Our Annual Report Card for 2024

An unlikely investing legend... 'How I made $2 million in the stock market'... The Hungarian dancer's legacy... A strategy our subscribers know well... Kicking off our 19th annual Report Card...

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Nicolas Darvas was the toast of New York City's Latin Quarter, when the dancer got a gig that would change his life...

Born in Budapest in 1920, Darvas fled Hungary ahead of the Nazis when he was 23. He eventually found his way to America, where he launched is dance career with his half-sister Julia.

By 1952, the team was starring in the nightclubs of Manhattan, when his agent called with an offer...

A pair of Toronto nightclub owners wanted to book the dance team. But they didn't have the cash to pay them. Instead, the offered to pay them in stock... specifically, 6,000 shares of a Canadian mining company called Brilund.

"I have had some strange experiences in show business," Darvas later wrote, "but this was a new one."

Darvas initially accepted the job. When he later had to cancel the date, he offered to buy the shares as a goodwill gesture.

He paid $0.50 a share, a $3,000 investment, and promptly forgot about it. That is until two months later, when he was idly thumbing through a newspaper and checked the stock price. Brilund was selling for $1.90 a share – up 280% in a couple months. Darvas immediately sold his stock, booking an $8,000 winner.

"At first, I could not believe it. It was like magic to me," Darvas recalled in his 1960 memoir. "I decided I had been missing a good thing all my life. I made up my mind to go into the stock market."

And just like that, one of the 20th century's most unlikely investing legends was born...

At first, Darvas faced one problem: He knew virtually nothing about stocks...

By his own admission, he didn't even know there was an exchange in New York.

But like so many new investors, he didn't let his ignorance stop him. He dove in, scooping up shares of whatever hot tip he came across... And he lost thousands of dollars.

Darvas persisted and began educating himself slowly over six years. He tried focusing on the stocks' fundamentals – finding the strongest stocks in the strongest industries. That yielded some successes, but also a near-disastrous loss.

He then began looking for stocks with momentum on their side, ones that seemed to be in a steady uptrend. That yielded even more success...

Eventually, he saw that stocks that resisted downtrends the best and rebounded fastest were those with growing earnings. So Darvas married his technical and fundamental approaches.

"I would select stocks on their technical action in the market," he wrote, "but I would only buy them when I could give improving earning power as my fundamental reason for doing so."

Darvas dubbed his formula 'techno-fundamentalism'...

He sought out companies that were innovating products that could grow earnings over decades. He would then bide his time until he saw those stocks entering an uptrend.

While touring Asia in 1957 with his dance troupe, he began putting his system to work. Darvas was in Saigon when the nightly wires he received from his U.S. broker showed a breakout in shares of Lorillard, a cigarette maker experimenting with a new filter tip. He bought in.

Later, from Tokyo, he saw an opportunity to invest in Diners Club, the pioneering credit-card company...

By April 1958, he was up more than $31,000 on the two stocks when the price action in hardwood-flooring firm E.L. Bruce caught his attention. From his tour stop in Hong Kong, he sold his Lorillard and Diners Club shares and began buying E.L. Bruce...

The Memphis flooring company's shares exploded from a little more than $50 a share to more than $100. In a little less than a year, Darvas – who was never afraid to juice his earnings by trading on margin – had made more than $295,000.

Those trades kicked off an 18-month run that generated more than $2 million... and inspired his memoir's title, How I Made $2 Million in the Stock Market.

Darvas' investing success combined with his renown as a dancer to make him a minor celebrity...

He toured with Bob Hope and Judy Garland. And in May 1959, he scored a profile in Time magazine...

The lights go low at Manhattan's garish Latin Quarter nightclub. Onto the stage glides a slim-hipped, broad-shouldered man in white tie and tails. He grasps his partner, a stunning redhead in black tights, whirls her over his head on one arm, hurls her dramatically in a split-legged fall to the floor... What the tired businessmen watching the show do not realize is that [Darvas] is a better moneyman than most of them.

"In my dancing I know how to judge an audience," Darvas told the interviewer. "It is instinctive. The same way with the stock market. You have to find out what the public wants and go along with it. You can't fight the tape, or the public."

