Editor's note: Today, I'm sharing the most important thing we publish all year.
At Stansberry Research, we provide our subscribers with all the financial research they need... including specific, actionable ideas for them to put to work in their portfolio.
And we hold ourselves to account. Each year, we publish a series of public "Report Cards" for our paid services. Some will get A grades. And at times, others get an F. We're honest, open, and transparent. We publish our investment results and share what went right... and what went wrong.
It's the only way to make sure our subscribers are treated fairly. And it's the way we'd want to be treated if our roles were reversed.
So today, I'm sharing our 2025 annual Report Card with readers of This Week on Wall Street as well...
Our 20th Annual Report Card
It was the only time in my life I thought I'd have to sleep on the street.
And it came at the end of a real heater.
It was 2003, and I (Stansberry Research Publisher Matt Weinschenk) was a college junior. And the poker boom was in full swing.
When Chris Moneymaker (yes, his real name) turned $86 into $2.5 million by winning the World Series of Poker, the game exploded in popularity.
ESPN had hours of poker coverage. Online sites offered round-the-clock play for real money.
And I spent multiple nights each week at lopsided card tables in messy dorm rooms grinding out hundreds of dollars at a time.
Then I got invited to Atlantic City...
A friend's family was spending the weekend in New Jersey's gambling mecca. They offered me a place to stay. I just needed to get there.
On campus at the University of Pittsburgh, the pots usually reached $200... maybe $300. In Atlantic City, you could make real money. And it was just six hours away.
My poker buddy Donnie and I didn't have a car that could get us there. But we ran the numbers. We could hit three local games before the weekend. If we won all three and pooled our money, we could scrounge up enough cash for a rental car and the entry fee for a poker tournament.
Were poker purely a matter of luck, we'd have had a 0.8% chance of taking all three games. But it's not. I knew I was good. And I was counting on my skill to make the difference.
Together, Donnie and I netted three wins, a couple second-place finishes, and $600.
Then we drove to Atlantic City... jumped into the tournament... and, five hours later, came out with more than $4,000. I'd won.
This isn't a story about how I'm a poker genius. Sure, I thought I was one at the time...
Actually, Donnie and I were complete idiots...
First, just before the tournament began, we got a call from our friend. He wasn't coming to Atlantic City after all.
There went our free place to stay.
The Tropicana wanted $500 for a last-minute room. That wasn't going to happen. And we had no backup plan.
We entered the tournament with our minds on our sleeping arrangements, not on our games. That's no way to play poker.
And then it got worse... Every other player at the table immediately did their damnedest to lose.
You see, this $100 tournament had a "rebuy" policy. If you had a single chip less than your original stack, you could rebuy in for another $100 and get a second stack.
All the Atlantic City old-timers knew this strategy. And they used it to double their might at the poker table.
Donnie and I weren't prepared for this. We were sitting behind stacks half the size of the other hundreds of players'. This meant we were extreme long shots.
On top of that, when I mentally reviewed my hands afterward, I realized I'd made a lot of mistakes.
Once, I had all my money in on a 4-to-1 shot... and won with a lucky card. Another lucky draw delivered a win on a 20-to-1 shot.
I'd done everything wrong... from dicey plays, to failing to prepare for the "rebuy" policy, to planning our trip without enough extra funds in reserve.
Other players did everything right, and I still beat them.
But was I any good, or just lucky?
I was good... I was a sharp poker player with a lot of wins under my belt.
But I wasn't as good as I thought. If I hadn't gotten just the right cards at just the right time, I'd have ended up like the rest of the losers.
Most sports are a mix of luck and skill – but that mix varies a lot...
In basketball, for example, the best team usually wins. Each team gets about 100 possessions per game. Each one can be worth 2 or 3 points. If the better team scores on a higher percentage of possessions, they'll win out over time.
In football, luck plays a bigger role. The ball bounces in weird ways. And a single fumble or dropped pass can mean a seven-point difference in a game that averages about 23 points per team.
Researcher Michael Mauboussin demonstrates this mathematically and plots different sports along his Skill-Luck Continuum... ranging from chess (pure skill) to roulette (pure luck).
Mauboussin is a brilliant researcher who has worked at Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse, Legg Mason, and more. He shared this Skill-Luck Continuum in his book The Success Equation: Untangling Skill and Luck in Business, Sports, and Investing.
And investing, which Mauboussin illustrates with a stock chart, is closer to a slot machine than it is to a hockey game...
Well, hold on a minute here...
If investing depends so much on luck, why are we all here working so hard at it?
