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.

Editor’s note: Starting tomorrow, we will be changing up our normal publishing schedule… and kicking off our “12 Days Of Christmas” series.

Better than a long lead-up to 12 drummers drumming, 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, we will dish out key lessons from 2025… some earned from pain and others from gain.

We will be back with our regular mix of insights, analysis, and wit in the new year… on Monday, January 5.

Last week, we did something few businesses make part of their annual practice…

We looked back at how we did in our investment recommendations. And not in a way that highlights the winners and hides the losers. No. We took an unflinching look at the past 12 months and detailed, yes, our winners, but also where we fell short, and what we can learn from those ups and downs.

Porter has been handing out Report Cards to his analysts for more than 20 years. This December, he issued Report Cards for Porter & Co. – starting with our flagship publication, Complete Investor (formerly The Big Secret On Wall Street). Complete Investor received a B+ for the year… good, but could be better, Porter said.

Porter heaped more praise on Marty Fridson’s Distressed Investing and Erez Kalir’s Tech Frontiers, which we launched in January 2024 as Biotech Frontiers. Both earned an A+.

Of course, Porter looked at everything else we publish: The Trading Club: an A, the Partner-only advisory Asymmetry: B+, our Best Buys: A+, and Porter’s Permanent Portfolio: an A+.

Porter had this to say about the overall 2025 performance:

Yes, the team has been on an absolute tear lately, but, we must point out that it has been an incredible bull market, especially in biotech, especially in high-quality growth stocks, and even oddly in corporate credit.

Starting tomorrow, we will pull lessons learned from our year of investing in 2025, with a series we are calling the “12 Days Of Christmas.” Rather than sing you a song, we will dig deep into a trade – or non-trade – made in one of our publications… offering insights into what made it successful or extracting a lesson as to why it did not work out.

We will look at the different strategies employed that led to higher returns… for instance, how Marty Fridson in Distressed Investing looks at both bonds and shares of a distressed company to find winners. Erez Kalir will explain the importance of position sizing when purchasing biotech companies as a way to manage risk in his Tech Frontiers advisory. Ross Hendricks looks at a key call that has helped The Trading Club portfolio jump off to a good start. We will look at how our team does preliminary research to sort through the thousands of publicly traded companies out there to just a handful of potential investment recommendations.

And just as important as getting the right picks is holding on to winners by not selling too soon. We will explore an asymmetric pick that couldn’t go wrong… until it did. We also look at one that got away in our Complete Investor publication…

We kick that off tomorrow and continue it every weekday (except Christmas) until January 5, when we return to our regular publishing schedule.

That regular schedule for 2026 holds even more for our subscribers than we have provided over the last three years…

Since we launched Porter & Co. in 2022 with The Big Secret On Wall Street, we’ve created a vast amount of research – we have made about 100 recommendations, with more than 40 that are active right now. On top of that, we have Porter’s Daily Journal, our free newsletter, which publishes during the week as well as on the weekend.

Part of the weekend Journal is Sunday Investment Chronicles – a digest of everything the team has read over the prior week. And there is also the Saturday Stock Screen, which is very popular with readers – and has become a great way to feed the formal recommendations in our other publications. In that Saturday Screen, we look at thousands of publicly traded businesses and run them through one of four proprietary screens or filters to produce a dozen or so companies that readers can then explore on their own. It’s one of the most useful things that we do.

And, of course, there is Porter’s Permanent Portfolio. Our Permanent Portfolio returned 24.8% versus a return of 17% for the S&P 500. And here’s what’s key: despite tariff turmoil and other market shocks, it has done so with less than half the volatility (0.44 beta) of the S&P 500 (which by definition has a beta of 1.0).

The cornerstone of our research, of course, is our flagship publication, Complete Investor (formerly The Big Secret on Wall Street). It features Porter’s signature capital efficient recommendations, along with his take-no-prisoners commentary. Without a doubt, this advisory is the one that’s impacted the greatest number of our readers over the past three years – with hundreds of letters pouring in every week saying that our recommendations have changed their lives.

With our recent name update to Complete Investor, we’ve also added a suite of proprietary investing tools that we believe will bring our readers even more wealth in 2026.

Complete Investor offers a series of indexes that mimic similar indexes (Better Than Berkshire, for example), that help generate better returns in certain sectors of the market (The Lindy Index), or that capture the performance of one sector (P&C Insurance Stocks)…

Porter shows readers how to construct the legendary “set it and forget it” Permanent Portfolio that he uses to manage his own investments…

Porter and the editorial team also record and share a vibrant monthly Roundtable discussion with those who compile Complete Investor…

And our monthly Best Buys feature serves up the three best holdings in the portfolio that are at a particularly good buy price compared to others…

As time goes on, we will likely add even more features to Complete Investor… because, after a quarter-century of adventures in finance, this advisory has turned out to be Porter’s life work.

Complete Investor is the culmination of everything Porter has done and learned in his nearly three decades as a financial publisher. For paid-up subscribers, there is so much in store for you in 2026 – to make you a better investor, to make you a complete investor, and to make you a much wealthier investor.

For those who are not yet a paid-up subscriber, we hope you will join Porter and his entire team for a very exciting journey in 2026.

Presented by Paradigm Press*

Mining stocks have already handed investors astounding returns throughout 2025 — like 523% on Goldgroup Mining…294% on Avino Silver & Gold Mines… and 509% on Helius Minerals…

But when the “Trump Catalyst” launches into effect, what we see next could be up to 50X bigger.

Editor’s Note: This post is sponsored by our friends at Paradigm Press. We only accept advertising from publishers we know to offer well-researched ideas vetted by a legal team, excellent customer service, and reasonable refund policies.

We do not, however, make any representations about their investment ideas, nor will we warrant them as equal to our own.

Porter & Co. also may disagree with the ideas presented by our sponsors but we understand there’s more than one way to skin a cat. With that said, you can check out what Jim is predicting by clicking here.

1. Private credit defaults continue. The private credit default rate rose to 5.7% on a trailing 12-month basis – the highest level in nine months. Fitch recorded 13 default events in November, more than double the year-to-date monthly average of 5.5. Fitch’s numbers show that distress is being deferred rather than resolved, as borrowers rely on balance-sheet engineering to avoid immediate cash defaults – meaning more actual cash defaults are still to come.

2. An historic extreme in mid-caps. U.S. mid-cap stocks – defined as those with a market capitalization between $2 billion and $10 billion – are currently trading at a forward price-to-earnings (“P/E”) ratio of 15 versus 22 for large-cap stocks. As the chart below highlights, this is their cheapest relative valuation in history, below even the peak of the dot-com bubble. While this type of extreme isn’t a short-term timing signal, it does suggest mid-caps should significantly outperform large-caps over the next several years.

3. Homebuilders slash prices. While official data show U.S. home prices hovering near record highs, America’s homebuilders tell a different story. In response to weak demand, companies like Lennar (LEN) – America’s number-two homebuilder – are offering record amounts of incentives to move inventory. Factoring in these incentives as de facto price reductions, Lennar has cut prices 27% since the pandemic-era peak. Unlike existing homeowners who can take their properties off the market if they don’t get their price (which they’ve done in record numbers this year), builders are forced to move inventory. Thus, the effective prices reported by builders like Lennar provide a more real time view of actual prices buyers are willing to pay.

Tell me what you think: [email protected]

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 our Customer Care team at 888-610-8895 or internationally at +1 443-815-4447.