Darvas' system inspired many later investors, including legendary momentum trader William O'Neil.

O'Neil developed his own CANSLIM trading system that defined seven fundamental and technical traits of good investments... Using his technical-fundamental approach led O'Neil to average annual gains of 40% over one 10-year period.

I (Brett Aitken) was reminded of Darvas' legacy while constructing this year's 19th annual Report Card...

Every year, we evaluate our newsletters and other services and publish the results. As always, I compare the performance of our products' 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.

During our team's review of this performance, we noted that some of our best work recently has come from services that fuse elements of technical analysis with classic fundamental research.

Take True Wealth Systems, for example, which editor Brett Eversole built with our founding partner Steve Sjuggerud to quantify Steve's investing strategies.

Longtime Stansberry subscribers know Steve's three-step investing philosophy: Buy stocks that are cheap, hated, and in an uptrend... As you'll see, Brett has carried True Wealth Systems forward with exceptional results.

And Nicolas Darvas would surely approve.

Similarly, I hope you'll take a look at our Stansberry Score. It's another tool we developed in recent years to quantify our strategies for assessing value, business quality, and momentum that will yield a single grade for any individual stock. Again, marrying technical and fundamental analysis has resulted in a powerful tool. Subscribers can find a stock's Stansberry Score by searching for its name or ticker symbol on our website.

Before I get to this year's grades, a reminder...

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 it... But when one of our editors or services is underperforming, we won't hold back about that, either.

As you'll see, in today's Digest, we're reviewing our Portfolio Solutions products and our system and trading services. We'll complete our Report Card with a review of the rest of our monthly newsletters next week.

For the portfolios and trading services, we're grading one- and five-year track records. As always, the grade is mine alone as the publisher of Stansberry Research. If you don't agree with my grade... that's fine. We are providing you with all the numbers. You can make your own assessment. And you're always welcome to share your thoughts at feedback@stansberryresearch.com. I truly look forward to hearing from you. And now...

On to the grades.

Let's start with the Portfolio Solutions...

If you've been with us a while, you will know that we manage our Portfolio Solutions products like a fund...

Our traditional newsletters' model portfolios are a list of individual recommendations. By contrast, our portfolio products each include a risk-adjusted, fully allocated portfolio.

In other words, we assign a weighting of each stock in the portfolio... down to the exact number of shares to buy. And we structure our recommendations and position sizes to complement each other with an eye toward the overall portfolio's risk versus return.

Because of this, we can easily measure the performance of each portfolio versus its benchmark over a select period.

As William O'Neil points out in his book How to Make Money in Stocks... everyone can become a successful investor over time. And there's the critical word: time. Because every investor or strategy has its rough patches... You need time for things to play out. This is why we continue to pound the table on the importance of having a strategy and the discipline to follow it.

While investing can be incredibly rewarding... it is a challenging and long-term endeavor – a marathon rather than a sprint. This is why we generally consider tracking performance over a period of years rather than months or weeks.

Still, I know you will want to hear how our editors did last year.

So for our Portfolio Solutions products and our system and trading services (shorter-term by nature), we will provide you with the 2024 results as well as their performance over the past five years (or since inception in the case of products that haven't been in publication that long).

I would love to hear how you did with our research. I am fully aware that your results may vary from ours... and that you may not agree with my grades. This is why we provide you with all the stats... so you can see for yourself.

The Stansberry Portfolio Solutions investment committee combines the wisdom and insights of several of our top analysts including Director of Research Matt Weinschenk and senior analysts Dr. David "Doc" Eifrig, Whitney Tilson, Brett Eversole, and Alan Gula.

Here is our 2024 Report Card on the Portfolio Solutions...

Now I'll cover each of these grades in detail, starting with...

The Total Portfolio: B- (1-year), A+ (5-year)

The Total Portfolio got a revamp in 2024.

As part of an effort to improve our portfolio offerings, the investment committee took some of the strategies of the former Capital and Income portfolios together with their many decades of combined experience to consolidate into a refined strategy for The Total Portfolio.

Here is what Matt Weinschenk shared with subscribers about the wealth-building benefits of true portfolio management back in April...

