Whitney Tilson has a new teaser pitch out for Stansberry’s Investment Advisory, which is now his primary “entry level” newsletter for generalist stock picks (he formerly ran Empire Financial, a partnership with Stansberry, but that was shut down in the newsletter bloodletting last year)… and I imagine some of the stock picks have changed over the past five years, but this pitch is quite similar to the first “perfect portfolio” ads he ran for Empire Financial back in 2019.

So let’s dig in and see which stocks he likes, shall we?

This is how the ad opens…

“The Man CNBC Called ‘The Prophet’ Says He’d Feel Secure Putting 50% of His Kids’ Inheritance in THIS Stock

“It could generate more returns than annuities, life insurance, gold, or a house… and it could be the single smartest way to pass wealth to your family.”

And I’ll cut to the chase a little bit, and spare you the extremely long back-story — that “50% of his kids inheritance” stock is Berkshire Hathaway (BRK-B), a stock Tilson has owned and been following since he had a little hedge fund and mutual fund a couple decades ago. Unlike the similar ads back in 2019, though, he does actually “reveal” Berkshire as his “50% of his kids’ inheritance” stock (at the time, it was 50% of their college fund… but I think his daughters have all graduated from college now), that’s not the secret… the secret he teases is what he’d do with the other 50% of their inheritance, and that’s where he starts hinting at the “perfect portfolio.”

But first, in case you want some of Tilson’s reasoning for allocating half of that portfolio to Berkshire today, here’s a little excerpt:

“With the market trading at all-time highs… and with many assets, like crypto and AI stocks in clear bubble territory…

“I think you’d be crazy not to consider pushing a large portion of the money you’re going to be depending on… into the kind of investments you know you could use to help preserve and grow the value of your wealth….

“It has generated much better returns than any of the traditional inheritance assets like annuities, life insurance, real estate, and gold….

“… it has been one of the greatest and low-risk wealth generators for decades. It more than doubled the return of the overall market since 1990… and I think it’s an important first step for anyone who wants to feel like they have control over the direction of their investment returns and wish to leave a legacy…..

“You have a short window in which you can “back up the truck” on by far one of the best stocks in America… and have the potential to radically improve your retirement finances and create a lasting legacy.

“In other words, you DON’T need a risky or speculative investment to retire happily and leave a rich nest egg for the next generation…

“And you DON’T need to bet on fringe ideas, hot IPOs, speculative AI stocks, cryptos, or mining stocks…

“And you don’t need to hire high-priced money managers or consultants.

“What you do need, instead, is one high-conviction idea….

“I’ve crunched the numbers, and the stock is still a bargain… With this investor at the helm, I think it’s very likely to beat the S&P 500 over the long term.”

None of that is terribly surprising, I agree that Berkshire Hathaway is probably the most diversified stock we can own as a foundation of a portfolio, and is probably the least fragile company in America, thanks to the high level of trust that Berkshire shareholders place in the company and the way that trust has been honored by Berkshire management — they’ve got enough cash to survive just about anything, they don’t make company-risking bets, and Warren Buffett talks frequently about the fact that he considers his primary job to be protecting the capital of the thousands of families who have invested in Berkshire over the decades.

But the “back up the truck” part is a bit disingenuous. This is how he puts it in the ad:

“I’ve personally made more than 7 times my money on some of the early shares I bought.

“And today we have another one of those buying opportunities…

“That’s why I’m trying to get the word out about this ‘back up the truck’ moment…

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“So you could potentially secure your family’s wealth for generations to come.”

Whitney Tilson also publishes his “intrinsic value” estimate for Berkshire shares each quarter, when new numbers come out, and back in May he tagged that value at $407 for the Berkshire B shares (BRK-B, each one of which is worth 1/1,500th of a Berkshire A share, BRK-A). The stock is at $405 today, so it is not particularly discounted relative to his latest assessment of intrinsic value, and he has not singled it out as an opportunistic buying opportunity in his more serious commentary. And yes, it has sometimes traded at very deep discounts to that calculation of “intrinsic value”. So either his opinion has changed dramatically since the March quarter was released and he published those numbers (there’s no real reason for that, the Berkshire investment portfolio is roughly unchanged since May and we have no other meaningful updates from the company), or he’s predicting a crash and thinks Buffett will create value during that moment (he specifically says this isn’t his prediction), or he’s being misleading in the attempt to great some urgency in the minds of his readers, and convince them to subscribe right away. I would bet on door number three.

