What You Need To Know About Trump’s “Strategic Pivot”

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

In Monday’s Daily Journal, Porter reported that because of Berkshire Hathaway’s enormous $1 trillion market cap and its $200 billion in commitments to capital-intensive and highly regulated businesses, it’s virtually certain that Berkshire will underperform the S&P 500 going forward.

Why does its size get in the way of investing options? Porter explained one interesting insight from his analysis…

If Berkshire decided to allocate 100% of its cash into the stocks of the S&P 500 and it started with the smallest of these 500 businesses, it could buy every single outstanding share of 476 companies. Berkshire has evolved from a world-class property and casualty insurance company with a best-of-breed public equity portfolio into the world’s largest conglomerate.”

On Wednesday in the Daily Journal, we wrote:

The long period of financial exceptionalism is coming to an end.

For the first time in more than 50 years, foreign investors are selling, not buying, U.S. Treasury bonds… and instead they are loading up on gold in record amounts. If this situation holds, we could be in for an entire decade of what we so far have seen in 2025… volatility and share prices that leave investors with trepidation and paltry returns.”

While Porter still favors the set-and-forget type of investing he has advocated for years, he sees significant volatility in the market ahead. As a result, he has launched The Trading Club – providing members with opportunities using trading techniques to earn outsized gains during the ups and downs of the market. His video about it is here.

Then, on Thursday, Marty released a recommendation for readers of Distressed Investing. It’s a bond issued by a relatively new software company that caters to the automotive industry. After going public, the company’s revenue declined and its stock price plunged. “Now,” Marty wrote: “new management is doing the right things and beginning to turn the company around. We believe this past turmoil has created an opportunity to buy its bond at a very favorable yield.”

On Thursday, Marty Fridson released a distressed-debt market analysis and Distressed Investing portfolio review. In that analysis, Marty wrote:

Stepping back from the day-to-day swings, we find that the consensus of forecasters surveyed by Bloomberg on the probability of a U.S. recession within the next 12 months has doubled from 20% to 40% since the end of 2024. Another potentially ominous sign is that the distress ratio (percentage of bonds in the high yield index yielding 10 percentage points or more above U.S. Treasury rates) is up from 4.15% to 7.37% over the same interval.”

To date, his Distressed Investing bond portfolio is up more than 25%, and he releases his next recommendation to readers June 11… If you’re not already a subscriber to Distressed Investing… see what we’re talking about here, or call Lance James, our Director of Customer Care, at 888-610-8895 or internationally at +1 443-815-4447, for more information on becoming a subscriber.

Also on Thursday, we sent to Big Secret On Wall Street subscribers an extensive update on eight stocks in the portfolio – and added back one company to it that we felt we sold too soon more than two years ago. With its shares falling, we recommended buying back shares of this quality home builder for what we think is some significant upside ahead.

We also released a buy recommendation in our Asymmetry advisory – which is exclusive to Partner Pass members… It’s an oil-producing business that when we first reported on it in December had not yet begun production, so there was still considerable downside risk. But now that the oil is flowing – and at likely a higher volume than had previously been anticipated – much of the risk has gone away while the upside potential has greatly increased…

On Friday in the Daily Journal, Porter reflected on tomorrow’s holiday:

On Memorial Day, while most Americans celebrate the salvation of the Union, I remember the fundamental loss of liberty and the usurpation of States’ sovereignty. And slavery? Slavery was on the way out in any case, not because of a war, but because of the cotton gin and all other kinds of industrial innovations that were greatly increasing the productivity of labor. Slavery didn’t end all around the world at roughly the same time because of America’s Civil War. It ended because it was no longer economic.”

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.