By building portfolios carefully, you get magic returns. There are certain investments that can add juice to a portfolio just by the way they behave.

It could be a stock that always has steady returns.

It could be a unique asset driven by forces other than the broad market. Or it could be something that specifically offsets the volatility of other investments in your portfolio.

When you study and measure a fully allocated portfolio, you can unearth hidden gems for better returns. That's the holy grail of portfolio design.

Now, this "holy grail" isn't a magic wand...

Due to its balanced long-term strategy, The Total Portfolio will hold stocks that won't keep up with high-flying tech stocks.

The investment committee may include the "Magnificent Seven" tech stocks – Apple (AAPL), Alphabet (GOOGL), Amazon (AMZN), Meta Platforms (META), Microsoft (MSFT), Nvidia (NVDA), and Tesla (TSLA) – but it won't overweight them like most indexes. So while the Mag Seven are soaring, The Total Portfolio may trail those benchmarks.

But this portfolio also includes safer, less volatile stocks. These include great wealth builders like property and casualty (P&C) insurance stocks – what we call "the best business in the world." It also includes positions that hedge against trouble striking other parts of the portfolio. In other words, The Total Portfolio will also hold things that will help protect you on the downside in the event of chaos.

So rather than take on too much risk looking to merely outpace the market... the investment committee is focused on producing a robust, long-term wealth-building portfolio.

For example, take Comfort Systems USA (FIX), America's top mechanical, electrical, and plumbing installer. It's up more than 600% since the investment committee added it to the portfolio in 2021. And it more than doubled last year alone. Or look at bitcoin, which soared in 2024 to more than $100,000 – also a double for the year. Yes, it's a small position. But today it's up more than 800% since joining the portfolio in 2020.

And in the less speculative "Stay Rich" section of the portfolio, you have gold royalty plays like Franco-Nevada (FNV), which was up more than 60% since its initial recommendation to end 2024... and a prominent P&C insurance holding that climbed steadily throughout the year to return double-digit gains for 2024.

Now, when looking at the long-term (five-year) track record, the results are outstanding. As you can see, The Total Portfolio is an A+ in my view. And we're even more excited with what the new strategy will bring for the next five years.

This is a superbly structured portfolio that can help you get rich... and stay rich.

Now, Total Portfolio subscribers know that we unveiled our annual 2024 rebalancing in April. But for our Report Card, we're looking at the service's full calendar-year performance.

With a 9.9% return since the beginning of 2024, subscribers enjoyed steady results. But our benchmark for The Total Portfolio is the Vanguard Balanced Index Fund (VBINX), which was up 13% last year. Given this underperformance, The Total Portfolio earns a B- for 2024.

But remember: The most important thing is building longstanding wealth. And the track record over the past five years shows a total return of more than 112% – an impressive 19.1% per year. This trounces its benchmark by more than double over the same period.

That result earns the investment committee an A+ for the five-year period of the 2024 Report Card... a truly impressive performance.

Congratulations if you joined us with a Total Portfolio membership. I hope you are enjoying these gains.

Stansberry's Forever Portfolio: C (1-year), A (since inception, March 2020)

All great businesses have some unique qualities or traits.

It could be their brand, like Apple, Google, or Microsoft... or their distribution network, like Coca-Cola (KO)... or a combination of factors.

Investing legend Warren Buffett famously said that he likes to buy "businesses that are so wonderful that an idiot can run them. Because sooner or later, one will."

Consider the time back in the 1970s when Coca-Cola poured millions of dollars into shrimp farming (yes, shrimp farming) and winemaking. It didn't take long before the board fired its CEO... and steered the company back to doing what it knew best – making soft drinks.

The thing about these great businesses is that they usually dominate their markets. Google became a dominant powerhouse in search... Microsoft in software... and Hershey (HSY) in chocolate.

They consistently grow sales and earnings. They sport healthy gross and operating margins, have robust balance sheets, and look after shareholders through paying dividends, buying back shares, reinvesting in growth, or a combination of all three.

These are the types of businesses that qualify for Stansberry's Forever Portfolio... a portfolio of stocks we see as safe long-term holdings with market-beating upside.