For what it’s worth, Berkshire Hathaway is the largest position in my Real Money Portfolio, too, and I also calculate the value a few times a year to set my reasonable “buy” range for the stock, though my math is slightly different than Tilson’s — as of the last quarter, I have a “max buy” price of $424 on BRK-B, and I last bought a few shares earlier this year, when it was just a hair below $400. I think buying is reasonable here, but I don’t expect the stock to beat the S&P 500 from this starting point… for that we might have to be more opportunistic, and buy when the market is weakening or Buffett has a health scare or something. This is not ever going to be a fast-growing company, the value comes from gradual compounding as they invest surplus capital in new companies (or lately, in T-bills), and from being a company that can buy and support businesses when (if) the world is on fire.

I trust Berkshire management, including the folks Buffett has named as proposed successors, but the culture will shift when Warren eventually steps out of the CEO office, if only because we’ll be going from the friendly, wise uncle who makes $100,000 a year and delights in working for shareholders to Greg Abel, with his $20 million compensation package and more corporate vibe. Things could certainly change in either negative or positive ways, two of the big asset-heavy businesses at Berkshire are slumping right now and might need a firmer hand, which Abel might provide but Buffett probably won’t (utilities because of the California wildfire liabilities, railroads because they’re not as efficient as some of their large peers), but the insurance business is booming, including some recovery, finally, at GEICO, and Berkshire’s investment portfolio, dominated by Apple shares, is doing just fine.

So yes, Berkshire is a very strong company, and will likely remain so long after Buffett ceases to hold the CEO job (he’ll be 94 later this summer), but it’s more of a safety pick and a ‘pretty close to matching the S&P 500 most of the time’ pick, it probably won’t be an exceptional out-performer. They own one of the most powerful insurance operations in the world, with the ability to take on any idiosyncratic risk for the right price, and they have a lean headquarters staff and a culture of letting their businesses operate without heavy oversight or coordination, which effectively also makes them a giant diversified pool of hundreds of businesses… and given the “float” that they can use from those core insurance businesses, they have a steady pool of cash to invest to keep compounding the value of the business. Given the tax advantage of holding shares of a single company versus investing in a fund, perhaps it’s an easier “legacy” investment than some others, if you’re thinking of leaving stuff to your kids… but I’ve also told my kids that I’m pretty sure we’ll be able to spend their inheritance before they get it, and I’d rather give them some money (or Berkshire shares) today and let them decide how to manage them and learn something, than have them waiting patiently for my demise (I’m 40 years younger than Buffett, in case you’re wondering, so hopefully this is not imminent, and my kids are 17 and 20 right now).

But you probably also know Berkshire quite well… so what is the balance of Tilson’s “perfect portfolio” these days? Five years ago he picked a tech-heavy selection of stocks, Amazon (AMZN), Alphabet (GOOG), Facebook (FB) (now Meta Platforms (META), and Altria (MO)… so that has done very well, Berkshire has roughly matched the S&P 500 since he teased that portfolio in December of 2019, Altria (MO) has trailed way behind, but the three tech leaders have blown the doors off the market and helped that group nicely outperform the market.

Will his next “perfect portfolio” do similarly? Is it just the same stocks again? Here’s how he describes that…

“… for the rest of the portfolio, I’d want to allocate it across just a few high-conviction ideas with plenty of potential upside and strong downside protection….

“… these stocks do share common threads in their genetic code with Berkshire Hathaway. They all generate a lot of free cash flow, have booming businesses, and are currently undervalued.

“In other words, these are low-risk stocks you could hold for a very long time, compound your wealth, and then later pass on to your family.

“They are so dominant in their space, I believe it would be a tremendous mistake not to have them in your portfolio…”

And then some hints about the specific companies:

“The first company perfectly embodies a key metric we look for in a stock… It’s something almost everyone ignores and few people even understand, but it makes this company one of the most attractive investments in the world…

“It’s allowed this company to flourish for over 100 years. And people consistently buy its flagship product through good times, bad times, and even when it raises prices.

