Why Good Investment Ideas Might Start Out Unpopular

Editor’s note: Today, Porter turns the Journal over to Matt Tuttle, CEO of Tuttle Capital Management and portfolio manager of the Porter & Company Porter Portfolio Index ETF (PCPP).

In late 2021, betting against Cathie Wood felt about as smart as betting on rain in San Diego.

Wood’s ARK Innovation ETF (ARKK) had returned 153% in 2020, against roughly 18% for the S&P 500, and the press had decided that she was the next Warren Buffett.

But the returns were the story, not the holdings. In my view, ARKK held the opposite of what I look for in an investment: the fund was full of richly valued companies with limited cash generation, and its shareholder base had mostly bought after the sharp runup in prices.

So I built a fund, the Tuttle Capital Short Innovation ETF (SARK), which sought the inverse of ARKK’s daily return through a swap agreement. That is – as ARKK fell (which I was pretty sure would happen before long), SARK would rise.

My fund found an audience quickly. Wood had a loyal following that took the fund personally – and I heard from a lot of them. Their catcalls, though, didn’t change what was in her portfolio.

In a similar vein… Porter Stansberry had spent years making an unpopular argument of his own: that the dollar was being eroded, that the deficit arithmetic didn’t work, and that the “safe” asset sitting in every retirement account had quietly become one of the riskiest things a person could own.

He’d built a portfolio around it. What he needed was someone who could turn that into an index and then leave it alone, even if it might look foolish in any given quarter.

And that’s how our fund, the Porter & Company Porter Portfolio Index ETF (ticker symbol PCPP), came about.

The index holds not one, but four generally unfashionable positions:

1. Cash-generating businesses, instead of the hot story
2. Insurance companies, instead of government bonds
3. Gold and Bitcoin, and
4. Short-dated bonds, instead of reaching for yield

I’ll come back to how those fit together. First, though… why I think being unpopular is worth something.

About 16 months after building SARK, I built a fund that took the other side of the on-air stock picks of CNBC shouting-head Jim Cramer.

I loved the idea, but the fund didn’t work. I shut it down inside a year, at a loss.

The point, though, was never the return.

My aim was to highlight how – and ask why – a man can go on television every weekday for two decades, tell a national television audience what stocks to buy, be wrong repeatedly and at scale, and face no formal accountability. He said Bear Stearns was just fine – days before it went under. He called Silicon Valley Bank a “buy” on air one month before regulators closed the bank. He compared Sam Bankman-Fried to J.P. Morgan.

The fund closed, but the point remains. And, incidentally, I haven’t been back on CNBC since.

My firm’s tagline is “The antidote to Wall Street.” We mean it, and it has cost us.

Here’s what I learned building those funds in public.

Financial TV isn’t lying to you. From my point of view, it’s doing something more subtle. I see the real problem is that it needs characters – not analysts.

The easiest way to stay on the guest list is to be a “perma-something.” Always bullish, always bearish, it doesn’t much matter which. Repeat the same forecast for long enough, and the market eventually obliges.

Then you’re the person who called it. The dozen wrong calls before that disappear.

What doesn’t get you booked is being right early – and downright inconvenient in the meantime.

Years ago, I made a simple observation to a reporter about a large brokerage and one of its analysts. He told me he couldn’t print it. His editor would kill him.

Let me guess, I said. It’s a major advertiser for the paper?

He nodded. Yep. And that, I’d argue, is how the system works. Who loses? I think it’s the guy who takes what the talking heads are saying at face value.

Porter spent years saying the U.S. dollar wouldn’t stay dominant forever, that the deficit arithmetic didn’t add up, and that long-term government bonds, the very thing investors are told is safe, had quietly become one of the riskiest assets you could own.

For most of those years, that made him sound like a crank to the institutions selling the old playbook. Then 2022 happened. Then April 2025 happened. Some of the same institutions now make a version of the same argument.

Which brings me to the thing I actually believe: Being unpopular with the crowd isn’t by itself a flaw in an investment thesis. Plenty of unpopular ideas are simply wrong. But an idea that everyone already holds has no advantage left in it.

So here is how those four positions inside PCPP actually work. It’s worth stating plainly up front that the fund is passively managed, and these four positions reflect the methodology of the underlying rules-based index rather than a manager’s view.

The stock sleeve screens on historical cash conversion and shareholder distributions. Consensus says buy the index and own everything in it. This owns a screened subset rather than the whole index.

The “bond” sleeve isn’t bonds. It’s property and casualty insurers – the companies that write home, auto, and business policies, chosen for underwriting quality. They stand in for the government debt that did not hedge equity losses in 2022 or in April 2025.

The hard-assets sleeve pairs gold and Bitcoin. Gold is the 5,000-year store of value everyone knows. Bitcoin is the newer digital asset built to be scarce and is maintained by network consensus rather than a central issuer.

The fixed-income sleeve is short-dated bonds and Treasury funds that mature in a few years rather than a few decades. Consensus calls that a drag on returns. The intent is to hold assets that can be sold without a large loss of principal, so the annual rebuild has something to draw on.

And none of it runs on judgment. Fixed targets, a published methodology, an annual rebuild.

Four uncomfortable positions in one ticker. Porter & Co. creates the index. As the adviser, I can’t override it. Which is the point.

Most investors can hold one contrarian view. That’s uncomfortable but survivable. Almost nobody can hold four of those views – at once.

Experience tells me there tends to be one you talk yourself out of, usually not long before it turns. Sometimes it never does.

And while a rules-based structure doesn’t make that discipline easier, it removes the discretion. It does not remove the risk that the rules produce poor results.

Early can just feel wrong for an uncomfortable length of time.

I’ve been shouted down for the Cathie Wood ARK Innovation trade and mocked for the Cramer one. I’d take both again.

Porter spent his career researching how to hold a portfolio through different market environments.

The index attempts to express that view in a single set of rules.

You can see the whole thing at porterandcofunds.com.

Matt Tuttle, CEO/CIO
Tuttle Capital Management

P.S. Every morning before the open, I publish The Daily H.E.A.T., my framework applied to whatever the market is doing that day. It’s free. Sign up here.

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