Finding great businesses is just one piece of our Forever Portfolio equation. Buying these companies at great valuations is what determines your returns.

When we launched this portfolio in March 2020, some of these stocks were trading at what we would call a "fair" price. Others were outright once-in-a-decade bargains.

Stocks like American Express (AXP) were trading at decade-low valuations. It has soared more than 260% since. The search-engine giant Alphabet is also up more than 260%. And the software behemoth Microsoft is up nearly 200%. These are outstanding results – especially considering the size of these companies.

The list goes on.

Yes, you could argue the portfolio gains of 12.7% lagged the benchmark S&P 500 Index last year. For that reason, I am awarding a C for the single year of 2024.

But rest assured, most investors would be thrilled to have their portfolio jam-packed with every single stock in this portfolio – especially at prices from March 2020.

Since inception, the portfolio generated total returns of 121% through last year – a phenomenal result for these global elite businesses. That's 18% annualized gains.

Now, even this figure slightly lags the S&P 500... But consider this: As of this week, every current holding in the Forever Portfolio is showing a gain. And the service has only closed four losing positions in its history.

And for me, a combination of high gains and consistent wins earns an A for the five-year portion of this year's Report Card.

The Quant Portfolio: C (1-year), B (since inception, June 2023)

We released this portfolio about a year and a half ago...

But the foundation on which it is built – the Stansberry Score – has been years in the making.

The score considers several fundamental factors, including capital efficiency – a metric that longtime readers know has been at the core of our flagship publication Stansberry's Investment Advisory for nearly two decades.

Other important factors include financial robustness – in other words, healthy operating margins, strong cash flow, and rock-solid balance sheets.

Finally, our system considers valuation and price momentum to ensure we are getting into stocks at the right price and time.

Our system analyzes more than 4,500 stocks every day and assigns a score between 0 and 100 – with 100 being the highest-ranked companies.

The Quant Portfolio takes the highest-ranked companies, then runs an algorithm to find the best combination of around 15 to 20 stocks. Our goal is to provide a low-risk way to buy a small risk-adjusted portfolio of carefully selected stocks.

Overall, the portfolio has performed as we expected. But it did hit a speed bump late last year. Two of its largest holdings at the time – oil and gas royalty play Texas Pacific Land (TPL) and the world's leading insulin maker Nova Nordisk (NVO) – both stumbled in December. (It's worth noting that despite the recent decline, TPL is still up more than 190% since the system first added it to the portfolio in 2023.)

A single stock stumble (held in a risk-weighted portfolio) might sting a little... but two at the same time obviously hurts more. This meant December was a tough month on The Quant Portfolio... and hurt the 2024 results as we closed out the year. For that reason, I'm assigning a C for the single-year 2024 Report Card.

The good news is that it's bouncing back already. As I write, the portfolio is up 2.8% for the month compared with a mere 1.6% for the S&P 500.

As mentioned, with the exception of December's blip, the portfolio has performed as expected. While we always look to improve... we don't believe we need to change the code or anything in our algorithms. Rest assured, the investment committee continually challenges our strategies and looks for ways to improve performance.

Looking back at the results since June 2023 when we first launched The Quant Portfolio, the portfolio is up 34%. Those are impressive returns. But yes, I recognize that it's lagging the benchmark S&P 500, which came in at 40% for the same period.

Since the portfolio does not yet have a five-year track record, we have reported its results since inception (June 2023). It earns a B for the longer-term portion of the Report Card.

I'm confident in the strategy our investment committee has taken. And any future refinements they may adopt will result in outstanding returns over the coming years for The Quant Portfolio. I hope you get to enjoy those returns with us.

Now let's move on to our system and trading services...

It's easy to grade our portfolio products because we can treat them as a single entity... an allocated collection of stocks held during a certain period. We can compare this portfolio's overall weighted performance directly with the performance of an index, since that's also a weighted collection of stocks.

But in these next publications we'll cover, we don't provide allocated portfolios. Each recommendation stands on its own, with buys and sells taking place throughout the year.

We account for this by comparing each position's performance with the publication's benchmark (the S&P 500 unless we say otherwise), then adjusting for how long the portfolio held that position.

