Inside today’s Daily Journal…

Editor’s note: After visiting Emmet Savage in Ireland a few weeks ago, Porter was so impressed that he is turning the Daily Journal over to him today – Emmet is chief investor and co-founder of the research firm MyWallSt. He has been involved in the stock market for more than two decades, with an independently proven annual return in excess of 24% for the last decade – more than triple what the S&P 500 returned. Emmet has previously written for The Motley Fool and has been included in the Irish America magazine’s “Top 50 On Wall Street” list… twice!

Here’s Emmet…

There is a particular kind of pain that only investors know.

It is not the pain of losing money. That stings, but it fades. The pain I am talking about is more corrosive: it’s the pain of missing out. A company you noticed, early, when it was still small and unknown and promising. And then you did nothing about it. You watched it for years while other people got rich. That is the one that got away – because you just weren’t sure.

I have spent decades thinking about what separates the companies that become extraordinary from the ones that become merely fine. The quality of the business model matters. The size of the addressable market matters. Financials matter.

But none of those things, individually or together, fully explain why some companies create wealth for decades while others plateau, stumble, and disappoint.

The differentiator, in my experience, is almost always the person at the top.

In the late 1990s, a management researcher named Jim Collins looked at all the companies that had underperformed the market for 15 years and then dramatically reversed course. After his analysis, he set out to answer a deceptively simple question: What did they have in common?

He studied 1,435 Fortune 500 companies. Only 11 of those had a leader that Collins called “Level 5.”

Level 5 leaders are not the charismatic visionaries that grace magazine covers. They are, if anything, the opposite. They are deeply humble. Personally modest to the point of deflecting attention. And yet they are ferociously, almost frighteningly resolute when it comes to the long-term health of the businesses they run.

Collins described it as a “paradoxical combination” of intense professional will with deep personal humility. These people set up successors for even greater greatness than their own. They are intolerant of mediocrity, and they are relentless in their resolve to build something that lasts.

Take Darwin Smith, who ran Kimberly-Clark (KMB) for 20 years. He was, by all accounts, shy, self-conscious, and almost allergic to public attention. He refused to put his photograph in the annual report. He spent his summers on a farm in Wisconsin. And over two decades, he turned Kimberly-Clark from a lagging paper company into one that hammered the S&P 500 by relentlessly removing everything that wasn’t working and investing in everything that was.

The lesson: when you find these leaders, you invest in them. Because they will see their companies through decades of market-beating returns not by being the loudest voice in the room, but by never, ever letting up.

We at MyWallSt have been building the Nova portfolio for months – 13 companies, 13 conviction positions.

Nova is a collection of high-alpha U.S. stocks that we believe will outperform the market. It is built on a singular, proven conviction: owning a small number of exceptional companies for the long term reduces stress and creates life-changing wealth. It is a high-conviction portfolio, meticulously balanced to anchor and grow your capital.

Here is the general breakdown of how we select them:

And I want to be honest with you about something. When we look back at this list, really look back at it, with the benefit of years rather than quarters, I believe a handful of these names will be remembered the way we now think of the early shareholders of Walmart (WMT), or Johnson & Johnson (JNJ), or the companies that seemed unremarkable until they suddenly weren’t unremarkable.

I cannot tell you which ones. That would take away the pleasure of finding out together.

What I can tell you is this: several of the leaders running the companies in this portfolio show, in our assessment, unmistakable signs of Level 5 leadership.

One is a founder who still runs the business he built from nothing over three decades ago, owns a substantial personal stake, and has spent his career refusing to chase volume at the expense of quality, even when the market would have rewarded him handsomely for doing so. He is not famous. He does not appear on panels or give keynote speeches. He just compiles one of the most remarkable operating records in his industry, year after year, without much fanfare.

Another is a surgeon who looked at a broken system, decided to fix it himself, and has spent 25 years building the infrastructure to do exactly that. His personal stake is meaningful, and the business he has built has no real precedent. It is genuinely changing the odds of survival for patients who otherwise would not make it.

A third built an entire company to solve a problem that the industry had accepted as permanent. He is a technical founder who lives inside the details, refuses to compromise on reliability, and has consistently delivered on milestones that his more famous competitors have repeatedly missed.

There are others. And across this portfolio, the recurring pattern is founders and long-tenured operators who have skin in the game, who have resisted the easy path, and who are building for a horizon that most investors are not even looking at yet.

Markets are volatile, the news cycle is exhausting, and there is always a reason to wait.

But the investors who caught the ones that got away did not wait for a clear signal. They made a decision before the Wall Street analysts did, before the mainstream press caught on, before the stock had already done most of its best work.

The 13 companies in Nova are not all household names. Some of them are barely known outside their own industries. A few are not yet profitable. One or two are genuinely early-stage, the kind of early-stage where most investors won’t look because the numbers aren’t yet tidy enough.

That is precisely why we are here.

All 13 names are available to Nova members now.

The window does not stay open forever, and the companies that have Level 5 leaders at the helm are the ones I would most hate to regret having missed.

And for those who are wondering… Jim Collins, that management researcher who found the small handful of winners among the 1,435 Fortune 500 companies, was clearly on to something – proving his theory in his best-selling book Good To Great, which is on the short list of must-reads for any business-minded person.

Happy investing,

Emmet Savage
MyWallSt.

Porter recently sat down with Emmet and one thing Emmet reveals is that he’s found his next 100-bagger. A U.S.-listed stock that he says could be the next Tesla, Nvidia, or Netflix… He adds: “and I’m personally going in very heavily with my own money.”

In Porter’s interview with Emmet, you’ll discover more about this under-the-radar company that’s applying AI to an archaic industry that’s refused to adapt to the times.

Go here now to see Porter and Emmet’s conversation before it’s too late.

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