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 revealed a somewhat-shocking new reality about gold. And there are enormous sums of money at stake in what he discussed about how the world’s financial system is evolving. In fact, he argued, what’s at stake is all the money in the world. He said that the most important change to the world’s monetary system since 1971 is happening: Gold is being re-monetized.
Gold is becoming on par with U.S. Treasuries as a reserve asset, and in some ways it’s clearly superior, Porter explained:
There’s no duration risk, it’s uncorrelated to fiat-currency volatility, it’s a counter-cyclical asset, it’s counterparty-proof, and it’s globally fungible. It also can’t be automatically seized by the U.S. (Russia lost all its dollar reserves after its invasion of Ukraine.)… These new regulations will cause seismic changes in the demand for physical gold over the next three years.”
On Wednesday, Porter offered a poignant (and often-forgotten) lesson in investing… about finding undiscovered gems on balance sheets of publicly traded companies. Many balance-sheet assets sit and slowly grow, while others bloom exponentially… Like Alphabet’s (GOOG) $1 billion investment in Elon Musk’s private aerospace manufacturing firm SpaceX that could now be worth about $100 billion… a 100x in 10 years.
The key investment lesson is that the market has not factored in the 100x gain on that asset into the price of GOOG shares. And there are many other examples like this. It’s akin, Porter wrote, to finding a small wad of cash in a pair of pants you haven’t worn in awhile. “Check your pockets,” he concluded.
On Thursday, Marty Fridson recommended shares of a company that finds itself in distress, along with all the other companies in the niche industry of titanium-dioxide producers. And like he has done many times before, Marty runs the numbers – he looks at the company’s past, digs into its current operations, and projects into the future. And what does he see? A share price way above where the company currently trades. It looks to be another gem in the long line of distressed-equity winners Marty has discovered in Porter & Co.’s Distressed Investing. Partners and subscribers can read about it here.
In Complete Investor this week, Porter and his team provided a portfolio update. With a shift in the market dynamic – as doubt has grown about the future of artificial intelligence (“AI”) – the broader market remained strong. This shift serves as a reminder that investors should always be re-evaluating their portfolios for changes in the fundamentals – even more true when there is a trend change at the top of the market. All subscribers can read the analysis here.
To that end, we recommended selling two companies from the Complete Investor portfolio – one for a 50%-plus gain, the other, sadly, for a loss that we did not see reversing itself. Paid-up subscribers can see that portfolio update here.
On Friday, in addition to its regularly weekly update (which showed the portfolio up 19% since it launched in May), The Trading Club released an exciting new feature – a real-time, interactive discussion forum. The Trading Club Forum allows members to pose questions that Porter & Co. team members respond to directly. Members can find it here.
Porter ended the week with a provocative essay in the Daily Journal. He said that we are approaching the “end game” with the U.S. government’s management of its debt load…
Federal debt is now more than $37 trillion. A generation ago, in 2000, the debt-to-GDP ratio was only 33%. Today it’s more than 120%. And that ignores the massive obligations of Social Security and Medicare (~$75 billion) that remain “off balance sheet,” but continue to come due, more and more, every year.
While most investors will ignore these problems, they are going to have a profound impact on our whole society, not just on your investments. It’s the government’s incessant expansion of the money supply that creates inflation, causes America’s affordability crisis, and creates the wealth inequality that’s fueling the rise of socialism.”
This week, starting tomorrow, Porter will issue report cards for nearly all Porter & Co. publications. Follow the Daily Journal all week… not just to see the grades he gives but to gain insights from what Porter has learned from our year in investing.
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.
Markets And Economics
Investment Ideas
Government Bonds And Credit
Corporate Bonds And Credit
Consumer Credit
Special Situations: Activist Investing, Spinoffs, Arbitrage, Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A), And More
Bitcoin And Crypto
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Keep in mind, we only accept advertising from publishers we know to offer well-researched ideas vetted by a legal team, excellent customer service, and reasonable refund policies. Paradigm Press is one such partner. We do not, however, under any circumstances make any representations about its investment ideas or strategies, nor will we warrant them as equal to our own. We do recognize that the markets can be tempestuous and, at times, ideas that we may not endorse prove valuable.