We know this can get complicated... But we think it's the most accurate way to compare results. Since we're making recommendations throughout the evaluation period, we can't compare the newsletters with the S&P 500 over the full period... Not all recommendations were made at the start date. Likewise, we don't close all our positions at the same time.

That's why you will see a different number for the benchmark on most publications rather than a flat rate of return for the evaluation period. By looking at the average gains for a publication, you can determine what kind of returns to expect from following the editor's recommendations.

Next, in investing, annualized returns show what would happen if you were to repeat a trade's performance (up or down) throughout the year. This allows us to compare different strategies over different periods. It shows who's making quick gains versus slower ones.

Also, while we expect Portfolio Solutions subscribers to follow all our advice... we know that subscribers to our other services may cherry-pick the ideas they think work best. This brings us to another important criterion... the win rate.

When we don't know which recommendations a subscriber might follow, it's critical that an editor picks more winners than losers – regardless of his publication's average overall performance. When you follow an editor with a high win rate, you should stick with them.

Our four system and trading services are Retirement Trader, Ten Stock Trader, Daily Wealth Trader, and True Wealth Systems. Here's how they scored...

Now for the details...

Retirement Trader: B (1-year), A (5-year)

OK, this is starting to get a little crazy.

Doc Eifrig's "trading for income" strategy continues to deliver the most consistent win rate I've seen in any trading product... anywhere... ever.

I know this Report Card is about the one- and five-year results. But get this...

Since launching this service in 2010, through the end of 2024, Doc and his team have made 791 trades. As of December 31, 2024, 731 of them had already closed as winners – a 92% win rate.

These are extraordinary results. To my knowledge, no one in the financial-publishing industry has racked up a win rate on an options trading service – especially over such a long period – quite like it.

In 2024, Doc and his team racked up an 82% win rate. While that is impressive... the five-year win rate is an outrageous 90%.

What's more, our metrics for the Report Card count positions as losers if they're down at the close of 2024. As Doc often reminds his subscribers, using his strategy, many newly opened trades show temporary losses... but they reliably rise in value as options approach their expiration dates.

Based only on closed positions, Doc has only two losers since March 2020... his covered-call and put trades on CVS Health (CVS). When the pharmacy giant triggered his stop loss in May 2024, it ended a record winning streak of 211 straight trades. (Since then, Retirement Trader has closed another 33 winners in a row.)

Every year I attend our annual Stansberry Alliance conference... I hear more and more testimonials from his subscribers. Each one seems better than the last. Here's just a taste of what I hear, from Doc's paid-up subscriber R.M...

Learning the things that Doc teaches in Retirement Trader has been the single greatest advancement in my investing education. Once you understand the beauty of selling puts and covered calls, and how to do it safely, you've increased your investing acumen and can start applying it outside of the recommendations he makes in the letter. I'm very thankful for my Retirement Trader education.

If you are looking for safe and steady income every month... this is for you.

If you haven't heard how he does it... just know that Doc generates almost all this income off some of the safest companies in America, and normally in a period of weeks or months. He is looking for lots of singles... with a high percentage of success.

He has made winning trades on companies like coffee retailer Starbucks (SBUX)... soft-drink giant Coca-Cola... and consumer-staples maker Kimberly-Clark (KMB).

And subscribers receive a new trade every couple of weeks.

It's a great way to generate additional income. And Doc loves to educate. So rest assured, if you've not tried it but want to give it a try... know that Doc has an abundance of educational material. Plus, he and his team are in constant contact with their subscribers via twice-monthly issues... e-mail alerts... and published Q&As... so you never feel like you're trading alone.

With such an impressive win rate, you might be wondering why I haven't given the service a higher grade. And I'm sure the good doctor will also challenge my grade. The win rate certainly deserves it.

What's more, many of Doc's trades remain open... so they have time to play out and become winners. But to award a higher grade for the one-year performance, I would like to see a higher average annualized gain. For that reason, Retirement Trader receives a B for the single year of 2024.

But consistent with our message that you need time to succeed in the markets – and the service's performance relative to its benchmark, the Vanguard Wellesley Income Fund (VWINX) – the five-year track record earns Doc and his team an A for this year's Report Card.

