Bitcoin’s IPO Moment Has Arrived

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… What We Published Last Week

“This really surprised me,” Marty Fridson said when he submitted Monday’s Journal to the editorial team for publication.

Marty took readers back to the Global Financial Crisis, when distressed debt was generating sizable returns. But his research found something even more impressive. He wanted to see how a random selection of bonds would have performed versus a handful of handpicked Utility-sector bonds that had generated a 37% annual return.

So he used a list of bonds within the ICE BofA U.S. High Yield Index that were yielding 10 percentage points or more above U.S Treasuries on November 30, 2008. From that list he selected bonds #1, #11, #21, #31 and so on until he’d collected a total of 30. 

These 30 bonds – even with two defaults – generated at 74% return over the following 12 months. The lesson, says Marty:

When distressed debt hits bottom, the odds on this famously high-risk asset class shift radically in favor of bondholders. Speculative-grade bonds, even some of the highest rated (BB), become available at prices that make improbably high aggregate returns not merely possible, but highly probable.”

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On Wednesday, Porter shared this Slack message with the team:

I’m writing a Journal essay today about EQT. That was the first stock I picked when I launched Porter & Co. and it has been a pretty weak performer… so far… but it continues to execute its business plan extremely well. And I think it’s going to be a great investment over the next five years.”

The Journal he wrote that day followed the path of EQT – the liquefied natural gas (“LNG”) producer run by the Rice brothers, who Porter has named “The Gods of Gas.” It’s been an impressive run – from founding the business to selling it, then to gaining control of EQT. 

Porter says that for the next several years, as both AI pipelines and the enormous expansion of America’s LNG export capacity continues to grow, prices for U.S. natural gas will grow as it becomes more global. He concludes:

That’s incredibly bullish for EQT.”

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Erez Kalir delivered another masterclass in finance with this month’s Tech Frontiers, the second issue since he has expanded his domain outside of biotech to include tech, crypto, and the blockchain. In his leadup to the issue’s recommendation – a little-known data-center infrastructure play that has the potential to 10x – he took readers step-by-step through a data-backed examination of the question: “Are we in an AI bubble?” He concludes:

The arithmetic of investing doesn’t bend for good stories: If we pay an absurd multiple for a great company, the best we can hope for is a modest return stretched thin across too many years. The worst is a permanent loss of capital when sentiment normalizes. In every great technological cycle – from railroads to radio, from mainframes to microchips – the enduring fortunes were made not by those who recognized the breakthrough, but by those who had the patience to own it at the right price. Valuation discipline is what separates an investor from a speculator.”

Paid-up subscribers can read about the company here.

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Thursday’s The Big Secret On Wall Street led off with big news: Porter’s flagship newsletter will now be called Porter Stansberry’s Complete Investor. We explained that we’re adding a whole suite of additional features to the existing list of benefits… a new selection of indexes, a new basket of short recommendations, and a How To Short A Stock guide…

In that issue, in addition to updates on five Big Secret recommendations, we cautioned that investors would be wise to read Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If”…

If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs… If you can meet triumph and disaster and treat those two impostors just the same… Yours is the earth and everything that’s in it.”

This might be some of the best advice investors can heed during turbulent times, we concluded.

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And on Friday in the Daily Journal, Porter warned that the End of America is getting nearer – and that Social Security can’t be propped up much longer. He said:

There will be political violence like we’ve never seen in this country before. New York City just elected a full communist mayor, mostly because college-educated people under 40 can’t afford to buy an apartment. Our economy is upside down because of out-of-control government spending and debt. And that means that life in America isn’t going to get better. It’s going to get a lot worse. And the collapse is going to happen a lot faster than anyone expects.”

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.