The Trump Tariff Playbook

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

In Monday’s Daily Journal, we reflected on the news that the Nobel Prize for economics was awarded to three professors for their contributions to understanding the relationship between technological innovation and sustained economic growth. We wrote:

In a world where short-sighted strongmen, populist movements, and a tendency toward socialist economics challenge globalization and free markets, the work of these economists offers a powerful reminder: sustained economic growth does not occur by accident. It requires not just technological breakthroughs but the cultural, institutional, and policy environments that allow innovation to flourish.”

---

The Trading Club released three options trades on Monday… The rationale behind the trades, which benefit from high volatility in the market, was the recent rise in the VIX – the CBOE Volatility Index.

What caused the sudden 30% jump in the VIX, from 16 to 21, is when China’s Ministry of Commerce announced restrictions and tighter licensing requirements on exports of rare earth metals –  used for everything from consumer electronics to military equipment.

Then in a social media post after that, U.S. President Donald Trump called the move “sinister and hostile,” and announced plans to increase tariffs by 100%. Equity markets plunged almost 3% on the news, then both sides walked back their tantrums, and stocks recovered. But in the intervening turmoil, Trading Club members were offered 1) an advanced trading lesson and 2) a great opportunity to make some tasty gains on some stable assets.

---

In Wednesday’s Journal, Tech Frontiers editor Erez Kalir made the profound argument for buying blue-chip blockchain assets. Subscribers familiar with Porter’s work know his belief in building a stock portfolio that consists of “forever stocks.” The time is right, Erez explained, to expand this concept to include not only stocks, but also blue-chip blockchain assets. Not speculative cryptocurrencies or meme coins – no, he means assets you can buy today and hold with an intention to pass them on to your children and grandchildren. 

The three main reasons he provides for this argument are: 1) that blue-chip blockchain assets act as digital gold and store of value, 2) more institutional investors will begin accumulating these assets, driving the value higher and higher, and 3) finance will soon be running on blockchain. He concludes:

“Over the coming decade, as stablecoins, tokenized assets, and digital securities become mainstream, Ethereum will be a major winner – almost certainly joining gold, Bitcoin, and U.S. Treasuries as a core monetary asset of the modern era. For investors building a Forever Portfolio of blockchain blue chips, Ethereum isn’t an optional speculation but instead a core must own.”

---

Also on Wednesday, Marty Fridson issued a sell alert for one of his Distressed Investing holdings that has, for lack of a better phrase, crushed it since he recommended a combined stock-bond position in May. The sell alert said, in part:

Green Plains has received a lot of good news lately, causing its securities to rise sharply. The value of the combined position has risen more than 70% since May. In August, we recommended selling half your position in Green Plains shares for a 2x gain. And in September, we recommended selling the 2.25% Green Plains bonds for a 25% gain… Today, we recommend selling the remaining portion of Green Plains shares, which trade around $12.”

---

Thursday saw our release of the latest issue Porter & Co.’s Best Buys – three portfolio picks that are currently at an attractive purchase point. The newest addition to this cohort is a Japanese conglomerate that has been dominating vast sectors of that country’s industry, from autos to semiconductor chips – an extremely capital efficient business that we suggest buying and holding forever. 

The other two are fairly well-known international companies that have risen considerably since being recommended into The Big Secret On Wall Street: one is up more than 50% since its entry in March, and the other is up 4% in the three-plus months since its inclusion… That latter company was just also placed into our High Conviction portfolio – where we recommend what we consider the ultimate “no-brainer” investment ideas for our Partner Pass members – so it likely has only begun its ascent.

---

On Friday, Porter told the story of Jenkins’ ear. British sea captain Robert Jenkins had his ear cut off by a Spanish customs official in the early part of the 18th century. And to keep their profitable trading routes flowing, the British South Sea Company used the sea captain’s sliced-off year to rally the country into a war… which made no sense, Porter explains.

People will believe anything. They can be persuaded, easily, with virtually zero actual evidence, that they have a moral obligation to act against their own self-interest – all the way to, and including, sacrificing their lives and the lives of their loved ones.”

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.