Well, that's because there still is skill. It matters. And it especially matters over the long term.
Mauboussin concedes...
There is a big difference between saying that the short-term results of investment managers are mostly luck and saying they are all luck... Investing, especially over relatively short periods of time, is more a matter of luck than of skill.
There's more...
Mauboussin's prescription for assessing investing in the presence of luck is this: Focus on process.
If an activity involves luck, then how well you do in the short run doesn't tell you much about your skill, because you can do everything right and still fail, or you can do everything wrong and succeed. For activities near the luck side of the continuum, a good process is the surest path to success in the long run.
He later says...
A good process can lead to a bad outcome some percentage of the time, and a bad process can lead to a good outcome. Since a good process offers the highest probability of a good outcome over time, the emphasis has to be on process.
And he finally ties it directly to investing...
Good process must be well grounded analytically, psychologically, and organizationally. The analytical part requires finding a discrepancy between value and price that gives you an edge... For an investor, it's buying a stream of future cash flows for less than they are worth.
As with poker, basketball, and football, you can work the investing odds to your favor...
You do all your research. Make your best predictions. Carefully manage your risk.
There's still no such thing as a guaranteed return. But by avoiding mistakes, over time, a smart investor will grow their wealth.
That brings us to 2025...
The benchmark S&P 500 Index was up 16% last year. Lots of stocks did even better.
But in the words of economist Humphrey Neill, "Don't confuse brains with a bull market."
Even if you posted big returns last year, you have to ask yourself... were you good... or were you just lucky?
As we open our annual Stansberry Research Report Card, we see a mix of skill and luck in our publications' model portfolios... and in the benchmarks we're comparing them with.
We've been doing our annual Report Card grades for 20 years now. Every year, we evaluate all our newsletters and other services and publish the results.
And to my knowledge, we're the longest-running publisher in the business to follow this path of radical transparency.
This year, I'm taking over for Brett Aitken, who now works for our parent company MarketWise. But I'll treat the Report Card the same way that Brett did... and that our founder Porter Stansberry did before him.
I'll compare the performance of our products' investment recommendations with their respective benchmarks... score the results with a letter grade... explain my analysis... and show the data I used to draw my conclusion.
We perform this review every year because we believe it is important to hold ourselves accountable for our performance.
When you put your money into our editors' investment recommendations, you're giving us a lot of trust. It's essential to us that we earn that trust. When we have phenomenal results to share, we want you to hear about them...
But this is not a marketing exercise or a fluff piece. There are no participation trophies. When one of our editors or services is underperforming, we won't hold back. This isn't a new-age kindergarten where everyone gets an A. Sometimes, one of our newsletters earns an F. And it hurts.
As the publisher of Stansberry Research, it's my job to find and employ skilled investors who can deliver real performance for you when you read their work...
As a subscriber, you want an answer to the simple question...
Is this newsletter I'm reading any good at picking stocks and making me wealthier?
The luck inherent in investing makes the truth of that answer easy to hide.
But we're not going to hide anything in this Report Card.
We won't just show you that we had a great 2025. We'll show you our one-year gains, yes, but also our five-year returns.
Here's what I'm going to do... like we've done for 20 years.
I'm going to grade each and every service from A to F, just like in school. You know what these grades mean.
You'll see the performance numbers that help inform my judgments, but I'll also be reflecting on each product's mandate. For example, a safe portfolio of dividend stocks is there to protect you just as much as it is to earn returns and build wealth. So I might pay more attention to its consistency than its average gain... while doing the opposite with a more aggressive, speculative product.
We publish a lot of research across many newsletters and other services. So I'll be reviewing them in pieces over the next few weeks.
Today, I'm going to focus on our three Portfolio Solutions products. These are fully allocated, built-for-you portfolios that compare directly to market performance.
Two of these portfolios underperformed... There's no other way to address it. It wasn't a good year for them. And I'll show you why.
And then, I'm going to turn to a service with outstanding performance last year... and for many years prior.
I think you'll want to read about this one. Because if you've got any struggles as an investor, be it low returns, lack of time, or confusion, this could be the exact thing you are looking for.
Here is our 2025 Report Card on the Portfolio Solutions...
Now let me explain my grades in detail. I'll start with our two laggards: Stansberry's Forever Portfolio and The Quant Portfolio.
Stansberry's Forever Portfolio: C (1-year), B (5-year)
The Quant Portfolio: C (1-year), B- (since inception, June 2023)
I'm not here to sugarcoat it. Stansberry's Forever Portfolio and The Quant Portfolio both underperformed last year.
