Editor’s note: Today, Porter turns the Journal over to Matt Tuttle, CEO of Tuttle Capital Management and portfolio manager of the Porter & Company Porter Portfolio Index ETF (PCPP).

In late 2021, betting against Cathie Wood felt about as smart as betting on rain in San Diego.

Wood’s ARK Innovation ETF (ARKK) had returned 153% in 2020, against roughly 18% for the S&P 500, and the press had decided that she was the next Warren Buffett.

But the returns were the story, not the holdings. In my view, ARKK held the opposite of what I look for in an investment: the fund was full of richly valued companies with limited cash generation, and its shareholder base had mostly bought after the sharp runup in prices.

So I built a fund, the Tuttle Capital Short Innovation ETF (SARK), which sought the inverse of ARKK’s daily return through a swap agreement. That is – as ARKK fell (which I was pretty sure would happen before long), SARK would rise.

My fund found an audience quickly. Wood had a loyal following that took the fund personally – and I heard from a lot of them. Their catcalls, though, didn’t change what was in her portfolio.

In a similar vein… Porter Stansberry had spent years making an unpopular argument of his own: that the dollar was being eroded, that the deficit arithmetic didn’t work, and that the “safe” asset sitting in every retirement account had quietly become one of the riskiest things a person could own.

He’d built a portfolio around it. What he needed was someone who could turn that into an index and then leave it alone, even if it might look foolish in any given quarter.

And that’s how our fund, the Porter & Company Porter Portfolio Index ETF (ticker symbol PCPP), came about.

The index holds not one, but four generally unfashionable positions:

I’ll come back to how those fit together. First, though… why I think being unpopular is worth something.