Inside Today’s Issue

• Essay: You Probably Don’t Own Bitcoin And That’s A Huge Mistake
• Strong GDP Growth
• Job Growth = Rate Hike
• Diesel Rises Again
• Chart Of The Day… Morgan Stanley Bitcoin Trust (MSBT)
• Today’s Mailbag

Editor’s note: The Porter & Co. editorial and Customer Care teams will be off on Monday because of Labor Day. We will all be back on Tuesday.

Nobody invented money.

It was not designed, chartered, decreed, or granted. It was discovered, slowly, in trade. A man takes salt in exchange for his labor because he knows he can exchange it for other goods. Cattle, hides, shells, iron bars, bricks of tea, cakes of salt, strings of beads: each of these served as money at different times in history.

Carl Menger, one of the founders of the Austrian School of economics, first theorized how money evolved through trade. Men were led, he wrote,

each by his own economic interests, without convention, without legal compulsion, nay, even without any regard to the common interest, to exchange goods destined for exchange (their ‘wares’) for other goods equally destined for exchange, but more saleable.

The most important takeaway is that money predates all government. Governments don’t create money – in fact, as you’ll see, governments constantly corrupt money.

The second most important takeaway is that the market – through the choices of millions of individuals each pursuing their own economic interests – will always trend toward the best and most reliable form of money. That’s why, over time, more people favored metals, particularly gold and silver. And it’s why more and more people are choosing Bitcoin (BTC), today.

And what did governments add to money? Fraud, of course.

The denarius, the benchmark coin of the Roman Empire, was 90% silver (3.9 grams) under Julius Caesar. By AD 200, the coin was less than 60% pure, and by AD 300, it contained 5% silver. The Empire disintegrated alongside its money – something Americans would be wise to remember.

The same thing has happened to every empire.

Between 1544 and 1551, in a program historians call the Great Debasement, England’s silver coinage went from the old sterling standard of 92.5% fine to 75%, then 50%, then 33.33%, and finally to 25% in April 1551. Measured in metal, a pound sterling fell from 153.4 grams of pure silver to 25.9. Roughly 83% of the silver content was removed in only eight years.

It happens, over and over again. As sure as the sun rises in the East, every government, if it gains enough power, will attempt to control money by creating a currency. And they will devalue that currency to steal. That’s exactly what’s been happening in America since 2010. It’s why people under the age of 40 can’t afford to buy a house, get married, or have a family. It is what’s driving the collapse of our culture and our society. It’s what’s leading more and more people into lives of desperation: gambling, prostitution, and substance abuse. It’s leading people to become politically radicalized. And, if it continues, it will lead America to socialism, a financial collapse, and even a civil war.

But this doesn’t have to happen to you. You are still free to choose what you save. And you should save money, not the government’s currency. What is money? Money is what people voluntarily save. It is discovered, in markets, over long periods, by people making their own self-interested choices. Currency is what a government issues and debases and requires you to use as legal tender for debts and taxes. Money doesn’t require any coercion. It’s chosen freely, in the market.

Unless you understand this background, Bitcoin will never make sense to you.

Beyond this basic distinction between money and currency, the other misunderstanding that’s common even among people like financial commentators Peter Schiff and Jim Grant, who have an Austrian orientation, is that because Bitcoin is inert – it’s just code – it doesn’t have any intrinsic value.

As the Austrians proved, value is relative. And, in the modern world, code can have enormous value. Look at Microsoft (MSFT). What is it, other than code?

Every technology that Bitcoin has combined into its code has tremendous real-world value. Public-key cryptography verifies bank wires, military traffic, software distribution, and every other encrypted commercial transaction. Cryptographic hash functions compress huge files into a short fingerprint, which is how password databases and software integrity have been protected for decades. Distributed consensus protocols (blockchains) keep databases organized for mission-critical infrastructure around the world.

Saying that these things have no value because they are only code is profoundly ignorant.

Bitcoin combined these technologies to create something extraordinary: a way to send a fixed amount of value (a proof of work) to anyone around the world using only the public internet. Bitcoin allows two strangers, who do not trust each other, to exchange a form of money, with final settlement, without asking a bank, a clearinghouse, a corporation, or a government for permission. It also allows individuals to save an unlimited amount of money using only their minds: a seed phrase.