And even though they are very different products, both their portfolios underperformed for the exact same reason.
Stansberry's Forever Portfolio is made up of "forever stocks." These are household names and other high-quality businesses that we believe you can buy now and never sell.
When you hear the stories of how people have built true wealth in the stock market, they generally haven't done so by day trading or chasing trends. Rather, they bought iconic companies like Coca-Cola (KO) and Microsoft (MSFT) and held them for decades.
That's the goal of the Forever Portfolio.
However, even forever stocks have down years.
In 2025 (measured since we rebalanced our Portfolio Solutions portfolios in early February), we struggled with holdings like Novo Nordisk (NVO) and Starbucks (SBUX), which declined 36% and 20%, respectively.
And our technology companies hit a rough patch. Salesforce (CRM) fell 21% as it faces a challenge from artificial intelligence. And PayPal (PYPL) fell 35% as all payments stocks had their worst year since the Great Recession.
We had lots of big wins to offset these. Google parent Alphabet (GOOGL) rose 56%, and precious metals giant Franco-Nevada (FNV) rose 52%. We also got market-beating returns from very safe stocks like candymaker Hershey (HSY), up 27%... and insurance companies Travelers (TRV), up 20%, and W.R. Berkley (WRB), up 21%.
Overall, this portfolio made money last year... but not much. It rose 2.7% since February 3, while the benchmark S&P 500 Index jumped 15.4% during that same period. That's why Stansberry's Forever Portfolio scored a C for 2025.
Since its inception in 2020, the Forever Portfolio has compounded at 15.9% per year.
That's great. That's the pace you want to build long-term wealth. And in a down market, these are the kinds of stocks that will protect you.
But it has been such a hot five years for the stock market, we're behind the benchmark S&P 500. So even the Forever Portfolio's five-year performance gets a B in this year's Report Card.
We'll come to the reasons shortly... But let's look at The Quant Portfolio first.
The Quant Portfolio is a selection of stocks identified as great businesses by our proprietary Stansberry Score, combined with a diversification algorithm to maximize returns but also minimize risk. It's completely run by a computer.
This system produced great back-testing results, and subscribers enjoyed a couple years of sterling performance as well.
In 2025, it didn't work.
Last year, The Quant Portfolio was up 4.5%... only slightly better than the Forever Portfolio. And I'm giving it a C as well.
The two portfolios lagged for the same reason...
In 2025, investors loved junk stocks.
Remember, both of these portfolios start with high-quality businesses.
After decades of experience, we at Stansberry Research believe that's the best way to invest: Become a partial owner in high-quality businesses with big margins and defensible moats, and do so at a reasonable price.
Over the long term, it works. But it doesn't always work over the short term.
When investors feel frisky... they consider stocks that they know they shouldn't buy. They pile into overvalued shares and businesses with no profits.
In a hot bull market, these junk stocks look attractive as high-leverage ways to get fast returns.
In 2025, the trashy stocks called out to investors and they piled in, leaving quality stocks by the wayside.
The end-of-year Barron's issue sported a cover with a mock sale announcement: "Now on Sale! Quality Stocks, 40% Cheaper."
The investment bank UBS finds that since the beginning of March, low-quality stocks have beaten high-quality stocks by 50 percentage points.
When you have two portfolios based purely on business quality... and no one cares about quality... it's hard to keep up.
But we're keeping the faith.
Think back to Atlantic City in 2003... For a few hours, my lucky poker hands let me skate past my better-prepared rivals. But if I'd put my winnings back onto the table the next day, without upping my game... I'd have gone back to Pittsburgh empty-handed.
Some investors will book last year's gains on their junk stocks. Most of them will still be holding as they crash down.
All the while, the Forever Portfolio and The Quant Portfolio will take the odd outperformance, then get back to grinding out winning years.
These are the questions we need to ask as we manage these portfolios:
- Do good businesses outperform over the long run? Unequivocally, yes. The historical long-term returns prove this out.
- Will this run in low-quality stocks continue forever? Of course not. They soared in the bull market of 2021, only to fall 90% in many instances.
- Will quality stocks soon get their due? Given that the thesis for quality stocks makes so much sense, the long-term performance isn't a fluke. They will reign again.
These answers form many of our core beliefs as investors.
If we didn't have some faith in the power of quality stocks, I'd hit these services with a lower letter grade.
But they are doing what they are supposed to do. They're supposed to hold quality stocks, not chase risky trends. And quality stocks will come back.
If you hold that belief as well, then buckle up and get ready for the Forever Portfolio and The Quant Portfolio to have blistering returns when junk stocks fall to Earth.