“Believe it or not, it is probably one of the only companies in the market that actually saw its sales rise during the 2008 financial crisis, the pandemic, and even when inflation peaked in 2021…”

That sounds very much like Tilson’s predecessor’s pitch for Hershey (HSY), and the clues fit, including the specific chart of “crisis-proof revenues” that he posts, showing at least a little growth almost every year — so I suspect he’s recommending this longtime Stansberry favorite again. That “key metric” is probably what Porter Stansberry has long called “capital efficiency,” embodied by metrics like return on equity (ROE) that highlight the efficiency of this brand-driven business. Hershey is a bit beaten down this year, partly because of some softer growth (thanks to inflation causing consumers to cut back a little), and partly thanks to a little profit squeeze from the inflating prices of their own key inputs, cacao and sugar, but they’ve been through similar challenges before and I expect they’ll end up doing fine. I’ve been buying Hershey shares this year, as it has been dipping into a reasonable valuation range, and I like the company in part because the controlling ownership of the Milton Hershey Trust gives us something like long-term family/founder control for the firm, helping them build for the future instead of focusing on quarterly earnings. As of today, it is valued at about 18X earnings, with a blistering ROE of 53%, and pays a steadily rising dividend that offers a ~3% annual yield.

Tilson also notes that there could be a Berkshire connection…

“I’m not surprised there’s been buzz about Berkshire Hathaway potentially buying this company – it’s exactly the kind of investment Warren Buffett loves.”

It’s true that Hershey would be a good fit for the kinds of consumer brands Buffett has long invested in and loves, including Coca Cola (KO) and See’s Candy (the much smaller confectioner that Berkshire bought decades ago), but that probably refers to the rumor mill speculating about a Berkshire bid back for Hershey back in 2021 — mostly just because the Hershey private jet landed in Omaha that Summer (probably for some other reason, as it turned out later). The Hershey Trust has rejected takeover offers from other companies in the past, and it’s not terribly likely that they’d give up control in the future, but I guess one never knows. There are no active acquisition or merger rumors that I’m aware of today.

What’s the next “perfect” stock?

“It’s one of the financial markets’ oldest and most trusted institutions. You’d probably know the name if I told it to you, but there’s a strong chance you’ve always believed that it is a regulator or part of the government.

“But in fact, it is a company you can invest in via the stock market…

“It’s the backbone for an average value of $1 quadrillion trading every year. If this company vanished overnight, it would virtually shutter the world’s financial system.

“That’s because its services are as essential as water to the broader financial system.

“Revenues surged during the 2008 crash and the Great Recession. And the same thing happened during the COVID-19 pandemic – which means you can expect its business to do well, even when the stock market is selling off and there’s lots of volatility.”

Given the “$1 quadrillion” number and the rest of those clues, this is very likely the CME group (CME), better known as the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. They handle something like three billion contract transactions each year, mostly for futures and other derivatives, including a monopoly on futures trading for the S&P 500. The stock has been flat for the past five years or so, but the business does generally grow steadily, and currently trades at about the lowest valuation we’ve seen in about a decade, roughly 22X earnings, with a 4.5% dividend yield. That doesn’t mean it can’t fall, it dropped to 10X earnings during the great financial crisis and the Euro crisis of a few years later, and dropped sharply during the early days of COVID, along with almost everything else, even though the actual revenue didn’t drop very much (revenue kept climbing through the 2008-2009 crash, for example).

CME was also teased in a separate ad from Whitney and Porter a couple months ago, here’s what I said at the time about that one:

CME Group is the primarily exchange for futures trading, after CME merged with the Chicago Board of Trade and then with NYMEX many years ago… and it also has a deal with Dow Jones Indices (including part ownership) that gives them a monopoly on S&P futures trading. It’s also one of the more reasonably valued exchanges among the publicly traded options, probably in part because it’s not necessarily growing all that fast. CME is decently profitable, it has a 10% return on equity (ROE) these days, and it has benefitted from economies of scale as trading volumes have generally increased — they have grown earnings by about 9% per year, and revenue by about 5% per year… and they also pay a substantial dividend, currently about 4.1%, and trades at a forward PE of about 21. The stock got pretty overvalued during the go-go trading times in 2020 and 2021, but it seems to me that it’s back to being pretty reasonable again.

The business is more complex and diversified than it was when it went public, almost 20 years ago, so they now do a lot more than just equity futures and commodity futures trading, there’s a lot of bond and cash trading on their platforms as well… but this is essentially the same kind of business as any exchange: They are primarily a fee-based business that lives off of volume, so if there’s a lot of trading, they’ll make more money… if trading collapses, they’ll make less money. There’s a more stable core of earnings, in the form of market data revenue, but fee-based revenue is most of it — in the first quarter this year, they had about $1.2 billion in fee revenue, and $175 million in data revenue (that’s selling live market data to traders and institutional research platforms, etc.). They’re also very efficient and should continue to see small economies of scale as the market grows over time, since most things are computerized and they don’t need to add more people just because trading volume goes up — but that’s true of pretty much any “exchange” type business — their pre-tax profit margin is usually in the 70-80% range.