Ten Stock Trader: C (1-year), A+ (5-year)

Greg Diamond embraces volatility like no other...

While the bear market of 2022 inflicted serious pain on most investors... Greg thrived. He produced an outstanding 82% win rate with average gains of 23% compared with his benchmark, which was in the red for the same period. That's a remarkable result.

But with the relatively low volatility as the bull market continued to soar... 2024 didn't offer Greg the market conditions he tends to exploit. It certainly proved to be a challenging year for his Ten Stock Trader service.

Greg maintained a solid 65% win rate... an impressive feat in the world of buying options (rather than Doc Eifrig's lower-risk, lower-return strategy of selling them). But unfortunately for Greg, a few trades at the tail end of the year hurt the average returns for the year, which came to a 4% loss.

As the name of the publication implies, Greg trades only a handful of positions at any given time – generally 10 or less. He places both bullish and bearish bets on names you will be familiar with... such as global courier company FedEx (FDX), heavy-machinery behemoth Caterpillar (CAT), or semiconductor maker Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), among others.

He is also agnostic to the direction of a trade. In other words, he places bullish and bearish trades on individual stocks as well as ETFs tracking sectors for small caps, tech, financials, and bonds just, to name a few.

I know Greg is disappointed with the 2024 results. But I also know that with his experience, strategy, and risk management, together with his long-term track record (a 69% win rate over the past five years)... it is only a matter of time before things get back on course.

After all, Greg has traded for a $3 billion hedge fund and a $35 billion pension fund. He understands risk better than most. And his winners far outweigh his losers over time.

Greg is among the most competitive traders I know... and has an impeccable work ethic. If you hear him say he will be back in 2025... I wouldn't bet against him. And his long-term track record is outstanding – 8.5% average gains (76.4% average annualized gains) over the past five years versus just 1.7% (and 15% annualized) for the benchmark. For that reason, despite a challenging year that earns him a C for 2024 results, he earns an A+ for the five-year returns.

One thing worth noting before I move on...

Greg also provides market insights in his weekly outlook published every Monday morning. Among the many different topics throughout the year, he covers industry sectors, currencies, and bonds, as well as sentiment and time cycles. I've said this before... Every investor should be reading it... even if you're not interested in trading options.

DailyWealth Trader: D (1-year), B (5-year)

2024 was tough on DailyWealth Trader.

But as always, context matters.

It's important to know that almost half of the 33 positions that editor Chris Igou opened in 2024 remain open... And some of these positions were showing small single-digit losses at year-end. In other words, some of these trades still have time to play out. This is why we prefer to consider the longer term when it comes to track records.

Still, we promise transparency... and we grade our Report Card using the closing prices for the year. And unfortunately for Chris, the 2024 one-year results as we closed out the year were lagging.

With a 46% win rate at the end of last year, and average returns of negative 8%, I know Chris will be disappointed.

As mentioned earlier, every trader hits a difficult patch from time to time. But DailyWealth Trader has a strong history.

Over the past two years, Chris has locked in 60%-plus win rates – earning an A in each of the prior two years' Report Cards.

The five-year track record shows an impressive 69% win rate with average annualized gains of 10.7%. While that lags the benchmark, a win rate above 60% merits a B for the five-year results.

As the name suggests, we publish DailyWealth Trader every day the markets are open. And Chris does an excellent job educating his subscribers on various aspects of the market.

He covers global markets, currencies, bonds, industry sectors, and individual stocks, as well as sentiment and various other indicators. And while he doesn't include an actionable trade in every issue, Chris offers invaluable insights and trade setups every day we publish. He recommends stocks, ETFs, and options. And while he trades mostly on the long side... he also recommends bearish trades when opportunities arise to hedge.

As I tell my friends and family looking to learn how to trade... the education alone is worth the price of admission.

I'm confident Chris will analyze the 2024 results in detail and adjust where needed so that we see the track record rebound in 2025.

DailyWealth Trader earns a D for 2024 and a B for five-year performance in this year's Report Card.

True Wealth Systems: A (1-year), A (5-year)

True Wealth Systems is the epitome of a proven trading strategy.

