculative investment; and 3) selling too soon. And Porter offered reader “Bill” a chance at a “second life”…

… I think the best way for older investors to build a second life is to focus on a little-known kind of investing that’s almost exclusively available to professional investors like Marty Fridson. But, with Marty’s help, I believe it’s possible for people like Bill to make 30%+ gains annually, by investing in a handful of these deals.”

(Porter’s talking about distressed bonds… Porter shares his very personal story here.

This month’s Porter & Co. Spotlight shines on longtime Porter friend Marin Katusa, one of the world’s premier natural resource analysts. Marin has thoughts about gold… and the best way to invest in it. Marin explains here.

In Wednesday’s Daily Journal, Porter shared a powerful – and simple – way to generate outsized returns when the market is jittery…

One good strategy to use is simply to stockpile cash (and investment ideas) until the VIX [that’s the CBOE Volatility Index] crosses 30. Then deploy your capital into the market. It’s hard to be patient, but there will always be opportunities to buy. During my career (which began in 1996) notable opportunities to buy high-quality stocks by using the volatility indicator occurred in: 1997, 1998, 2001, 2002, 2008, 2011, 2015, 2018, 2020, and 2022.”

And note… That’s around once every three years. And it’s been three years since the last time…

On Thursday in The Big Secret On Wall Street, we assessed the performance of Porter’s Permanent Portfolio, Porter & Co.’s answer – and improvement on – the legendary Permanent Portfolio developed by Harry Browne (and subsequently copied by hedge fund titan Bridgewater Associates). The PPP — Big Secret subscribers can see it here — has performed exceptionally well… And if you’re looking to restructure your portfolio, or are in search of set-it-and-forget-it ideas, it’s a great place to start.

We released the second recommendation of Asymmetry, a Partner Pass-only publication focused on investment opportunities that offer high upside – and low downside… though speculative, this is a portfolio worth your time. The latest addition is an oil and gas exploration company that’s jumping head-first into one of the most exciting offshore projects in the world. But the market is expecting the worst: As a result, shares are trading at close to an all-time low valuation, and at a significant discount to the rest of the sector.

And… also for Partners only… our second High Conviction pick… these are “no-brainer” stocks that are so compelling that we’d be prepared to invest 100% of our capital into a single recommendation (though we do not recommend this approach to asset allocation). The latest addition to High Conviction is a longtime Porter favorite that’s in the discount bin. (If you’re not a Partner Pass member… call Lance James, our Director of Customer Care, at 888-610-8895 or internationally at +1 443-815-4447, to learn how to get access to these and other Partner Pass-exclusive insights.)

Finally… also on Thursday… we released the latest Biotech Frontiers recommendation. This month lead analyst Erez Kalir writes about a small biotech company that’s developing a drug that promises to be a game-changing therapy for pulmonary sarcoidosis, and for the broader family of interstitial lung disease (“ILD”)… a terrible disease that over time makes it almost impossible to breathe. This company is alone in the market, and is right now in Phase III clinical trials – which means the potential upside is enormous…

Porter & Co.’s Distressed Investing‘s main focus is on distressed bonds. But stocks are also an important component of the portfolio. In Friday’s Daily Journal, Marty explained his investment analysis process for stocks – and how it compares with his bond analysis. And it works… The Distressed Investing stock portfolio is up 39%.

The Best Things We Read Last Week

Out of the hundreds of sources of investment, finance, and economics news and insight we regularly review – our Bloomberg terminal, hedge-fund letters, annual reports, the financial news media, Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) filings, investment newsletters, newspapers, X (Twitter) threads, conferences, podcasts, and more – here’s what we’ve read that we think you might find interesting.

(Note: Quotes, transcripts, and excerpts are generally reproduced as they appear in the original.)