Issue #143, Volume #2
Our Annual Report Card For 2025
This is Porter’s Daily Journal, a free e-letter from Porter & Co. that provides unfiltered insights on markets, the economy, and life to help readers become better investors. It includes weekday editions and two weekend editions… and is free to all subscribers.
We’re devoting this week’s Daily Journals to a practice that Porter has been doing for decades… issuing Report Cards for the newsletters that he publishes. Honest and thorough feedback is the key to earning trust and ensuring straightforward financial analysis and recommendations. As Porter likes to say: it’s the information I’d like to receive if the roles were reversed.
Today, we kick off the grading with Porter Stansberry’s Complete Investor – and then we will follow up on Wednesday with Marty Fridson’s Distressed Investing and Erez Kalir’s Tech Frontiers, and conclude the week with the remaining advisories.
Porter begins the first of his Report Cards below.
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An annual tradition since 2003… The advice Porter would want… Big wins in Complete Investor… Energy takes the lead… Some down, but not out… Best Buys has a great year… |
I’m publishing these annual Report Cards because it is important to hold ourselves accountable for our performance.
Since 2003, I have always evaluated my financial publications’ actual track records and shared the results with all of my partners and subscribers. That’s what we’re doing today and all this week.
I’ll personally review the analysis and recommendations, score the results with a letter grade, and explain my reasoning. Why make sure that everyone knows what we’ve gotten wrong…?
I’m a firm believer that good intentions must be measured against actual results. (Imagine if politicians did the same!)
Through these Report Cards, you’ll get a better understanding of how our analysts achieve their excellent results. Our editors and analysts get feedback that improves their future performance. Porter & Co. winds up with better products. And, best of all, you’ll get higher and higher quality research from us in the future.
The obvious place to start is our flagship advisory… Porter Stansberry’s Complete Investor. (Though people might still know it better by its former name, The Big Secret On Wall Street.)
Complete Investor is the culmination of everything I’ve learned after 30 years of studying markets and the incredible power-law outcomes of investing in great businesses. The goal of Complete Investor is simple: to help subscribers build a legacy portfolio. We want to create an investment portfolio that will compound wealth for decades – safely. This should allow long-time subscribers to retire in comfort and to compound their wealth almost effortlessly for decades.
That’s our ambition. And the results…?
Complete Investor has seen some big wins this year.
Like the Energy & Commodities section that’s been out in front of the artificial-intelligence (“AI”) power buildout…
These companies are benefitting from Trump’s reshoring, the AI build-out, blockchain, and more. We are going to need a colossal amount of new energy production to enable the projected AI buildout.
The leader in next-generation power generation is BWX Technologies (NYSE: BWXT). It has a virtual monopoly on building small nuclear reactors for the military. Until recently, it was a sleepy, stodgy government contracting firm. But, because of its intellectual property and extensive supply chain, we knew it would soon be at the center of America’s nuclear renaissance. BWX Technologies has been a big win for us. It’s up 62% year to date (“YTD”) and over 200% since our original recommendation.
Creating a new, nationwide nuclear power network will take decades. And, as you can see, demand for artificial intelligence (“AI”) is growing much faster than a decade-long time scale. For the next 10 to 15 years, the fastest growing fuel source for all new electrical power will be natural gas. We believe growth in demand for this energy source will be unprecedented.
America’s largest producer of natural gas is EQT (NYSE: EQT), a “Lindy” energy business that’s been rebuilt by the “God’s Of Gas” – the Rice brothers. EQT is up about 20% so far this year. And we expect much larger gains through 2029, as both demand for AI grows and total natural gas export capacity (via new liquefied natural gas terminals) doubles.
No economic revolution happens without some volatility.
America’s most aggressive new liquefied natural gas (“LNG”) export company, Venture Global (NYSE: VG), has seen its shares tumble this year. It’s the only meaningful loss in our energy portfolio right now, down 38% from when I recommended it seven months ago, in March 2025.
Venture Global is developing the largest LNG export facilities in North America, a complex that when it is complete will be larger than Qatar’s LNG facilities are today. This will make Venture Global one of the world’s most important energy companies (or even a compelling acquisition for major “upstream” natural-gas producers). But in the short term, its share price is being driven by courtroom drama as it squabbles with integrated major energy companies of contract disputes. We continue to rate Venture Global a buy and believe it’s the best opportunity in our energy portfolio today – although it’s certainly risky.
Energy will play a critical role in establishing America as the world’s leading AI economy. If you haven’t read our AI report, The Parallel Processing Revolution, I urge you to do so. This revolution is going to be a 20-year-plus major technological trend that will produce far more wealth than the internet revolution did. The AI build-out will have plenty of ups and downs – like the internet did. But over the next 20 years it will change mankind’s ascent more than anything ever has before.
Thus, it’s worth highlighting our current Parallel-Processing Revolution holding Nvidia (Nasdaq: NVDA). Most analysts thought Nvidia was overvalued. We disagreed.
Nvidia lies at the very heart of the entire parallel-processing revolution, which includes AI, but also includes robotics, automated transportation, next-generation warfare, and personalized medicine. Just as the first microprocessors reshaped the world in the 1980s and 1990s, so will parallel processing reshape our world in the 2020s and the 2030s.