Gold’s weakness is its physical presence. It requires custody. To use gold, people ultimately must hand it to someone: a bank, a treasury, a depository institution. Or else… they risk having it seized (see 1933) or stolen. Bitcoin removes this risk. And that is a revolutionary monetary characteristic. Over time, I believe this will transform the relationship between people and governments. It creates a defense against debasement and coercion.

Like gold, Bitcoin is inert. It has no earnings. It pays no coupons. And, like gold, its supply only grows slowly, and the costs to mine Bitcoin continue to increase. To value Bitcoin, you must understand the other side of the scale: the currency you’re measuring it against. Bitcoin’s price, like gold’s, is driven by monetary aggregates.

The Porter & Co. Bitcoin Liquidity Model uses least squares regression analysis, which is a statistical method for understanding the historical relationship between global currencies and Bitcoin, using about 500 weekly observations beginning in January 2015.

The monetary aggregates we use include:

• Federal Reserve net liquidity, which is the Fed’s balance sheet minus the Treasury’s cash account minus money parked in the reverse repo facility. It is what the Fed is actually leaving in the banking system.
• Global M2 in dollars. M2 is broad money: currency, checking accounts, savings deposits and close equivalents. We sum the United States, the euro area, Japan, China and the United Kingdom, converted to dollars.
• Total circulating supply of the two large dollar stablecoins, USDT (Tether) and USDC (Circle Internet).

Statistics show our model explains 89% of the variation in Bitcoin’s price. Most Bitcoin enthusiasts claim Bitcoin’s price is driven by its halving cycle. But it isn’t. Once global liquidity is measured properly, the four-year halving cycle adds nothing to Bitcoin’s price. Bitcoin’s code was designed to keep the price of Bitcoin stable against the growth in compute. It’s working. What’s driving its price higher is debasement by governments.

On May 21, I posted this on X.com (@porterstansb):

I expect Bitcoin will continue to be highly correlated with liquidity in the global financial system. My model says each 1% rise in Global M2 YOY adds ~4.5% to fair-value BTC. Model fair value is $136,050.

On May 26, on Anthony Pompliano’s podcast, I said,

The mispricing today in Bitcoin is as large as I’ve ever seen before in the model.” And I explained why: “I think that’s because the tech stocks have been so strong that all of the risk capital has fled into tech stocks, and it had to come out of somewhere.

My conclusion:

I think we’re seeing a great opportunity today in Bitcoin, certainly the best opportunity I’ve seen in Bitcoin in a decade.

On June 20, we published an entire issue of my newsletter, Complete Investor, about Bitcoin:

In this issue, we’re re-recommending Bitcoin (BTC). And we believe buying it now, before the next halving, will prove to be the single best financial decision of the next decade.

By June 30, Bitcoin had fallen to $58,524. It recovered through August, and today is trading above $79,000. But… despite the rebound… Bitcoin is still trading below the lower 1-sigma band of around $94,000 of our pricing model.

Nero shaved the denarius. And every empire since then has destroyed itself and most of its people through debasement. But nobody can shave a Bitcoin.

If you use their money, you’ll be their slave. Free yourself with Bitcoin.

Tell me what you think of today’s Daily Journal: porterstansberrydirect@gmail.com

Good investing,

F. Porter Stansberry
Stevenson, Maryland

Porter & Co. Market Snapshot

Porter & Co. Top Positions

Inside Today’s Issue

• Essay: The Most Famous Gold Chart This Year
• The Crowd-Out Of Data-Center Spending
• Another Nvidia Circular Funding Deal
• AI Has Not Yet Reduced Inflation
• Chart Of The Day… Gold
• Today’s Mailbag

The Fed didn’t print a dollar, and gold had its best month in 27 years.

The Federal Reserve’s balance sheet didn’t move an inch this month, and gold still had its best month since 1999.

If that sounds backwards, you’ve been watching the wrong building.

On August 19, the U.S. Treasury announced it would double its buybacks of long-dated government debt, from $2 billion an operation to at least $4 billion. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent calls it a “Treasury Twist.”

Then on Monday, August 24, two senior Treasury officials told CNBC where the money could come from: the government’s own checking account at the Fed. Bessent has built it to roughly $950 billion. The last Treasury ran it at $550 billion to $600 billion.

