A Sobering Look At The AI Boom

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, Porter followed up on last Friday’s Journal, when he explained why the government’s consumer price index (“CPI”) figures are lies – by explaining how they’re defrauding all of us. He wrote:

Inflation has always been the bridge between what the politicians promise (everything) and what they can actually provide (nothing).”

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On Wednesday, in a preview of what he plans to present at the 2025 Annual Conference in less than two weeks, Porter wrote about Porter’s Permanent Portfolio. He said the important thing to remember is that this portfolio is like a sail that’s propelled by the ongoing, massive inflation of our paper-money credit system. And, in that regard, it works. This strategy produced market-beating results with about half of the volatility of the stock market.

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On Thursday, Marty Fridson released a new Distressed Investing recommendation. About the bond, Marty wrote:

This month’s recommendation reminds us of our very first Distressed Investing recommendation in March 2023, when we wrote about Diversified Healthcare Trust’s 9.75% bonds… Today’s bonds are priced at $1,000, with an annual return of close to 10%. We believe that in both cases, investors were looking backward rather than forward, creating an opportunity for high, risk-adjusted returns.”

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And on Friday, Porter ended the week by expanding on the Lindy Effect, which he touched on in Wednesday’s Journal. On Friday, he wrote:

This approach requires a small amount of trading, once a year. That’s it. And this is a 100% stock approach – there’s no offsetting gold, bond, or cash. That’s 100% of the stock market’s average performance, with only half the risk. And there’s nothing to it – just paint by numbers and go back to sleep.”

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.