How Close Readers Of The Daily Journal Benefitted Last Year
Today – taking a break from our normal publishing schedule – we conclude our “12 Days Of Christmas” series.
Porter & Co.’s version of the “12 Days Of Christmas” has, we hope, brought you something actually useful: hard-earned investment lessons to guide you through 2026. For the past two weeks – in place of our regular research and insights – we have dished out key lessons from 2025… some earned from pain and others from gain.
Over the past year, editors across all of our publications have recommended stocks, bonds, or other trades that have resulted in a mix of outsized performances and humbling underachievements. Having begun on December 23, and concluding today, we have revealed a pivotal lesson – about why a stock soared to double-digit returns, or why one languished. We also explored the ones that got away – that we sold too soon or that we didn’t recommend at all.
Throughout the year in the Daily Journal – which is a free service that we provide at Porter & Co. – Porter provides extremely valuable financial research. In today’s Journal, we highlight how some of Porter’s research and recommendations have played out over the course of the year.
We will be back to our regular publishing cycle on Monday, January 5.
Good advice is only good if you take it…
Here are just three examples of Daily Journals that offered readers with real actionable advice that has provided both short- and long-term gains for those who followed it.
In the December 29 “12 Days Of Christmas,” we came clean and admitted how we screwed up back in 2022 and sold shares of a great business too soon… Well, we learned from that lesson and Porter made amends in a March 2025 Daily Journal.
That business is Hovnanian Enterprises (HOV). It had been a poor performer until around 2021, when a solid turnaround began. That year it generated gross margins of 21%, a 29% return on assets, and a solid 53% return on invested capital.
Yet because of the company’s long history of poor performance – and its still junk-level credit rating – the market didn’t believe in this turnaround. Hovnanian was trading at a market cap of less than $250 million, which was roughly 40% of what it expected to earn, in cash, that year.
As we noted at the time, we had “rarely (and maybe never) seen such a high-quality business trading for such incredibly low prices, relative to earnings.”
So in June 2022, we recommended readers buy shares of Hovnanian at a price of $42.79…
Then, just a few months later, mortgage rates rose above 6%, and Hovananian shares – trading as much as 25% above our recommendation price – dropped. We panicked, and on September 29, 2022, we recommended readers sell Hovnanian for a 14.7% loss.
Shares would ultimately bottom less than one month later, and absolutely soar over the next two years. If we had simply held on to HOV shares, we would have been up more than 220%.
But we had not held onto shares, so, instead, we waited…
Earlier this year, through a combination of inflated housing prices and high mortgage rates, homebuyers withdrew from the market. And for the first time in two years, average home prices across the U.S. declined. This caused homebuilders like Hovnanian to cut prices to move inventory, reducing margins. This sent shares of Hovnanian down from $240 in August 2024 to just over $100 in March 2025.
On March 12, Porter detailed the Hovnanian story in the Daily Journal.
The bullish thesis was simple: the company was undergoing a transformation, but traded at 3x earnings… well below other homebuilders.
The shares proceeded to rally by 60% from that March issue of the Daily Journal to a high of $160 by September. (In May, we officially recommended Hovnanian in Complete Investor, where it’s just above its “buy up to” price.)
And while the stock market looks vulnerable to a potential bear market that could coincide with an upcoming recession, we don’t believe in trying to trade around such a forecast. For patient investors willing to buy and hold for the next three to five years, we believe market-beating returns are not only possible but likely.
Silver and gold were the best-performing assets in the world last year – and Porter began alerting readers in the Daily Journal about the two precious metals more than a year ago.
Numerous times in the summer and fall of 2024, Porter reported that central banks around the world were loading up on gold – and driving the price higher. And that trend would only continue, he explained. Then, in an October 2024 Daily Journal, Porter wrote…
The U.S.-dollar based price of gold hit another all-time high, of $2,740 per ounce on Friday – driven by central bank buying, falling interest rates, and a steadily rising distrust in the U.S. dollar.”
Shortly after that, also in October 2024, Porter reported in the Journal that although the price of gold had been surging, silver had not kept pace. He noted how the gold-to-silver price ratio indicated that the white metal had become extremely undervalued, and he predicted a breakout year ahead:
Look for silver to be one of the best-performing commodities of 2025.”
The price of silver ended 2025 with a gain of about 140%, while gold gained around 70%. The key drivers of the precious metals bull market – runaway deficit spending and monetary expansion globally – remain firmly intact as we enter 2026.
Finally, in April of this year, Porter offered one of his long-time convictions of investing. He wrote in the Journal:
For investors with an appropriate time horizon and who have the emotional fortitude to sit quietly through volatility, my best advice is simply to ignore all macroeconomic risks.”
He explained that to maximize future returns, buy great businesses when you can acquire them for substantially less than their intrinsic value. Market prices are highly influenced by sentiment and interest rates and rarely match intrinsic value.
An example he used to demonstrate that message is the French liquor producer Rémy Cointreau (OTC: REMYY). He wrote…
Since a peak of around $24 per share in 2021, the stock has fallen by more than 80%. Many spirits makers have seen their shares fall because there’s a belief that more and more people are going to abstain from alcohol… People have been enjoying fine cognac and other fine wines from France for all of recorded human history. I’ll take the “over” on people continuing to do that. I suspect that, in another decade, tariffs will have come and gone. And more people around the world will value Rémy Cointreau’s ultra-premium cognac. Meanwhile, today, Rémy Cointreau is the cheapest high-quality business I’ve ever seen in my career.
The stock is cheap, by just about any metric. It’s trading at 1.16x its book value, meaning, you’re buying the company for the value of its underlying assets. Rémy holds roughly 2 billion euro worth of inventory, against a market cap of 2.4 billion euro. That means you’re getting its earnings, its brands, its global distribution, and all its intellectual property more or less for free.”
Shares of Rémy Cointreau soared 61% over the next four months. They have since given back much of those gains – losses driven by struggles that nearly all spirits brands are feeling… But while we have not yet recommended shares of Rémy Cointreau in Complete Investor, Porter is taking his own advice “to ignore all macroeconomic risks,” and he continues to hold Rémy in his personal portfolio.
If you’re not yet a Complete Investor subscriber, you can get full access to our recommended portfolio, past archives, links to Indexes, and our monthly Porter & Co. Roundtable right here.
Porter & Co.
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