Follow the cash…

The Treasury buys long bonds from the banks, its balance at the Fed goes down, and the banks’ reserves go up by the same amount. Money that sat frozen in a government account starts moving, and the Fed’s balance sheet never does.

Nobody has to call it quantitative easing (“QE”), so I’ll call it what it is: Checkbook QE.

It’s the same liquidity, in a different building, with no press conference.

Because the Fed won’t do it. Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh took the helm wanting a smaller central bank, and futures give better than one-in-three odds his Fed hikes this month.

Meanwhile, the 30-year yield hit its highest since 2007 this month and federal debt crossed $40 trillion. Somebody has to be the buyer of last resort for the long bond. The Fed declined. The Treasury volunteered, and told you where it keeps the money.

Gold answered inside a week.

Bullion started August near $4,000 an ounce and traded above $4,700 to end the month, up about 14% on the month. The last time it moved that fast was September 1999, when 15 European central banks agreed to sell less gold. This time a government showed you its checkbook.

Gold is a great way to be right about Checkbook QE. It’s a slow way to get paid for it.

M2 hit a record $23.2 trillion this summer. Hold gold at the ratio to the money supply it reached in 1980, and the price lands near $10,000 an ounce.

Now run the same arithmetic on a miner. The big producers pull an ounce out of the ground for roughly $1,600 all-in, so at $4,000-an-ounce gold, they clear $2,400 an ounce, and at $4,700 they clear $3,100. The metal moved 17%. The margin moved 29%.

At $10,000, the number is on the chart below, because if I say it out loud you’ll think I’m selling something.

I am. Just not that.

My flagship service, Katusa’s Resource Opportunities, turns 10 this year.

I started it to show readers the names I own, the price I paid, and why, and to bring them into the private financings I write my own check into first, at the same price and terms.

• That’s how a $0.90 unit in Artemis Gold’s 2019 financing became a $45 stock.

The losers are in the letter next to the winners, with what I got wrong.

The correction left a list of gold producers priced at margins I haven’t seen in my career.

Some have repriced. Most haven’t.

The three I’d own first are in a report every new member gets on day one.

For the anniversary, for 10 days, I’ve reopened the price our charter members paid the day we launched: $1,499 instead of $3,500, with a full refund inside 30 days if it isn’t for you.

I’ve never reopened that price in 10 years and I won’t again.

Claim the charter price: $1,499 instead of $3,500.

The Treasury has $950 billion and just told the market it’s willing to use it. Gold had its best month since 1999 on the announcement alone. The spending hasn’t started.

Join Katusa’s Resource Opportunities at the 10-year charter price

Marin Katusa

Keep in mind, we at Porter & Co. only publish guest essays from publishers we know to offer well-researched ideas vetted by a legal team, excellent customer service, and reasonable refund policies. Katusa’s Resource Opportunities is one such partner. We do not, however, under any circumstances, make any representations about their investment ideas or strategies, nor will we warrant them as equal to our own. We do recognize that the markets are tempestuous and, at times, ideas that we may not endorse prove valuable.

Tell us what you think of today’s Daily Journal: porterstansberrydirect@gmail.com

Porter & Co. Market Snapshot

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Inside Today’s Issue

• Essay: How’s A 30% Annual Dividend Sound?
• Tax Money Keeps Rolling In… And Out
• Money Supply Grows Bigger And Bigger
• Tech Goes From Cap-Light To Cap-Heavy
• Chart Of The Day… Deere & Co.
• Today’s Mailbag

It’s like trying to drive a car at night without any lights…

Many years ago, one of my mentors was explaining the real purpose of prices. Prices convey information across a complex economy. But when the money is “broken” – when it’s constantly inflated by the Federal Reserve – that information in those price signals is corrupted. The feedback mechanism breaks down. As a result, it’s like trying to drive a car at night without any lights – accidents are bound to happen.

We’re about to see an enormous accident in global tankers. But you’d never know it…

The shipping tanker market is gushing more cash than I’ve ever seen before. By the time the 3Q dividends land, the six largest tanker companies will have paid out over $3 billion in cash to shareholders this year. The indicated annual yields on some of these stocks is over 30%.

Should you grab some of this historical cash windfall…? Maybe – but only if you know when the music is going to stop.