Analysts don’t see any real surge of earnings anytime soon, but given their position as a core trading platform, and the increasing extent to which almost everything is financialized and tradable, it seems pretty likely that trading volume will continue to grow over the long term, and they’ll probably continue to grow both revenue and earnings — the level of predictability and the high margins probably make it a pretty decent investment at these levels, even though they’re not currently growing earnings very fast and they still trade at a small premium to the overall market.

Tilson also drops these further clues about CME, in case you’re curious:

“Since 2002, when it went public, this stock has beat the S&P 500 by more than 6 times…

“And increased its dividend payout by an average of 8% per year over the past five years.

“One of the world’s top three tech firms even invested $1 billion and signed a 10-year partnership deal with it to develop new products together.”

That CME partner tech firm was Alphabet, by the way — CME was one of the big companies to sign on fairly early to Google Cloud, to bring more of its trading and technology to the cloud, and Alphabet simultaneously invested a billion dollars in CME. They both said the two were unrelated, but, well, I don’t think anyone believed them — it seemed like CME was a big “get” to validate Google Cloud for other potential large customers, and Google paid for it with their investment.

Next?

“The third company I believe you should buy today is a cash machine.

“It’s the infrastructure behind keeping your lights on… getting your groceries… your Amazon purchases… you name it.

“And it essentially gets a “royalty” on practically everything.

“This company is rolling in dough because it doesn’t sell anything tangible and is easily scalable.

“It’s not a factory or an aerospace manufacturer like Boeing, which invests heavily in equipment to turn a profit… or prone to manufacturing errors that have plagued Boeing and caused its stock price to suffer.

“Instead, it has an operating profit margin of about 65%….

“I believe owning this stock could lead you to generational wealth.

“I recommend people buy shares immediately.”

Well, there are VERY few large companies that have an operating margin over 60% — CME is one, incidentally, but this third “perfect portfolio” stock is almost certainly the anti-cash machine, Visa (V). And yes, they have slightly better margins than their most-of-the-world duopoly partner in digital and card payments, Mastercard (MA).

Hard to argue with that, Mastercard and Visa are two of the best companies in the history of the world, and as the world continues to move away from cash they become more and more a small royalty on almost all economic activity. They have survived every threat to their duopoly power, including many regulatory and legal challenges over the years to the core profitability of the business (how much they charge merchants, how much they share with issuing banks, etc.) — which makes them look pretty safe, even if their continuing dominance of the business does mean those challenges will probably continue to chip away at their moat. I wouldn’t necessarily say that Visa is dirt cheap here, at 25-30X earnings, but it’s now near the lower end of the valuation range they’ve mostly traded at over the past decade (the stock traded for 50X earnings during the 2021 mania, and is not a super-fast grower, so the shares have not kept up with the market if you bought them at a relatively expensive time, when it was valued at 30-50X earnings — but if you bought when the PE was well below 30, like in 2015 or 2016, similar to today’s valuation, you would have beaten the market pretty handily).

I don’t know if Visa and Mastercard will remain dominant forever… but that was the worry that kept some folks from buying those stocks over the past 15 years, and both certainly climbed that “wall of worry” from 2008 through today. We’ll see if that continues.

And one more from Tilson for the “perfect portfolio”…

“… when I look around the world today, what becomes most obvious is that artificial intelligence, or ‘AI,’ is changing the world faster than ever before….

“It’s no surprise that AI chipmaker Nvidia (NVDA) has become the third most valuable company.

“But I’m NOT recommending you buy Nvidia.

“Instead, it’s another company I believe is one of the cheapest AI beneficiaries out there right now.

“It’s in talks with one of the Magnificent Seven companies about a possible AI collaboration. This partnership could propel it into an AI front-runner and generate billions of dollars in recurring revenue. This company also designs its own AI chips.

“I recommend you buy the stock now before it potentially skyrockets.”