As we mentioned earlier, editor Brett Eversole follows a "top down" strategy. He and his team – together with the powerful quantitative system they built – scour the globe every day looking for the best opportunities in the market. As well as industry sectors like tech, biotech, and commodities... he finds opportunities in currencies, commodities, and different global markets, among others. He is looking for trends with strong tailwinds and lots of runway ahead.

Since inception (the publication launched in 2011), True Wealth Systems has produced an impressive average annualized gain of 19%... handily beating its benchmark's 16% annualized returns.

Brett turned bullish before most other analysts (inside and outside of Stansberry Research) back in late 2022 when the market bottomed.

And he has remained bullish ever since... riding several winners to double- and triple-digit gains. For example, at the end of 2024, he was sitting on triple-digit gains on a semiconductor play in a little less than a year. And he's up more than 140% on a software company after he doubled down on the bull market back in 2023.

And to take advantage of the rising prices in gold and silver, he recommended a small portfolio of stocks including Canadian miner Skeena Resources (SKE), which is up more than 110% as I write.

Now, obviously not every idea pans out the way we would like. While his overall portfolio of gold stocks is performing well, he took a larger-than-usual hit on one individual mining company after it reported a mine accident.

This is why we constantly remind readers about the importance of managing risk with position sizing and using stops. Sometimes a share price can fall straight through a stop loss. But if you adjust your risk by taking smaller positions – especially on speculative plays like mining stocks – no single position should be large enough to cause permanent damage to your portfolio.

However, even with this loss, True Wealth Systems still generated 11% average gains for 2024... outperforming its benchmark of just 9%.

Brett's strategy is best suited to trending markets. So in a choppy or down market like 2022, he will sometimes get bumped out of the trade before a trend can grab ahold. This is why Brett follows his clearly defined strategy with disciplined portfolio-management rules of cutting losers quickly and letting his winners run.

This is what makes True Wealth Systems so valuable.

You should know that while he acknowledges nothing goes straight up without some volatility along the way... he believes we are in a much larger secular bull market, and that it has years left to run. The key to making money from it is, of course, by having a system, implementing the strategy... and having the discipline to stick to it.

As you can see, Brett's strategy is working.

I hope you're enjoying some of this success. Annualized gains of 23.1% would have turned a $100,000 into almost $283,000 over five years.

And these results earn True Wealth Systems an A for both the one-year and five-year periods for the 2024 Report Card.

These are all the publications we'll cover in this first part of our 2024 annual Report Card...

Next week, we'll cover our traditional monthly newsletters.

As mentioned earlier, we welcome your feedback. I'd love to hear how you did with our work and whether you agree with my grades.

New 52-week highs (as of 1/30/25): Agnico Eagle Mines (AEM), BlackRock Health Sciences Term Trust (BMEZ), Alpha Architect 1-3 Month Box Fund (BOXX), Maplebear (CART), Compass (COMP), Cencora (COR), Dick's Sporting Goods (DKS), Viant Technology (DSP), Fortinet (FTNT), SPDR Gold Shares (GLD), Alphabet (GOOGL), HealthEquity (HQY), JPMorgan Chase (JPM), Kinross Gold (KGC), London Stock Exchange Group (LNSTY), Grand Canyon Education (LOPE), Masimo (MASI), Meta Platforms (META), Plains All American Pipeline (PAA), Planet Fitness (PLNT), ResMed (RMD), Starbucks (SBUX), Sprouts Farmers Market (SFM), Spotify Technology (SPOT), Twilio (TWLO), ProShares Ultra Financials (UYG), Visa (V), and VeriSign (VRSN).

We have a quiet mailbag today, which is OK since the Report Card always makes for a long Digest. But again, please, tell us what you think of the first part of our annual review with a note to feedback@stansberryresearch.com.

Also, for those of you who were expecting to hear from Dan Ferris today, please know we're publishing his regular weekly essay on Monday. Also stay tuned for more of our Report Card grades in the Digest later next week. If you didn't see a publication covered today, don't worry – it's coming.

Good investing,

Brett Aitken
Publisher
Baltimore, Maryland
January 31, 2025