About
The Rules
One stock per quarter. Hold it for 25 years.
No rebalancing. No selling because the thesis changed in year two, or because the market dropped, or because something more exciting showed up. The pick gets made, the entry gets logged publicly, and then the clock starts. Every quarter adds one position.
Each pick is benchmarked against the S&P 500 Total Return index with the same dollar amount, invested on the same date.
Why This Format
Most investment writing optimizes for the wrong time horizon. A quarterly earnings take has a shelf life of three months. A 12-month price target is obsolete the moment anything material changes. Even "long-term" analysis tends to mean two or three years which is long enough to look patient but short enough to still be performance-chasing in disguise.
Twenty-five years is a different kind of commitment. It's long enough that the quality of the underlying business including its competitive position, its capital allocation discipline, and its ability to compound retained earnings becomes the dominant variable. Short-term sentiment, macro calls, rate predictions: none of it matters much if you're asking whether a business will be meaningfully more valuable in 2050 than it was in 2025.
The 25-year horizon also creates an honest forcing function. If a pick requires a specific macro environment, a particular interest rate regime, or a management team staying in place, it probably doesn't belong here. The picks that belong here are businesses that should be able to compound through a few recessions, a few management transitions, and a few technology shifts because the underlying economics are durable enough to survive all of that.
How Returns Are Calculated
All returns on this site are total return: dividends reinvested, splits adjusted. For individual stocks, this means using adjusted close price series that reflect the full return including distributions. For the S&P 500 benchmark, it means using the S&P 500 Total Return index directly, which assumes dividend reinvestment at index level.
What This Site Is Not
This is not investment advice. Nothing here should be read as a recommendation to buy or sell anything. The picks are simply a personal log.
The short list of the four stocks that made serious consideration each quarter but didn't get picked goes to newsletter subscribers.