I have long said that in the newsletter industry, working with a publisher gets very difficult. Look at my own history. Every time I get in with a publisher, they control what we publish, when we publish it, how we publish it, how we structure it, and what the fulfillment looks like.
The important question in the publishing industry is not "Will it make people money?" but "Can we sell it?" They do not care much about renewals in my experience because they will just do a new promo to a new list and bring in a bunch of new subscribers. If it works, that is a bonus, but it has to be easy to sell.
Easy to sell means driven by politics, by tribalism, or promising gains that are impossible to achieve and maintain over a lengthy period.
We are not going to do that. I know from 40 years of research—of really digging into the markets, of crunching numbers, of learning from some of the best minds in the history of the business—what works and what does not. This includes some of the very best value investors, people who could trace their careers all the way back to one generation away from Ben Graham's original classroom, people who knew Ben Graham, who knew Warren Buffett.
Some of the best momentum investors, traders, and fixed income specialists have been generous in sharing their knowledge with me over the years. I made it a point to interact with and reach out to and talk with the very best investors of the periods of my career.
I have read everything I could get my hands on. That is my policy. If it agrees with me, I want to read it. If it does not agree with me, I really want to read it. I want to know what the other side of the story looks like.
One of the better pieces of advice I ever got was: if it can be counted, it must be counted. Everything must be tested.
It is not enough to have an idea. I have 10 ideas a day, which equals 3,650 ideas a year. Probably 3,647 of those are bad ideas or average ideas when we actually test them on data over an extended period. They sound cool, they look cool, could sell like crazy, but they are not going to make anybody money. They are not going to be worth what you pay for them.
My thought was this: we know there are four things that individual investors should focus on based on where they are in their life cycle and what their goals are. These four things will fit everybody, whether you are in the hyper-aggressive "make it now" approach, or you are the person who wakes up at 60 and says, "I do not want to go through another 50% decline. I want something that will provide me above-average streams of income with a margin of safety. I can live with some fluctuation, but I need that income coming in constantly." Everything in between fits as well.
This is something that fits everybody and will allow you to achieve your goals, something you can use regardless of your personality. If you want to be hyper-aggressive all the time, if you like a little in-and-out action, this Flagship report can cover that for you. If you like being hands-on, digging in and doing special situations that nobody else is doing, that works fine. If you just want to sit back and collect cash and let it roll in, that is great. You want to look at your portfolio only once a month, make a few changes, move on with your life, go to a ballgame, play with the kids or grandkids, focus on your business or professional practice—whatever is important to you, The Flagship Report will work for you.
Here in the Flagship Report, I want you to have everything that you need—things that we know will work for individual investors over periods of time to build wealth based on where you are in the life cycle.
The Four Core Strategies
Nearly 20% of Forbes 400 billionaires built their fortunes through real estate. Now I've cracked the code for ordinary investors to tap into this wealth-building machine through REITs—without buying a single property.
Since 1972, REITs have handily outperformed the S&P 500 with less volatility and higher dividend yields. But I don't buy just any REIT. I target deeply undervalued real estate investment trusts with rock-solid fundamentals.
Take one gaming and leisure company in my portfolio, yielding 6.36% while trading at just 83% of net asset value. Or a medical REIT throwing off a massive 10.26% yield at only 56% of NAV—like buying dollar bills for 56 cents.
My current REIT portfolio spans everything from healthcare facilities to industrial warehouses, each selected using my strict value criteria. One hotel REIT offers an 11.79% yield while trading at just 52% of asset value. A hospitality company pays 7.47% at a 69% discount to NAV.
This isn't speculation on the next hot property market. These are established companies owning billions in income-producing assets—airports, toll roads, hospitals, apartment complexes—that must legally distribute 90% of their profits to shareholders.
The beauty of my approach? You collect high dividends while waiting for the market to recognize these assets' true value. When a REIT trades below its net asset value, you're essentially buying real estate at a discount to replacement cost.
The result: Consistent income plus capital appreciation as valuations normalize. While tech stocks gyrate wildly, my REIT selections provide the steady wealth-building foundation that's created more millionaires than any other asset class in American history.
While ordinary investors settle for pathetic Treasury yields, the ultra-wealthy have been quietly collecting double-digit income from alternative fixed income investments most people have never heard of.
I've cracked this code, building a portfolio that yields up to 12% annually through the same strategies used by family offices and billionaire investors.
My Alternative Fixed Income portfolio doesn't buy regular corporate bonds or government debt. Instead, I target mortgage REIT preferred shares, closed-end funds trading at discounts, and specialized debt securities backed by real assets.