That’s why Nvidia is the most valuable business in the world today. It has an unprecedented moat in parallel-processing hardware and software, as we explain fully in our special report The Parallel Processing Revolution.
The Property & Casualty Insurance (P&C) section of the portfolio is a wall of green – with all eight of the holdings up since their entry to the portfolio, and six of the eight up double digits or more, including one approaching 120%.
On the other hand, insurance companies in general have been weak throughout 2025 because when interest rates decline, their current income streams fall.
While mildly cyclical, over time these investments (high-quality P&C companies) consistently beat the market. Our average annualized returns in this sector are over 30% a year. There’s no better, low-risk way to beat the market. We continue to believe that these stocks should make up 25% to 50% of your portfolio, depending on your overall strategy.
And then there’s the Exponential Growth section of our portfolio where we “swing for the fences.” These are fast-growing companies that can generate massive, life-changing returns.
We’ve been into many high-performing investments, like Bitcoin (BTC/USD) and leading tech stocks such as Coupang (NYSE: CPNG) and ride-hailing and food-delivery service Uber Technologies (Nasdaq: UBER).
Our only big “miss” was buying Celsius (Nasdaq: CELH) at the wrong time, early in 2024.
But, guess what? Celsius is up 65% so far this year and it just reported phenomenal quarterly results: revenue was up 173% year over year (“YOY”) in Q3, to over $700 million with 51% gross profit margins and over $200 million in operating profits. This is an amazing business that’s growing fast – and quickly gaining market share on the two energy-drink leaders, Monster Beverage (MNST) and Redbull. It will become a multi-decade holding for us, generating huge returns over time.
Finally, the cornerstone of the Complete Investor portfolio: our Forever Stocks section.
These are 16 companies you can feel comfortable buying and holding forever. Of these 16 recommendations, 12 are in the green, representing an overall return of 41%. The top performers among our forever stocks are Philip Morris International (NYSE: PM), up 87%, specialty retail brand Winmark (Nasdaq: WINA) up 113%, and Domino’s Pizza (Nasdaq: DPZ), up 45%.
Sometimes “forever” takes a while to perform well.
Back in April 2024, we put shoe and apparel giant Nike (NYSE: NKE) in the Forever Stocks section of the portfolio, and we’ve watched it slide 30%.
We still believe in the business. It’s a world-class franchise trading at its cheapest valuation in years. Nike is improving results and it will be fine over the long run. If you’re looking to buy and hold something for 20-plus years, Nike should do very well.
Porter’s Complete Investor 2025 Grade: I’m giving Complete Investor a B+.
However… In another way, we did an A+ job for our subscribers.
Hats off to our youngest analyst, Jared Simons, for developing Best Buys. Every month, we select three top picks from our Complete Investor portfolio. With so many stocks in our portfolio, we know that many subscribers don’t know what to buy now. This new feature makes our current best advice explicit.
Had you followed our Best Buys this year, you’d be up 23.3% compared with 17.5% for the S&P 500. And that’s without exposure to any volatile big tech or taking on any big risks.
Month after month, our Best Buys soared after we put them on the list:
Porter’s 2025 Best Buys Grade: A+
I’m very proud of how we’ve been able to combine excellent fundamental research with knowing when to buy these great businesses.
Three Things To Know Before We Go…
1. Americans are spending less than expected on holiday shopping. Gallup’s November 2025 holiday-spending survey estimated that consumers would spend an average of $778 on gift-giving – down $229 from October’s estimate. That decline exceeds the $185 drop recorded in November 2008 during the Global Financial Crisis and is $234 lower than last year’s expectation of $1,012. It’s a sure sign that consumers are struggling to keep pace with higher prices, and it is weighing on discretionary spending.
2. Student-loan delinquencies soar. Over 9 million borrowers are now delinquent on their student loans, having missed at least one payment in the past year. That represents about 10% of the $1.7 trillion in all outstanding student loans. And it’s wreaking havoc on credit scores, with the average delinquent borrower experiencing a drop of 100 points on their credit rating. This means millions of consumers are either losing access to new credit, or paying higher rates, adding another speed bump to U.S. consumption.
3. JPMorgan Chase (JPM) becomes the latest bank to jump into crypto. This morning, the bank announced its $4 trillion asset-management arm is launching its first “tokenized” money-market fund on the Ethereum blockchain. The private fund – called My Onchain Net Yield Fund (“MONY”) – will hold baskets of short-term debt securities like a traditional money market fund. However, because these assets will be held on the blockchain, it will accrue dividends and pay interest daily. MONY investors will also be able to buy or redeem shares using cash or USDC, the U.S. dollar stablecoin issued by Circle Internet (CRCL).
Tell me what you think of our report cards or anything else: [email protected]
Good investing,
Porter Stansberry
Stevenson, Maryland
Please note: The investments in our “Porter & Co. Top Positions” should not be considered current recommendations. These positions are the best performers across our publications – and the securities listed may (or may not) be above the current buy-up-to price. To learn more, visit the current portfolio page of the relevant service, here. To gain access or to learn more about our current portfolios, call our Customer Care team at 888-610-8895 or internationally at +1 443-815-4447.