Like the Forever Portfolio, The Quant Portfolio has done better over the long term. Since we launched the service in June 2023, it has returned 45.6%.
That trails the S&P 500's 65.5% rise during that same period, so The Quant Portfolio will earn a B- for its long-term performance. But it shows what this portfolio is capable of – without taking on the elevated risk of low-quality or overvalued stocks. These portfolios will rise again.
It could very well happen in 2026. But if it takes a bit longer, we don't mind being patient. We know that we've got a tried-and-true investment philosophy on our side.
Now, let's turn to a portfolio that needs no patience...
The Total Portfolio: A+ (1-year), A (5-year)
The Total Portfolio crushed 2025.
The description of The Total Portfolio is contained almost entirely within the name.
It's a fully allocated, done-for-you portfolio. It's something we want you to be comfortable putting 100% of your wealth into, if you choose.
That means it doesn't contain just stocks. It's balanced.
We separate the portfolio thematically into Get Rich holdings – like growth stocks – and Stay Rich holdings – like gold, insurance companies, water utilities, and bonds.
We want high returns, but we're laser-focused on risk.
As such, we don't benchmark ourselves against the S&P 500, but rather the Vanguard Balanced Index Fund (VBINX). This essentially tracks a "60/40" stock/bond portfolio.
As you see in the performance recap, for 2025, The Total Portfolio beat its benchmark 17.8% to 11.6%. That's an A+ performance.
In other words, if you'd followed our advice, you'd have made 53% more money last year than someone who'd held the Vanguard Balanced Index Fund.
Over five years, we're up 58.2% to 41.5%. Between the size of that gain and its outperformance versus the benchmark, I'm giving The Total Portfolio an A for five-year performance.
And since inception in 2017, we're up 185% versus 123% for the benchmark.
Here's what's most shocking...
Even though we're focused on risk and balance, we also beat the S&P 500's 15.4% rise for 2025 in a major bull market (again, starting in February).
This is the holy grail of investing: a market-beating portfolio with balance and safety.
We do it by putting in a lot of work... on our end.
The Total Portfolio relies on the research done across all our publications. We draw from at least 21 different primary research publications. These are the newsletters you read from our staff of analysts and experts.
Then we convene our Investment Committee, which includes Dr. David "Doc" Eifrig, Whitney Tilson, Brett Eversole, Alan Gula, and me.
Together, we review all these publications and pick the best of the best investments.
More importantly, we work to understand how these investments work together. For every AI stock we include, we offset it with a safer play. We consider the correlations between each, making sure some zig when others zag. And we size each investment according to our conviction.
In other words, we do the real work of turning ideas into a total portfolio... something we don't think anyone else in our industry does to this level.
This is not an easy process. But by the time The Total Portfolio gets to subscribers, it's all in a simple package. Most months, subscribers just have to buy or sell a few stocks.
Even our readers probably don't appreciate the amount of research and collaboration that goes into these portfolios. They just see the returns.
But our debates are intense. We all have strong beliefs about the market. And we don't all agree. The conversations get serious.
We all know and respect each other. I've worked with most of these guys for more than a decade. We wouldn't keep doing it unless we loved it.
And we are all working toward the same goal: better returns for you. And that keeps us on a constructive track toward solving what's really happening in markets.
To give credit where it's due, we rely on Alan Gula to make the final call and turn these debates into a portfolio.
Alan has been investing since he was 14 years old. And he's spent his entire professional life working in the financial markets – first at Goldman Sachs and later at Barclays, where he had a front-row seat to the financial crisis.
Alan understands the modern, complex portfolio math that helps make sense of a couple of dozen positions.
Now, since I'm on the Investment Committee but am also writing this Report Card... am I grading myself? Yes, but that doesn't take away from the validity of the grades. I'm publishing the numbers I used to make my decisions.
I also get input on all the Report Card grades from MarketWise colleagues who don't work for me and aren't directly involved in these publications.
Finally, our annual Report Card has a history of tough self-criticism. Famously, Porter Stansberry once gave himself an F. If The Total Portfolio were flailing, I wouldn't pretend otherwise.
But as the numbers show, the opposite is true for this year's Report Card.
Consider the following points from 2025...
We've been on top of the historic rise in gold and precious metals. In Stansberry's Forever Portfolio, we held Franco-Nevada, which rose 52% last year... topping off a 184% run since we bought it.
We also added Pan American Silver (PAAS) to the portfolio in August, right before silver went on its historic run, earning us 85% in just a few months.