Take one real estate income fund in my portfolio, yielding a massive 12.08%. Or a capital opportunities fund at 11.77%. These aren't risky junk bonds—they're professionally managed investment vehicles holding diversified portfolios of real estate mortgages, infrastructure debt, and other asset-backed securities.
I have mortgage REIT notes yielding 9.53% backed by residential mortgages. A minerals partnership pays 9.7% from oil and gas royalty income. Another minerals company delivers 9.92% from mineral rights across prime U.S. energy basins.
The secret sauce? These investments often trade at discounts to their underlying asset values, creating both high current income and potential capital appreciation. When you can buy a dollar of mortgage assets for 85 cents and collect 10% annual income, you're playing by the same rules as institutional investors.
Why this works: Most individual investors don't know these securities exist. The complexity scares away casual buyers, keeping prices artificially depressed for sophisticated investors like me who understand the underlying assets.
The result: Double-digit yields from investments backed by hard assets—real estate, energy infrastructure, and commercial mortgages—that provide the inflation protection and steady income streams that have preserved and grown wealth for generations.
While Wall Street's billion-dollar funds ignore companies too small for their massive portfolios, I've discovered a quantitative goldmine in forgotten small-cap stocks.
My "Hyperaccumulation" portfolio just delivered an 85% winner in September alone. The portfolio's annualized return? A staggering 60%.
This isn't stock-picking based on hunches or headlines. It's a ruthless, rules-based system that I've built to scan thousands of micro-cap companies for two critical factors: undervaluation and momentum. When both align, the results can be explosive.
I just had an entertainment distributor post 481% EBITDA growth and triple its earnings per share. Another financial services company achieved three consecutive quarters of GAAP profitability after years of losses.
My system doesn't play favorites. When Bitcoin companies qualified, they made the cut despite my personal dislike of cryptocurrency. When stocks stop performing, they're eliminated without emotion.
The portfolio rebalances monthly on the 15th with surgical precision. No second-guessing. No "it'll come back" wishful thinking. Just 25 equally-weighted positions in companies most institutional investors can't even buy due to their size.
The volatility is breathtaking—both up and down. But for aggressive investors seeking maximum wealth accumulation, my quantitative approach has identified winners like a sandwich company that delivered 30% gains when it received a takeover bid.
Warning: This strategy is NOT suitable for conservative investors. Monthly swings can be violent. But for those with the stomach for it, my hyperaccumulation approach offers access to the same small-cap opportunities that built America's greatest fortunes—before they become too big for extraordinary returns.
This is how I cut my teeth, ladies and gentlemen. I learned this strategy in the 1980s from the same Ben Graham principles that guided Warren Buffett. Now, after 35 years of refinement, my small-cap deep value approach is positioned for potentially massive returns.
This is Graham's original formula: Buy deeply undervalued companies with strong balance sheets for less than their liquidation value. But I add a crucial twist—Marty Whitman's credit analysis to ensure these beaten-down companies can survive and thrive.
My current picks read like a bargain hunter's dream. One therapeutics company trades at just 87% of tangible book value. A furniture manufacturer, despite paying a 4.76% dividend, trades at only 96% of book value. An outdoor products company sits at 91% of tangible book—less than the cash and assets on their books.
Here's what most investors miss: These aren't distressed companies heading for bankruptcy. They're profitable enterprises temporarily out of favor, trading below the value of their assets.
I have a coffee company trading at just 6.8 times earnings while sitting at 87% of book value. In normal markets, this creates modest outperformance. But when markets crack—like in 2009, 2020, or this past April—small-cap deep value delivers "massive returns," as I've seen firsthand.
Ben Graham himself said in his final interview that buying 25-30 deeply undervalued companies based on simple valuation criteria could outperform the market. I've spent decades perfecting this approach, adding credit quality analysis that Graham never had access to.
The opportunity today: Market euphoria has investors chasing expensive growth stocks, leaving genuine bargains ignored and mispriced. For patient value investors, this creates the setup for potentially life-changing returns when sentiment inevitably shifts - as it already looks to be doing.
Your Bonus: The Biotech Watchlist
Biotech cycles in and out of favor, but it never goes away entirely. The reason is simple. The biggest single-day winners and the biggest single-day losers in the stock market are almost always biotech names.
Stories of biotechs going from $1 to $100. Stories of life-changing molecules. Stories of cures.
Here is the honest truth. Without an MD or a PhD, clinical-stage biotech is extremely difficult to evaluate on a fundamental basis. The usual screens that work beautifully in banks and REITs and industrial companies do not translate.
