Flagship Portfolio
This is how I cut my teeth, ladies and gentlemen. This is what I started doing back in the 1980s: Ben Graham style deep value investing. Ben Graham, in the last interview he gave (published in Financial Analyst Journal), said, "Look, all that stuff that I used to do—going in and digging deep into the companies and doing the deep dive—it worked well in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s because I was the only one doing it. Well, since everybody is doing it, there is not really an edge, but never fear. What we have tested is that if you take simple strategies and build them based on valuation and buy 25 to 30 of these deeply undervalued companies based on different criteria, you can outperform the market."
We start from there. We add in a healthy dose of Marty Whitman-style credit analysis. Deeply undervalued companies with good credit or that have leverage and are paying back their debt outperform the market over time.
Again, this is an area where you can really add tremendous value by being sensitive about volatility. This strategy does a little better than the market in normal times.
When you are coming off a bad market when the market has cracked—think 2009, 2020, and some other periods where we have had big market dives, last April—you are talking massive returns to small-cap deep value.
For a video walkthrough of how this portfolio works, click here.
Here’s the portfolio, updated on 11/18/2025:
Subscribe to Premium to read the rest.
Become a paying subscriber of Tim Melvin's Flagship Report to get access to this post and other subscriber-only content.
UpgradeA subscription gets you:
- No ads.
- Access to Tim's REITs Portfolio, focusing on underpriced REITs with excellent fundamentals for market-beating total return.
- Access to Tim's Alternative Fixed Income Portfolio, focusing on bonds and preferred shares issued by the best REITs in the country.
- Access to Tim's "Hyper-Accumulation" Small-Cap Momentum Portfolio, which delivers options-like returns with much lower risk.
- Access to Tim's Small-Cap Deep Value Portfolio, inspired by Ben Graham and that outperforms the market in almost every year we've backtested it.
- Exclusive weekly video (and transcript) from Tim with his analysis of the Flagship Report portfolios, the market and economy, and much more.