What Every Investor Should Know About The “Cantillon Effect”

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

We started out the week with Porter sharing in Monday’s Daily Journal the details (and photos) of his most recent trip to Argentina – exploring the gorgeous countryside with his wife, Shannon. He said that a little more than 100 years ago, it was the wealthiest country in the world, but it has since experienced an incredible decline into poverty… and virtually all the wealth left the country. The lesson?

What happened in Argentina is what is about to happen in America. U.S. national debt is up $2.25 trillion in the last year alone. Interest on our federal debts (~$40 trillion) will cost taxpayers around $1.5 trillion annually – roughly 40% of all income taxes collected.

---

On Wednesday, Porter made the case for gold – up 65% last year. What’s driving the price higher isn’t merely today’s inflation. It is the growing recognition of the world’s major banks that the U.S. dollar is no longer a suitable reserve currency.

He concluded by saying that the coming re-monetization of gold will trigger a collapse in America’s economy, led by the destruction of our banks and the end of Social Security and Medicare as we know them today. He predicted…

These are not ‘someday’ or maybe predictions. They will happen over the next seven years.

---

The Complete Investor team released its first recommendation of 2026 – a leading financial firm that helps gather and make sense of the fire hose of financial data pointed at investors every day. It creates indexes, benchmarks, and other ways to synthesize the data flow into easy-to-read tables and charts… With its valuation recently hurt by macroeconomic shifts, the stock looks attractive today. It’s as safe as a bond with huge equity-style upside. Read it here.

---

Then on Thursday, we released two sell alerts with some big-time wins.

Tech Frontiers editor Erez Kalir recommended selling shares in pharmaceutical company Roivant Sciences (ROIV) after a gain of more than 100% in less than two years. It’s the sixth 2x winner for Tech Frontiers – as Erez has plucked gems in an-otherwise biotech bear market – and he sees more gains ahead for Roivant in particular, and biotech in general. To get access to Erez’s next recommendation, getting to paid-up subscribers on February 5, click here to learn more.

Porter & Co.’s Distressed Investing team also notched a big win… recommending readers sell their shares of nutrient-drink maker Herbalife (HLF) for a more-than-100% gain since recommending them just seven months ago. It’s the seventh time Marty Fridson and his team have recommended shares of a company after having realized big gains in that same company’s bonds. On February 12, Distressed Investing will be doing that again – recommending shares of a company whose bond it recommended two months ago… which is already up more than 12%. To learn more, click here.

---

Porter ended the week with a Daily Journal recounting two bad decades for General Electric (GE), beginning around 25 years ago. He said that he began warning investors about GE in 2002. The “tell” was simple, he explained – the company had been a net-debtor for 25 years in a row. He wrote:

At the time, GE was the largest publicly traded company in the world. It had a rare, gold-plated, AAA credit rating, meaning its bonds were thought to be as safe as U.S. Treasury bonds. This gave the company an incredible advantage over virtually every other business in the world: a vastly lower cost of capital. GE’s borrowing capacity was virtually unlimited.

Why bring up GE? It’s the same path the U.S. is following at the moment – but to a much larger degree.

---

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.