Some Good Advice From 2025

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…