Revealing Our Top Asymmetric Stock Opportunity

Limited Downside And 100% Upside 

This is Porter’s Daily Journal, a free e-letter from Porter & Co. that provides unfiltered insights on markets, the economy, and life to help readers become better investors. It includes weekday editions and two weekend editions… and is free to all subscribers.

Table of Contents

• Limited Downside And 100% Upside 

• How Burford Could Turn $70 Million Into $3 Billion

• Is The World’s Greatest Investor About To Shock Wa …

• Three Things To Know Before We Go…

In last Wednesday’s Daily Journal, we reported that a recent legal victory unleashed “the most asymmetric opportunity we’ve ever seen.” 

Today, we’re revealing the details of this opportunity to Daily Journal subscribers. Full disclosure: we recommended this stock to The Trading Club subscribers on June 18. And while the shares have rallied 25% since then, we still see another potential 100% gain in the company’s shares from here. 

The company is Burford Capital (NYSE: BUR), the world’s largest provider of litigation finance – a business model based on providing funding and legal expertise for third parties to pursue legal action. In exchange for the funding and legal work, Burford earns a share of the winnings, either through a court ruling, arbitration agreement, or pre-trial settlement. 

The companies that hire Burford either don’t want to take on the expense or the risk of pursuing litigation on their own. They’re willing to give up some upside in exchange for transferring the risk and cost to Burford. 

You can think of Burford as a private equity firm for the legal system. 

And over the 17 years since it was founded in 2009, Burford has established itself as the gold standard in the industry. We measure its success by looking at the return on invested capital (“ROIC”) earned from concluded cases for each year of its history (referred to as “vintage year” returns). 

The typical case for Burford takes several years to wind through the legal system before reaching a resolution. Since the majority of cases initiated after 2020 have not yet been resolved, we exclude the 2021-2025 vintage years from our analysis. 

The table below shows that across all years through 2020, Burford has achieved an incredible 105% average ROIC. Even more impressive, the company has had only one losing year over this period – in 2011,  when it generated a modest loss of 2% ROIC. 

How does Burford consistently generate such returns, while limiting downside?

The secret sauce lies in its management team, led by industry heavyweights CEO Christopher Bogart and CIO Jonathan Molot. 

Before founding Burford, Bogart served as the general counsel of Time Warner. At just 34 years old, he managed one of the largest legal teams in the world that included more than 350 lawyers. 

​​Molot graduated at the top of his class at Harvard Law School, and then spent several years advising hedge funds and investment banks on litigation risk during mergers, acquisitions, and private equity deals. He also served in Obama’s Treasury Department. 

Among his many achievements at Burford, Molot led a landmark case against the country of Argentina that resulted in a $16.1 billion judgment. This ruling marked the single largest judgment awarded against a foreign country in the history of the U.S. legal system. And thanks to a recent series of positive legal victories, we believe Burford could eventually secure a $3 billion windfall in this case – equal to 100% of its entire market capitalization today. 

How Burford Could Turn $70 Million Into $3 Billion

The lawsuit stems from Argentina’s 2012 nationalization of YPF SA, one of the country’s largest oil companies. Two hedge funds that lost billions from the YPF nationalization subsequently filed a suit against the government for damages. And in 2015, Burford agreed to fund the legal expenses associated with the lawsuit, along with an upfront payment of $16 million, to acquire a stake in the litigation claims against Argentina. 

All told, Burford has invested approximately $70 million into this legal case. 

In March 2023, the judge presiding over the case – Judge Loretta Preska of the Southern District of New York – ruled that the Argentine government was at fault for failing to compensate the hedge funds for their YPF stake. And on September 28, 2023, the court awarded damages of $16.1 billion to the hedge funds. 

Burford currently owns approximately 38% of any proceeds from the lawsuit, making its share of the judgment equal to just over $6 billion. For context, at $14 per share, Burford’s total market capitalization is approximately $3 billion. In other words, a full payout on the $6 billion award owed to Burford in the YPF case would translate into double the value of its current share price. 

But winning a judgment is one thing. Collecting a $16.1 billion settlement from Argentina is another matter entirely. 

Since the initial ruling was made, lawyers for the Argentine government have tried every legal maneuver to avoid making good on the ruling. The government has also ignored requests from Burford to work out a settlement on a potentially reduced payout. 

Thus the market has assigned low odds that Burford will collect anything close to the $6 billion payment as ordered by the court. 

But that began to change on June 30, when Judge Preska granted Burford’s motion to order Argentina to transfer its 51% stake in YPF to the plaintiff group, led by Burford. Burford’s 38% share works out to $2.4 billion. 

Importantly, this ruling was not aimed at resolving the matter. The order for the transfer of Argentina’s 51% stake in YPF is only meant to serve as partial payment. Argentina is still on the hook for the full $16.1 billion judgement. 

Judge Preska gave Argentina two weeks to make good on the order. While we expect more legal brinkmanship from the Argentine government and its lawyers, this ruling was a major victory for Burford Capital. 

Whether Argentina complies with this request or not, one thing is clear: it massively boosts Burford’s negotiating power in bringing the Argentine government to the negotiating table to strike a final settlement on the YPF case – a settlement we believe could ultimately result in a $3 billion windfall for Burford, equal to its entire current market capitalization. 

On Wednesday, we’ll dive deeper into the legal and practical implications of this latest ruling, and what it means for the case going forward. We’ll explain why we believe the downside in Burford’s shares are limited even in a worst-case outcome in the YPF case, and why we see upside potential of 100% gains from here.

Is The World’s Greatest Investor About To Shock Wall Street?

Presented by Golden Portfolio

In just a few weeks, a move decades in the making could be revealed – and when it is, it could ignite the next great gold rush. Savvy insiders are quietly positioning now… before Buffett makes it official. Garrett Goggin has already pinpointed four tiny-gold-miners that could 100X once the announcement hits. It’s the perfect moment to be greedy – before the herd wakes up.

Click here to get Garrett’s Top Four gold picks now – before the world’s greatest investor pulls the trigger.

Three Things To Know Before We Go…

1. Tariff turbulence… again. Announced on April 2, President Donald Trump’s tariffs were set to take effect on April 5, but the news caused stocks to plunge, prompting the administration to impose a 90-day pause. That pause was scheduled to end this Wednesday, but the administration announced yesterday that imposition of tariffs would be delayed again – until August 1 – when Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent stated that the administration would place 25% tariffs on Japan and South Korea. The news sent the major indexes tumbling – for now.

2. Signs of a top… “Mom and pop” have been buying stocks like crazy. According to data from market analytics firm Vanda Research, retail investors bought $155.3 billion worth of stocks in the first half of 2025 – the most in the first six months of any year in history, exceeding even the post-COVID boom years of 2020-2022.

3. Leading indicator points to rising unemployment. Companies that employ over 100 workers must file a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (“WARN”) before implementing large-scale layoffs. Thus, WARNs provide a key leading indicator of the unemployment rate. There has been a notable uptick in U.S.-employer-posted WARNs, suggesting a jump in the unemployment rate in the months ahead. This is the latest sign that cracks are forming in the U.S. labor market. 

Good investing,

Porter Stansberry
Stevenson, Maryland

Please note: The investments in our “Porter & Co. Top Positions” should not be considered current recommendations. These positions are the best performers across our publications – and the securities listed may (or may not) be above the current buy-up-to price. To learn more, visit the current portfolio page of the relevant service, here. To gain access or to learn more about our current portfolios, call Lance James, our Director of Customer Care, at 888-610-8895 or internationally at +1 443-815-4447.