Porter & Co.

Porter StansberryFounder, Porter & Co.

25+

Years of independent financial research

$3B

Valuation of MarketWise at IPO

200K+

Investors reading Porter's free daily journal

Career

From Baltimore
to a $3 Billion
Company

In 1999, Porter Stansberry launched what would become Stansberry Research with a borrowed laptop and $36,000 in seed financing from publisher Bill Bonner. The operation began in a modest Baltimore apartment, where he wrote his first newsletter, initially called the Pirate Investor, and built a subscriber base through the quality and directness of the analysis itself.

The model was simple in concept and difficult in execution: deliver genuinely useful investment research to individual investors who had no access to the same quality of analysis available to institutional clients. That founding principle shaped everything that followed.

Before starting his own firm, Porter had already established a foothold in financial publishing by becoming the first American editor of the Fleet Street Letter, the world's oldest English-language financial newsletter. The role gave him a grounding in the tradition of long-form, independent financial analysis, a tradition he would spend the next two decades expanding.

Over more than twenty years, Stansberry Research grew into one of the largest independent investment research operations in the world. After several acquisitions including Casey Research, Tradestops, and InvestorPlace, Porter created a holding company called MarketWise, which completed a public offering in 2021 at a valuation of approximately $3 billion.

Porter Stansberry departed from MarketWise in 2022 and founded Porter & Co. in April of that year. He left the institutional structure of a public company behind and returned to the model he had started with: a small, editorially-independent team producing research without compliance committees, corporate mandates, or outside investors determining the agenda.

Investment Philosophy

Forever Stocks & Capital Efficiency

At the core of Porter Stansberry's investment approach is a concept he calls "Forever Stocks": businesses so well-constructed that the correct holding period, in his view, is simply forever. These are companies with high free cash flow generation, low capital requirements to sustain and grow their operations, and durable competitive advantages that make them difficult to displace over time.

The concept of capital efficiency sits at the center of his stock selection process. A capital-efficient business is one that can convert a high proportion of its revenues into free cash flow without requiring constant reinvestment just to maintain its competitive position. These businesses generate returns on invested capital that dwarf what they need to keep the lights on, and they return the surplus to shareholders in the form of dividends, buybacks, or further investment in genuinely high-return opportunities.

The contrast he draws is with capital-intensive industries such as airlines, steel producers, and most commodity businesses, where profits are perpetually consumed by the demands of keeping the enterprise operational.

Porter Stansberry has also refined the Permanent Portfolio framework, adapted from the work of Harry Browne. It is a fixed-allocation strategy designed to perform through multiple economic regimes, including growth, recession, inflation, and deflation, without requiring the investor to predict which regime is coming next. The version used in his research has, since its launch, generated returns he reports have nearly doubled the S&P 500's performance over the same period.

Track Record

Notable Market Calls

Porter Stansberry's reputation as an investment analyst rests substantially on a series of documented macro and company-level calls made ahead of major market dislocations.

2006–2008

Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac & General Motors

Stansberry publicly predicted that all three institutions would fail. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were placed into government conservatorship in September 2008; General Motors filed for bankruptcy in 2009.
2008

General Growth Properties

In late 2008, Stansberry warned that General Growth Properties, at the time the largest mall owner in the United States, was headed for bankruptcy. General Growth Properties filed for Chapter 11 in April 2009, in what was then one of the largest real estate bankruptcies in American history.
2008

Financial Crisis Positioning

Stansberry published explicit warnings about the stability of major financial institutions and the broader credit market while much of the financial media remained constructive. His subscribers were positioned for the downturn well before it became consensus.
2010

End of America

Stansberry published a widely circulated presentation arguing that the U.S. dollar's reserve currency status was at risk, that the government's debt trajectory was unsustainable, and that the social and political instability following the 2008 bailouts would be more severe and lasting than mainstream forecasters expected. He has since revisited and defended its core arguments on multiple occasions as the underlying debt dynamics have continued to worsen.
Ongoing

Corporate Bonds & Capital-Efficient Energy

Stansberry has been an early and consistent advocate for investment-grade and high-yield corporate bonds as an asset class underappreciated by individual investors, and for capital-efficient energy businesses over broad index exposure. He has argued that the energy transition narrative has obscured the durable cash flow generation of well-run traditional energy companies operating within their means.

