Porter Stansberry knows that controversial and religious and political stuff draws eyeballs, and that if you’re trying to sell something, being controversial is way better than being boring.

So his latest big “documentary” video sales pitch, which is an ad for The Big Secret on Wall Street ($1,000/yr, 30-day refund period with 10% charge), is called “God’s Investment” … and it touches on the religious theme a bit more than I would like, promising “An investment so perfect and with returns so endless, only God could have created it.”

But the basic argument makes sense, and I generally like the sector he’s touting. Can we ID any of the stocks he might be teasing in this “documentary?” Let’s see… I’m going to blather on a bit today, and touch on a bunch of different companies, so strap in.

Throughout today’s note, I’ll quote a few of the things Porter says in the piece… though, sadly, he doesn’t include a transcript, and I wasn’t willing to listen to it a second time (we’ve all got our limits), so I may be paraphrasing a bit… here’s one bit to tantalize you…

“If most people invested only in these firms, and no other sector, they would significantly increase their annual returns.”

He includes a chart of a stock that almost 10X’d the market’s returns from 1985 to 2023, with, as he puts it, “almost no downside” — though really what that means is the stock recovered within a few years from every big downward move. If you owned the stock during those drops that look small in the historical chart,  they probably felt like big “downside” events to you, in the moment. Here’s what it looks like, in a screen grab from his “documentary”…

But sure, it never had the “down 90%” downside of some of the most volatile big-time winners — like Amazon (AMZN), for example, which has fallen 70-90% a few times over the past 25-30 years.

And I’ve been following Porter’s pitches for 20 years now… so I actually recognized that chart immediately, it’s the chart of a company that 40 years ago was called Replacement Lens, Inc., and is now known as the fantastic specialty insurance company RLI (RLI). So yes, as he has done many times in the past, Porter is talking up the insurance industry with this “documentary.”

And I don’t blame him, frankly, he has ...