Each year I check in on every company that I own and cover for the Irregulars, even those where my opinion doesn’t change much from month to month (or even from year to year, in some cases)… but we’re going to do it a little differently this year. This is all part of what will be a transition over the next few weeks in how I write to you about my favorite ideas and about my portfolio.

As I noted a few weeks ago while we were coming to the end of the year, I’ve long gotten questions about my personal portfolio and about the performance of my “picks” and about why I own some stocks in the “Irregulars” listing and don’t own others. I don’t offer a portfolio for other folks to follow, we’re not trying to provide an advisory that directs you to make trades each month, but I do hope to help other investors by sharing my thought process and, since you’re a kind and generous soul and are willing to pay up as an Irregular to keep Stock Gumshoe going, I want to provide you with, well, more.

And it has, I’m sad to say, gotten a little confusing over the years as my special coverage for the Irregulars has evolved — we’ve had core stocks that I write about a lot, and I’ve profiled interesting investments for you most months, and sometimes I own those stocks and sometimes I don’t… and sometimes I cover them a lot going forward, and sometimes I don’t.

So I’m going to revamp what I write and share with you to make it a bit more clear, and will be changing up those Irregulars spreadsheets and “performance” measures to reflect that.

The end result? The Friday File commentary will still include teaser solutions sometimes, and I’ll still write to you once a week about something that I find interesting — but from now on, the Irregulars-only “non-teaser” coverage in pieces like my “Idea of the Month” articles will be much closer to being just the coverage of my personal real-money portfolio and the stocks I’m making decisions about throughout the year.

I will disclose the rough portfolio weightings in the stocks I write about and own, and publish updated summaries of those holdings at least once a month in some form (I’m still hammering ...