Tankers are the most cyclical, mega-capital industry in the world. Tankers’ depreciation schedules make data centers look like a safe long-term investment! A supertanker costs well over $100 million, takes two to three years to build, starts rusting the day it launches, and always dies young – it’s typically scrapped after two decades.

Why would anyone want to be in this business? Because the world cannot function without these ships. Roughly a third of the oil consumed on Earth reaches its refinery by ship.

The cost of the shipping is a tiny fraction of the value of the cargo. So when shipping gets disrupted or when demand for imported oil grows suddenly, there will be enormous increases to shipping rates because demand doesn’t change. A refinery that cannot get crude stocks has to shut down. Shut-in costs more than any freight bill, so refiners bid against each other for the last available vessel. The daily rate to hire very large crude carriers (“VLCC”) does not rise 20% or 40% in a tight market. It increases 500% or 1,000% – usually within days.

Prices can remain elevated for years because it takes a lot of time to build more ships and because ships are rusting out of the fleet all the time. The gap between when a shortage emerges and the delivery of a new fleet is “the window” – it comes along once every decade or so. And truly immense amounts of money can be made. But you must know when it’s time to leave the party.

I’ve written previously that the current market cycle reminds me of the 1973-1974 bear market. Energy prices spiked because of a war in the Middle East. U.S. politics were coming unraveled because of Watergate. And stocks were coming off huge highs in 1972, as the Nifty-Fifty – a group of high-quality stocks – were trading at higher multiples than anyone had ever seen before.

That market also featured a huge tanker cycle – almost exactly like the one we see today.

Leasing rates on the largest tankers quadrupled between May and September of 1973. Egypt and Syria attacked Israel on October 6 of that year. The Arab oil producers cut supply and embargoed shipments to the United States. The rush to find crude anywhere in the world and to ship it to America was on. The freight market went vertical.

Then it broke.

On October 24, spot rates for large tankers fell 75% in only three days. By November they were down 90%. Why did rates collapse so fast and so completely? The embargo cut the volume of oil so completely that there was nothing left to carry.

But the oil supply crash wasn’t the real disaster. The disaster was what happened next.

By January 1, 1974, the world’s shipyards had orders for 193 million tons of new tanker capacity – 90% of the entire existing fleet. In other words, the fleet owners ordered themselves an entire second fleet. The new ships came. And kept coming. World tanker capacity – the supply – went from 440 million tons in 1973 to 494 million in 1974, 544 million in 1975, and 633 million by 1978, while the demand didn’t grow at all.

By Q2 1976, almost 20% of the entire world tanker fleet was moored and out of service. But idling a ship is not free: keeping a supertanker anchored costs as much as $75,000 a month. Plus, it costs roughly $700,000 to prepare it and secure a berth.

By February 1979, the rate index for the largest tankers had fallen to a level roughly 95% below the 1973 peak. In April 1983, a full 10 years after the peak, the world had 310 million tons of tanker capacity available but it still only needed 137 million. There was a surplus of 173 million tons, meaning more idle oil-carrying capacity than the entire industry could employ!

I wasn’t in the markets during the 1970s, but I watched the same cycle happen again in the mid-2000s.

As China’s economy boomed following its entry into the World Trade Organization (“WTO”), demand for crude carriers surged amidst a broad commodities mania. Oil surged from $30 to $147.50 a barrel by July 11, 2008. Demand for tankers followed crude higher. Rates for the largest tankers averaged $53,000 a day in January of 2008 and peaked above $169,000 a day by July.

What happened next? Global tanker building contracts, which had been running $30 billion a year, jumped to $91 billion in 2004, $104 billion in 2005, and $135 billion in 2006. The price of a new supertanker went from $63.5 million in 2002 to $129 million by the end of 2006. But owners kept ordering. By January 2007, Clarkson’s (the world’s largest shipbroker) put the global orderbook at 300 million tons – roughly 31% of the existing fleet.

The bust took five years to work through. And not everyone survived. Overseas Shipholding Group, then the largest American tanker operator, filed for bankruptcy in November 2012 with $4.15 billion of assets against $2.67 billion of debt.

Today, we’re sitting in “the window” – supplies for tankers are super tight. Leasing rates have soared. And a whole new fleet is on order. The clock is ticking… but how long will “the window” stay open?