And we made the right calls on AI. Holdings in Alphabet, electrical-engineering firm ABB (ABBNY), and semiconductor-equipment supplier Applied Materials (AMAT) rose 56%, 40%, and 78% respectively, in 2025 alone.
I could go on about gains... But what I really care about is risk.
Do you remember how you felt in April? The international economic order appeared to be falling apart as fresh tariff news rocked the market every day. The S&P 500 fell 19% in a few weeks.
When the markets tanked during the "tariff tantrum," we held 11 positions that rose.
Those included:
- A super-safe water utility
- High-quality insurance companies that are central to Stansberry Research's investment philosophy
- Financial exchanges, which benefit from volatility
- A pawn shop, which benefits when recession threatens
- Top-notch consumer-staples firms
On The Total Portfolio's worst day, it was down less than 5% on the year.
Our focus on diversification and risk management protected our portfolio – making it about half as risky as the S&P 500.
While so many investors focus on returns, limiting risk is how you make money. It's more difficult. And many nonprofessional investors don't have the tools or time to manage their money this way.
But when you have a smaller hole to dig out of in market downturns, you compound your wealth much faster.
Back to our first question... are we any good?
Since The Total Portfolio pulls from all of our research and combines it into one specific product with specific goals and measurable performance... the answer is yes.
Remember Michael Mauboussin's rules. The next bit of proof would be to analyze our process.
On that front, I can only let you decide. And we're doing something special to give you a chance...
On Tuesday morning, we're inviting you inside our Investment Committee meeting.
These debates have always been behind closed doors.
This time, you get to watch it all.
The Investment Committee (plus a special guest) will get together and debate what's happening in Venezuela, how AI will affect energy demand, what Trump means for your portfolio... and more, I'm sure.
To help you get the most out of 2026, I also challenged each of our experts to share their top investment idea for the year.
They'll share those ideas and walk you through their theses.
Everyone is invited. And I know that you'll learn a lot about your own portfolio if you watch.
Click here to sign up for Tuesday's event right now.
As much as January is a time to disclose and review our performance with these Report Cards, it's also time to prepare and plan for 2026 so that you don't get left behind in these rapidly changing markets.
This wraps up the first piece of our annual Report Card...
I'd love to hear what you think. Do you have experience with our Portfolio Solutions products? Would you have chosen different grades?
Let me know at feedback@stansberryresearch.com. We read every letter.
And I'll be back next week as I continue this coverage of our investment performance.
New Research in The Stansberry Investor Suite...
Nicotine is going to be big (again).
Remember the 1950s and 1960s, when everyone smoked? We're about to see something similar.
Not with cigarettes, though. Instead, people will be popping nicotine pouches, gum, lozenges, and other healthier alternatives. (Note: I said "healthier"... but they're still not healthy.)
As I wrote alongside Dr. David "Doc" Eifrig last August...
If you hang around a crowd of young folks, you'll likely see the telltale hockey-puck outline of a Zyn can in men's pockets.
The social activity of "bumming a cigarette" has now become asking for an "upper decky lip pillow."
According to Philip Morris International, an estimated 41.5 million individuals use its smokefree nicotine products... an increase of 5 million from the previous year.
Even those numbers belie the strength of nicotine's rise.
The truth is, nicotine is a powerful chemical. It provides a very specific and pleasurable buzz that has attracted (and hooked) humans as far back as 12,000 years ago.
Young folks were rightly scared of cigarettes as the source of that buzz... yet still want to feel the effects of nicotine. And they're now finding it through these new products.
Consider this your warning... and your opportunity.
This month, Mike DiBiase, on behalf of the Stansberry's Investment Advisory team, runs through our Global Elite Monitor. This is a system that tracks the biggest and most profitable companies in the world. We're talking businesses with impenetrable economics and the most valuable brands.
A lot of tobacco companies qualify as "global elites."
They have big profits, strong brands, and – to put it directly – addicted customers.
And over the years, they've learned how to navigate complex legal and regulatory environments.
In this issue, Mike breaks down some of the most popular "smokeless" products you need to know and the conglomerates that own them. He shows you just how much cash they rake in. And he highlights which tobacco stocks he thinks present the best opportunities in this new world of buzzed addiction.
Stansberry Investor Suite subscribers can read the entire report here.
If you don't already subscribe to The Stansberry Investor Suite – and want to learn more about our special package of research – click here.
Until next week,
Matt Weinschenk
Publisher and Director of Research
What do you think about This Week on Wall Street? Send any and all feedback to thisweek@stansberryresearch.com. We read every e-mail you send in.
