The Great Portfolio Experiment

The Blueprint And The Results As It Enters Its Second Year

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.

Today – taking a break from our normal publishing schedule – we are continuing our “12 Days Of Christmas” series.

Better than six geese a-layin’ and seven swans a-swimming, Porter & Co.’s version of the “12 Days Of Christmas” brings you something actually useful: hard-earned investment lessons to guide you through 2026. For the remainder of the year – in place of our regular research and insights – we will dish 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 Tuesday, December 23, and extending through January 2, we will reveal a pivotal lesson – about why a stock soared to double-digit returns, or why one languished. We will also explore the ones that got away – that we sold too soon or that we didn’t recommend at all. 

Today, we take some lessons from the remarkable success of Porter’s Permanent Portfolio, which has way outperformed Porter’s expectations… both in its overall return and in its low level of risk compared to the market. 

You can outperform the market and take on less risk.

For years, Porter has been working on a method of asset allocation to do just that, and in 2024, he put all the pieces together – and now the experiment is complete. Today, we explain the process… and the results.

In September 2024, at the second Porter & Co. Annual Conference, Porter unveiled what we call Porter’s Permanent Portfolio. 

It’s been exceptional, performing exactly as it was designed to… and better that it was expected to. Great returns – with far lower volatility than the broader market. The beauty of this portfolio is that it is built to weather all the chaos out there. And that makes sense, because Porter didn’t build Porter’s Permanent Portfolio to be clever… He built it so your future doesn’t depend on good stock picking. No drama, no big risks – just steady and relentless progress.

Porter’s goal with Porter’s Permanent Portfolio was to improve on Harry Browne’s Permanent Portfolio – which was later adopted by legendary investor Ray Dalio at his firm Bridgewater Associates. 

Browne was an author and an investor who wrote an incredible book that had a profound impact on Porter: How I Found Freedom In An Unfree World. Browne’s Permanent Portfolio is a way of investing where you don’t have to trade, and you don’t have to follow the news or worry about the future. The portfolio is structured in a way that makes it difficult to lose money, no matter what happens to the economy, or to individual stocks.

In the late 1980s, Dalio put Browne’s ideas into practice. These ideas, and the consistent, low-volatility results they achieved, helped Bridgewater become the world’s largest hedge fund, managing more than $100 billion.

Harry Browne’s core idea – later mimicked by Dalio – is deceptively simple. He suggested a four-part portfolio: 25% in stocks, 25% in bonds, 25% in gold, and 25% in cash.

But Porter wanted something for his Partners and subscribers that was better than that.