Well, I’d argue that it has already partially “skyrocketed,” but this is very likely Alphabet (GOOG, GOOGL) — that “it’s in talks with” bit about a possible AI collaboration is likely to be a reference to their talks about offering AI services to Apple, before Apple’s recent push to use ChatGPT (they might still use Google stuff, too, we’ll see how it all shakes out over the next year or two). That’s not a 100% certain lock for Tilson’s pick — but I know he has liked the company for a long time, and has recommended it in the past, and I think most people would still single GOOGL out as “one of the cheapest AI beneficiaries”, and I don’t think you can say that with a straight face of either Microsoft or Amazon, the other possible candidates who match those clues.

Alphabet has been on quite a run over the past 18 months, so it’s now creeping to the top of my reasonable buy range. I’ve owned this one for a long time, and write about it pretty frequently, so here’s an excerpt of what I shared with the Irregulars following the last Alphabet quarter, in April:

Friday File, 4/6/24: Alphabet is now my first large holding to show a 3,000%+ gain from my initial purchase price, which is fun to see — though that first buy was a long time ago, of course, I bought my first GOOG shares 19 years ago, back in February of 2005, when they were dipping as the six month insider-selling window opened after their IPO. And for some context, this was not some teensy penny stock way back when, it was already a very large company, with a market cap around $50 billion… and yes, most folks thought it was pretty expensive in 2005, and it had almost doubled since it’s IPO the previous summer ($50 billion was a lot of money in 2005 — the biggest companies back then were GE, Microsoft and Exxon, with market caps around $300 billion).

So that can serve as a little reminder, at least, that you don’t have to start tiny to get great long-term returns, you just have to try to choose quality companies, hold on to the ones who continue to have a good and growing business over time, regardless of whether the market thinks they’re great or terrible in any given quarter, and think really long term. And actually, that has been relatively easy to do with Alphabet, since the business has been much more stable than a lot of technology firms, and the stock never really got to a completely crazy valuation over the past 20 years… and also never really had operational problems that indicated to me that they were in serious trouble. They certainly had bad years, relatively speaking, particularly before they brought in the current management team to sharpen up their financial reporting and become more transparent with shareholders (and put some control on their spending)… but the business never looked like it was likely to get much worse, and never really caused me to feel itchy fingered and want to sell. That’s pretty unusual.

As Charlie Munger would say (paraphrasing here), you don’t make your money buying and selling… you make your money sitting on your ass.

This was Alphabet’s biggest earnings “beat” in a couple years, and analyst estimates are also likely to continue to trickle higher over the next few days, but the current forecast is about $7.50 in earnings for the full year, and I thing GOOGL is a buy whenever it’s available at an average valuation (or preferably a below-average one) — the argument being that it’s a well-above-average company, so if we’re valuing it as average we’ve got some wiggle room. Right now, “average” is 20X forward earnings for the S&P 500, so my “preferred buy” moves up to $150 [more like $160 now]. My “max buy” is 30X trailing earnings, given my expectation that they are very likely to be able to grow earnings at an average pace of at least 15% per year for a long time, and that would be $188 [actually, that’s up to about $195 now].

There is risk, of course, but beyond the valuation risk, the possibility that perhaps the whole market will get back down to a much lower valuation during any weaker period, I think the “story” risks are overblown when it comes to Google. Rears of Google losing its search business to AI-fueled competitors are so far quite unfounded, given the lack of any evidence of that loss in their numbers, and given that Google’s own AI work in search is proceeding, with a focus on continuing to manage that work to make sure they don’t kill the golden goose of search advertising. Search has gotten quite a big junkier, in my opinion, with all the machine-generated clickbait sites out there now, so it might even be that Google is able to improve their search business and make it more profitable in the future, there’s room for them to either gain or lose something as this technology evolves. I don’t think it makes sense to assume that they’ll screw up in a major way, despite the fact that a lot of investors like to muse about that narrative based on their public mistakes with some early generative AI products — they have also been the dominant player in search, with by far the best distribution, for decades, and they are not likely to lose market share quickly even if they do screw up.

And I think regulatory risk, though also real and with the potential to upset their business over the next five years, is unlikely to lead to a loss in shareholder value anytime soon. It is possible that a few years of antitrust trials could lead to something dramatic, like separating Android from Google or otherwise breaking up the business in some way… but I also think that any “break up Alphabet” command from the courts is more likely to create value for shareholders than to destroy it. Google doesn’t get much credit, in the eyes of investors, for much of anything beyond their search business as it is, so separating out their smaller businesses could potentially clarify the value. I think fines are more likely than a breakup, regardless, and Alphabet is such a cash-gushing machine that they can essentially laugh off any feasible fine… and, like Microsoft did a decade ago, could probably pretty quickly adjust to any “pro-competitive” changes to the business that are required to settle antitrust litigation.