For a while, people got excited about biotech names trading below net cash, which sounds compelling right up until you realize the reason they all trade below net cash is that they raised money in an IPO and are systematically spending it on trials, regulatory work, and development. The cash is the business model. It is going out the door on purpose.
There have been edges that worked. A friend of mine who understood the chemistry used to short Phase 2 approvals systematically and did remarkably well at it. The borrow is harder now, but the phenomenon still exists because the market still overreacts to phase two results in both directions.
The problem is that without the scientific background to evaluate the underlying data, you are largely guessing about which trials deserve the overreaction and which ones do not.
Dan Rasmussen and his team at Verdad have been on the front edge of quantitative research for years. Whether it is fixed income, credit spreads, or deep value factor work, they produce serious research that holds up. When they turn their attention to a problem, I pay attention.
They have been working on a quantitative framework for biotech investing, and it is elegant precisely because it does not require you to understand what is happening inside the drug molecule.
It is built on three things that investors can actually verify: smart money ownership by biotech-specialist hedge funds with documented track records in the space, insider buying by people who presumably know something about what the science is doing, and the level of spending on research, development, and trials relative to what you would expect at a given stage.
That is a framework a generalist can replicate. The databases exist. The screens are buildable. The factors are measurable.
About every three months, as institutional holdings are updated, we will run the screen and publish a list. The list will identify the companies that clear all the boxes: biotech-specialist institutions with strong track records are buying, insiders are buying, and spending patterns are consistent with serious development rather than theater.
We will tell you something about what each company is working on.
We will not pretend to be experts in the clinical science. We will not dress it up in hype language and tell you this is the miracle molecule that changes everything.
What we will tell you is what the data says. And the data behind this framework is not thin. It has a decade of backtested history behind it. The spread in annualized returns between the stocks it identifies as promising and the stocks it flags as likely losers is not small. We are talking about the difference between strong positive returns and meaningful negative ones — consistently, over 10 years of real market cycles including the biotech boom, the biotech bust, and everything in between.
Matching Strategy to Life Stage

Wherever you are in your lifespan, if you are looking for steady compounded returns, then you want to be in small-cap deep value and REITs. You want to favor those small-cap deep value stocks that pay dividends.
Are you looking for just income and growth of income? REITs and Alternative Income Portfolio. That is your down-the-road strategy that will deliver what you need to meet your financial goals.
You want income with upside? That is a no-brainer. You want to be mostly in the alternative income portfolio. You will have an income element that is well in excess of inflation. You can set a little aside to grow the capital over time. Plus, we are valuation-sensitive in the portfolio. Making volatility work for us by buying when things are undervalued or trading at a discount gives us an edge and some upside on top of the very high levels of income we plan to collect off that portfolio.
This will fit where you are and your personality. If you are really aggressive, then you want to be mostly focused on the small-cap momentum and the small-cap deep value based on the current levels of market volatility. You want to be opportunistic with some of the alternative income and REIT situations, but the small-cap stocks will be your main focus.
Again, everything you need to meet your needs from way back here as a 25-year old all the way up here as a 65-year old going, "Hey wait, it is really important that I get my money back at the end of the day."
I could charge more. I have been told that I should charge more. I am not going to charge more. I know it is marketing 101—one of the first things you learn, that setting that price really high creates an aura of being exclusive, something that the poor folks cannot buy. I am not doing that. Yes, I want the guy with tons of cash. I want him in here as a subscriber. I want the school teacher who has been busting their butt for the last 30 years tucking money aside. They built up a nest egg that is critically important to them and they have their goals. I want them as a subscriber too. I want the small business owner who is trying to build his wealth and run and manage and fund his business at the same time.
Basically, I want to be widespread. I do not need to make all of my money off any one reader. I am looking for a pool of people who share similar thoughts, similar goals, who believe that focusing on value, on credit quality, on strength and fundamental strength, paying attention to the fundamentals, ignoring the noise. I believe that is the best way, the proven way to build wealth. If I can get a group of those together, I do not need to ever raise the price. That is where we are going with this.
Our Macro-Driven Approach
We will be driven on a macro basis by credit spreads. High yield credit spreads give us the big picture.
When you have spreads that are like they are today—really tight, just going sideways, with no signs they are going up—then you want to be in high quality, high yield. You want to be in the higher quality REITs. You want to be in small-cap momentum in a big way and around the edges of small-cap deep value.
