The S&P Book
The large American names and a portfolio to hold beside them.
The book nearly everyone starts with. Positions in the five hundred, opened when the setup earns one, and the model portfolio that most of your money can simply sit in.
- A written thesis with every position, the day it opens
- The model portfolio, every weight and every change published
- The nightly screen: five hundred names, ranked every evening
- The Annual picks: one list a year, written in January and held until December
The record so far
Closed positions, from the public record
- Closed
- 251
- Closed at a gain
- 65%
- Average return
- +4.6%
- Average hold
- 16 days
Open now4
Per position, gross, exit against entry. No fees, no sizing. Not a portfolio return, and never added to the model portfolio's.
What you get with this book.
The picks
Live positions in the large American names. Each one says why I opened it, what would change my mind, and carries the note I write when I close it.
The model portfolio
Mosaic Mid-Horizon: a diversified core of index funds, rebalanced roughly every four months. You see every weight, every change, and the line explaining it.
The nightly screen
The five hundred names of the S&P, ranked every evening by how far each has stretched from its own trend. Start the morning with the dozen worth reading.
The Annual picks
One list a year. On the first session of January the screen names fifteen to fifty large American companies that move with the market rather than on their own news, equal weight, and nothing changes until the next January. Seven years of it, against SPY, further down this page.
And with every book
The iOS app, the archive of every closed position with its thesis and exit note, the letters, the watchlist, the X-ray of your own book and the forty-six themes. The same discipline whichever books you hold.
The nightly screen
It is the screen I run before I open a position, and it comes with this book. One end-of-day read per name, blended into a score from 0 to 100 for how stretched it is against its own trend.
- Start the morning with the dozen names worth reading
- Check anything you already hold and see where it sits
- Updated every evening, after the close
One list a year. Written in January, held until December.
The Annual picks are a third way to use the S&P Book. On the first session of each year the screen names the large American companies that move most with the market and least on their own news, fifteen to fifty of them, equal weight. Then nothing: no trades until the next January.
Know what you hold: the list moves about 1.4 times the market. Its worst year was 2022 at −4.9%, and inside a year it has fallen as far as −41.0% (2020).
Ahead of SPY in six of seven years
- Annual picks
- SPY, same window
- 2020
- +31.9%
- SPY +17.3%
- 15 names
- 2021
- +42.9%
- SPY +30.5%
- 34 names
- 2022
- −4.9%
- SPY −18.6%
- 37 names
- 2023
- +69.0%
- SPY +26.7%
- 15 names
- 2024
- +10.7%
- SPY +25.6%
- 15 names
- 2025
- +60.8%
- SPY +18.0%
- 16 names
- 2026to date
- +78.3%
- SPY +12.7%
- 17 names
Equal weight, entry at the first session of the year, exit at the last, dividends reinvested, from Jan 2, 2020 to Sep 28, 2026. Each list was built from the data as it stood on its 1 January. A separate record from the model portfolio above: the two are never combined. Past results do not predict future ones.
Where they landed
An average hides whether a record came from steady gains or one outlier. This is every closed position in the book, by return, with the losses on the left where they belong.
Per position, gross, exit against entry. No fees, no sizing. Not a portfolio return, and never added to the model portfolio's.
Every closed positionAdd another book any time.
The price depends on how many books you hold, never on which, so adding one later costs exactly what adding it now would.