Those two risks are real — AI could change the search business and catch Google flat-footed in future years, and Alphabet could be forced by antitrust to open its core businesses up to more competition, or lose some of their distribution advantage (like the deal to make Google the default search engine on iPhones). But I don’t think they’re meaningfully more scary than risks faced by Microsoft, Amazon or Meta, and I think Alphabet is likely to push through these challenges and maintain their hold on search and search advertising, which remains one of the best businesses in the world. And, as has often been the case, they’re growing at least as well as their major competitors like Microsoft and Meta, and are trading at a more reasonable valuation (META has come down more sharply, so they’re really at about the same valuation as GOOG now).

I’ll stick with Google as we head into my 20th year as a shareholder, but it’s close to 10% of my portfolio and I don’t feel the need to “double down” and buy more. I’m unlikely to do that unless we hit a period where the shares really overreact to some bad news.

And incidentally, I’ll note that the persistent ~1% gap between GOOG and GOOGL persists — and that’s just silly. If either share class should be more valuable, it should be the voting shares (GOOGL) not the non-voting shares (GOOG), but GOOGL has been at a 1%+ discount to GOOG for years. Our vote doesn’t matter at Google, that’s controlled by insiders still, with their super-voting shares, so if you want to buy Alphabet just buy whichever share class is cheapest… and right now, you can take some solace in the fact that the rest of the market is dumb enough, perhaps just because their habit is to use the older “GOOG” ticker, to make the better share class trade at a lower price.

So, again, hard to argue with Alphabet here — you get significant exposure to whatever the AI mania becomes, but also a dominant advertising business that has proven its value year after year, even though it also might make the business a little more cyclical, and this cash-gushing company also recently started to pay a dividend, buys back enough stock to make up for their stock-based compensation (and then some), and is valued at a small premium to the market today. That could obviously change, we could see a market crash that brings all the big leaders down to discounted valuations, or we could see more meaningful antitrust attention that really takes a chunk out of Alphabet’s profits in the years to come, but I’m not particularly worried — GOOGL is still arguably the cheapest big tech company, antitrust cases and regulatory pressure are extremely long-term problems but solving those problems could make Alphabet more valuable to shareholders, not less (if something extreme happens and the company is broken up in five years, for example), and they’re at least holding their own in AI development, as you would expect from the big tech company that was the most aggressive spender on AI during the pre-ChatGPT decade.

And, indeed, it’s hard to really argue with any of Tilson’s “perfect portfolio” stocks, since I own half of them and the other two are obvious leaders, trading at least at somewhat rational valuations. I would not expect great growth from any of the five companies he’s picking here, though Alphabet will probably out-grow the others, but I do expect them all to continue to generate solid profits, continue to deserve premium valuation multiples given their cash-generating power and their long histories of good performance, and to probably be relatively “anti-fragile” in a bear market. They won’t make you rich, I expect, not unless you’ve got 30 years to compound your earnings, these aren’t “shock and awe” companies… but they should help your money continue to grow.  I would guess that the performance of this “perfect portfolio” for the next five years will probably be lower than the gain in Tilson’s previous “perfect portfolio” (AMZN, META, GOOGL, BRK-B, MO) from late 2019 through today, just given the blistering performance of those tech stocks during and after the pandemic… but you never know.

That’s just what I think, though, and when it comes to your money it’s your call to make — want to stash your capital in shares of Berkshire Hathaway, Hershey, CME Group, Visa and Alphabet? Have other similar blue chip-type stocks you prefer, or think we should consider? Let us know with a comment below… thanks for reading!

P.S. We haven’t heard much from subscribers since Tilson took over this flagship newsletter, so if you’ve subscribed to that service and have some feedback for other readers and investors, please chime in on our reviews page for Stansberry’s Investment Advisory. Thanks!

Disclosure: Of the companies mentioned above, I own shares of Berkshire Hathaway, NVIDIA, Alphabet, Amazon and Hershey. I have trailing stop orders in place for NVIDIA that could be tripped at any time, but will otherwise not trade in any covered stock (or alter that stop-loss order) for at least three days after publication, per Stock Gumshoe’s trading rules.