With the war in Iran this spring, the Strait of Hormuz was effectively closed. That left a huge number of tankers stranded in the Persian Gulf. Rates for the largest tankers touched $436,000 a day. Traffic has been resuming gradually, though ships are still sitting idle around the strait waiting to move. Every ship stuck at anchor is a ship not competing for cargo. Veson Nautical (whose software handles booking and payment for the fleet) does not expect full normalization before the end of this year.

The other factor pushing leasing rates higher isn’t transitory. Oil production keeps rising in the United States, Guyana, Brazil, and Argentina while consumption growth is highest in Asia. A barrel shipped from Guyana to China occupies a vessel far longer than a barrel shipped from the Persian Gulf to Japan. The industry counts demand in ton-miles. The longer the voyage, the higher the transportation cost, and the more demand for ships grows.

Finally, there is the age of the fleet. Nearly half the world’s tanker capacity is more than 15 years old. Roughly 130 supertankers aged 20 or more are still trading today against fewer than 20 of them five years ago. Old ships sail slower, sit longer in port, and carry less.

But… the new ships are coming. Through the end of July, fleet owners contracted 96.4 million tons of new tankers, against a previous annual record of 81.3 million tons set in 2006. This year’s new ship contracting will surpass 100 million tons. So far, shipping companies have ordered 197 supertankers and 103 Suezmaxes (the largest ships that can transit the Suez Canal), records in both classes.

But they aren’t on the market – yet. In a “normal” year, something around 40 supertankers are delivered. But only one supertanker was delivered in 2024. And only five in 2025. Owners only scrapped 2.16 million tons in 2026. The order book delivers in 2027 and 2028.

Until the new boats come online, there’s a lot of money to be made in shipping.

Frontline (FRO) earned $659.2 million in Q2, $2.96 a share, on revenue of $943.3 million. Its supertankers earned $152,700 a day against the $23,800 a day Frontline needs to cover cash costs. It declared a $2.61 a share dividend, which is 100% of adjusted profit, and an annualized yield of 23.6%.

International Seaways (INSW) earned $294.9 million in adjusted profit, $5.91 a share, and generated $261 million of free cash flow, a company record by roughly $100 million. Its fleet averaged $79,000 a day against $27,500 a year earlier, its supertankers cleared $150,000. The board declared $5.05 a share on August 7. That’s 20.2% annualized.

DHT Holdings (DHT) earned $198.3 million, $1.23 a share, with its spot vessels earning $162,600 a day against cash costs of $22,600. DHT made more money in the first half of 2026, $362.9 million, than in any full year in its history. It declared a quarterly of $1.22, which is 100% of ordinary profit and annualizes to 24.8%.

Okeanis Eco Tankers (ECO) earned $230.3 million against $26.9 million a year earlier. It paid $5.25 a share on August 21, which annualizes to 30.9%.

So… the question is… how long will “the window” remain open?

We can see the next two quarters clearly, because the ships are already booked.

• Frontline has 86% of its Q3 supertanker days fixed at $156,900 a day, above the $152,700 it just earned, and 79% of Suezmax days at $117,400 against $111,500
• DHT has 1,020 days chartered out at $75,900 and 58% of its spot days booked at $152,700
• International Seaways has 48% of its days at $61,000 blended across crude and refined product against cash costs running between $14,500 and $25,700, those bookings pay the dividends through the end of the year

How much longer can it run after that…? Maybe another one or two quarters, with risk growing substantially after June of next year.

What will the crash look like?

The tanker orderbook today stands just over 31% of the fleet, where in January 1974 it stood above 90%. Owners cannot flood this market the way their grandfathers did. And the fleet is old. There are a lot of boats that need to be replaced.

But investors should remember: After the last boom in 2008, Frontline’s dividend went from $3.00 to $0.02 in 11 quarters.

Tell me what you think of today’s Daily Journal: porterstansberrydirect@gmail.com

Good investing,

Porter Stansberry
Stevenson, Maryland

Porter & Co. Market Snapshot

Porter & Co. Top Positions

Inside Today’s Issue

• Essay: Why Good Investment Ideas Might Start Out Unpopular
• El Niño And Commodity Prices
• More On Bessent And Bonds
• A September To Remember… Or Not
• Chart Of The Day… Veeva Systems (VEEV)
• Today’s Mailbag

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.

Tell us what you think of today’s Daily Journal: porterstansberrydirect@gmail.com

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