This is not the fantastic time to be a buyer. As a result, there is not really a lot of small-cap deep value. You kind of buy the ones that you like, but high quality, high yield, mortgage REITs, commercial mortgage real estate REITs? Yes, big time. Residential mortgage REITs? Yes, big time. That is where you want to be in this environment where credit is good, the price momentum is strong, the economy is basically pretty good, nobody is afraid of anything yet, the economy is humming along, inflation is not too bad. If you ignore all the noise coming out of Washington and Wall Street, things are actually pretty good. That is where we are right now. That is how we are advising folks to be positioned.
When they are low like they are today and they start rising, then you want to tighten up the quality in your portfolio. You are going to want at that point to be looking at maybe owning some gold stocks that have good fundamental and price momentum. You are going to want the really higher quality, shorter-term fixed income. You are going to want to limit yourself to the highest quality of business development companies in the private credit space. You are going to want really high quality REITs.
When they are really high and they are spiking up and they have that first down month, that is small-cap deep value time. That is where you are really going to hit a monster home run with small-cap deep value. About the third or fourth month of it going down, small-cap momentum is going to kick in in a big way. It is a great time for high quality, high yield bonds, for mortgage REITs of all flavors because they will be at very depressed prices. It is a fantastic time to be just piling into business development companies.
We have seen this opportunity before. We will see it again. Again, focusing on the quality of the BDC, the quality of the assets and the valuation, and buying when credit spreads tell us that things are bad, but they are getting better. It is going to be—I hate using the phrase—but life-changing wealth, even for more income-oriented investors.
We are going to use credit spreads to determine the flavor of the mix, how aggressive or how conservative we are being.
The Complete Package
We are putting all this in a wrapper. We are calling it Tim Melvin's Flagship Report. Each week you get a short video with a 30,000-foot macro view derived primarily from credit spreads, from National Financial Conditions Index, from data. Not from stories, not from rumors, not from arguments, from none of that. From what the data is actually telling us about the economy. We will do a little video on that. We will tell a couple stories maybe if we have something good going on, and then you will have the written report focusing on a different portfolio each week.
There is no point in talking to you about REITs every week. That is ridiculous. Once a month is plenty. We will do REITs one week, fixed income one week, small-cap momentum one week, and small-cap deep value one week. If there is anything that needs to be shifted around between those asset classes based on life cycle and what we are seeing in the real world, then I will tell you. It is up to you whether you do it or not, but I will tell you my thoughts.
That is the Tim Melvin Flagship Report. It is different from what anybody else is doing. It should work a lot better than what I think anybody else is doing. We will have more to say, particularly about the interplay and the magic that happens when you mix 50% small-cap momentum and 50% small-cap deep value into a single portfolio.
For income investors, I am excited about the income portion of this. We are going to really deploy the alternative income strategies which can really help you get where you are going without having the broader risk of owning stocks.
Why We Think Differently
We think differently than everybody else. It has worked for over 35 years. It does not go up every day. It does not go up every week. It will not make you rich by next Tuesday. That is okay. If you think the same, if you have friends that think the same, tell them about it. Again, this is going to be reasonably priced. I am not supporting an entire administrative staff, 20 writers. We do not have rents on downtown inner city office buildings that we have to pay. I just do not have any of that overhead. I do not have marketing people to think up stupid, dumb promises that I have no intention of keeping.
We use Beehive as a platform that takes care of all the payment processing and all that for us. I do not have the overhead. I do not have to charge you an arm and a leg. I could charge more, pay a couple marketing consultants to come in. I know some good ones. Hire a copywriter. I do not want to do that. I want to make you money. If I make you money, you will continue to renew, and I will continue to build a fantastic business. I think that is the way the business ought to operate. I am going to see if I am right or not because we are going to push this out and stick to our guns.
It is going to be REITs, just like we started with. We are expanding out the alternative income section. We are keeping the small-cap momentum going and we will add small-cap deep value to the portfolio.
Tim Melvin's Flagship Report. I like the name. I love the logo:

I am a bit of a history buff, especially the Revolutionary War, and having grown up in Maryland and Annapolis, I am a bit of a Navy buff and a Navy football fan.
Starts Saturday. Go Navy.
I hope you like the changes. I hope you stick around, stick with us. There is a lot of money to be made exploiting all the volatility that is going to come our way over the next decade. I think that the broader markets are not going to do well over the next decade. That is what the macro stuff is telling us. We have an opportunity to be in those asset classes that have historically just blown away the broad market when things get a little rocky.
Thanks for being a part of the adventure this far. I hope you stay with us. I will do everything in my power to make sure this is powerful, interesting, educational, and occasionally entertaining.
We will talk again soon. If you have any questions, shoot us an email. I will get back to you usually within 24 hours. Thanks, everybody.
Tim Melvin
Editor, Tim Melvin’s Flagship Report