Books

Porter's Most Important Arguments, in Full

I've spent my career writing about the financial forces shaping America, first in my research letters, and now in two books that lay out my most important arguments in full.

New Release

2029: The End of America

Why The Age Of Paper Money Is Ending And How To Survive The Coming Global Monetary Reset

I first published “The End of America” in 2010, a warning that the era of paper money would end in a currency crisis. Sixteen years later, the math has only gotten harder to ignore. This book is the complete, updated argument, and for the first time it carries a date.

The mechanism isn't a recession or a market crash. It's a math problem baked into the largest entitlement program in the U.S. government. The Social Security trust funds, under realistic assumptions, run dry around 2029. When they do, federal law triggers an automatic benefit cut with no political mechanism to stop it. That's the countdown.

The book explains why the age of paper money is ending and exactly how to protect your savings ahead of the reset through gold, bitcoin, and patient capital.

Get it on Amazon

Also available on Audible.

Investment Lessons

Warren's Mistakes

I spent more than a decade writing this book. It tracks all of Warren Buffett's biggest investment mistakes and shows you exactly how to avoid making them yourself.

Buffett built the greatest investment machine in history. He funded it with insurance float, picked consistently winning stocks, and compounded capital for decades. Then he slowly lost his edge, moving away from buying the best publicly traded companies and taking entire businesses private instead. The book shows you exactly how the machine worked, and exactly how he broke it.

There's no better way to learn how to become a great investor than by studying the mistakes of the greatest investor who ever lived.

Get it on Amazon

Also available on Audible.

Porter & Co.

Built to Last, Built to Be Small

Porter & Co. was founded in April 2022, shortly after Porter Stansberry's departure from MarketWise. The firm operates out of a renovated barn, a deliberate contrast with the corporate infrastructure of a public company, and is staffed by a small team of analysts, many of whom have worked with Stansberry for ten to fifteen years.

The structure is intentional: small enough to move quickly, independent enough to publish without institutional interference, and staffed by people whose investment judgment has been tested across multiple market cycles alongside his own.

The flagship publication is Complete Investor, a monthly research letter focused on "unbeatable businesses" meeting his capital efficiency criteria. Subscribers also receive access to Porter's Permanent Portfolio, proprietary indexes including the Better than Buffett index, a monthly video roundtable, and more.

Beyond Complete Investor, Porter & Co. publishes Porter's Daily Journal, a free, regular commentary from Stansberry on markets, macro conditions, business analysis, and the occasional digression into the broader economic and political landscape.

Current Work

Where Porter's Focus Is Today

Porter Stansberry's current publishing outlets, the Complete Investor and Porter's Daily Journal, reflect a consistent skepticism about the reliability of the U.S. government to protect its citizens from a decline of the dollar and quality of living.

Porter has also questioned the durability of the artificial intelligence investment cycle. He has argued that the AI build-out shares structural characteristics with the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s: genuine technological transformation accompanied by capital allocation that has outpaced any reasonable near-term earnings justification.

His focus remains on the credit cycle, where he sees systemic risks that most equity-focused investors are underweighting, and on capital-efficient energy businesses, which he views as structurally cheap relative to their long-term cash generation capacity. Distressed debt opportunities also remain within his analytical scope, consistent with a career-long interest in the fixed-income market as a source of returns that individual investors frequently overlook.

Follow Porter

Read His Current Research

Monthly Research Letter

Complete Investor

Each monthly issue covers a primary stock recommendation along with full portfolio analysis and Stansberry's macro commentary. Subscribers also receive access to the Permanent Portfolio, proprietary indexes, and a monthly video roundtable.

Learn More →

Free Daily Commentary

Porter's Daily Journal

A fantastic free resource for direct, frequent access to Porter's views on markets and specific businesses. Does not contain specific investment recommendations, but reflects his commitment to independent, unfiltered financial analysis.

Read For Free →