Substack Discount Update & Notes on Today’s P2 Dow 30 Maverick Portfolio Update Report
May 5, 2026
A note on the Substack discount and the billcara.com transition
The 50% discount code for Substack free subscribers is working as intended. You can access it here: https://caraportfolio.substack.com/6e5f35f6
Several readers have reported technology issues, and the new billcara.com is only a few days away from going live. For that reason, I’ll delay terminating the Substack discount offer until the day billcara.com launches and portfolio reports are running on both platforms.
Today’s report: the P2 Dow 30 Maverick Portfolio
The P2 Dow 30 Maverick portfolio was launched last week. After today’s close, I’ll publish the Tuesday update, to be followed by the Friday update — establishing the twice-weekly rhythm readers can expect going forward.
This is a portfolio I designed specifically for students of the market. By “student” I don’t mean someone in a classroom — I mean an adult of any age who is keen to learn the principles of investing through a real portfolio under my management.
The Maverick name reflects how I describe investors who refuse to accept Wall Street sell-side babble and instead make decisions based on their own judgment that has been sharpened by learning to think independently and objectively about new investments.
Because the mission of this report is to focus on investing principles, some of the educational material previously carried in the weekend Navigator is being migrated into this portfolio report and into the forthcoming Maverick books that will support the program.
Why only six stocks?
Most everyone already knows the names of the 30 Dow companies. Rather than spread attention across all of them, I’ve chosen just six to focus on with actual investments. Six is a manageable number — enough to learn from, not enough to overwhelm.
The data behind each name
For each company in the Maverick portfolio, the analysis draws on three sources:
INSTAT — my proprietary technical scoring system
Ziggma — corporate fundamental scores
Value Line — free company and stock studies, long promoted as the most trusted source of investment information, included in our database
Dow 30 companies that meet the Ziggma screen (a total score of 80 or more) are kept in a watchlist that I monitor carefully.
A note on the starting position
The Cara Fiduciary Protocol governs how this portfolio is managed. However, because the Maverick portfolio was initiated at a moment when market prices are extremely overbought and due for mean reversion, my choice of the first six stocks was deliberately subjective. The Protocol will guide every decision from here, but the entry point itself required judgment rather than a clean signal.
Why I believe the market is “extremely overbought”
That phrase isn’t rhetorical. Two specific signals are flashing right now.
1. The Nasdaq 100 is breaching its Bollinger Bands.
The Nasdaq 100, which is heavily weighted toward the largest technology names, has been gaining at a pace that is simply not sustainable. Prices have pushed outside the upper Bollinger Band — a technical boundary set at two standard deviations above the moving average. In plain English, that band marks the range within which roughly 95% of normal trading takes place. When price breaks above it, the market is trading at an extreme.
Extremes don’t last. They are typically followed by mean reversion — the tendency of prices, after stretching far away from their average, to snap back toward it. Mean reversion isn’t a theory or a forecast; it’s a recurring pattern documented across decades of market data. The further price travels from the mean, the stronger the pull back becomes.
2. Treasury yields are reaching the level where money rotates out of stocks.
Investors who want zero-risk returns can now get them at warning levels: roughly 5.00% on the 30-year US Treasury and 4.50% on the 10-year. Those are the thresholds at which institutional and individual money historically begins shifting out of equities and into bonds. When you can lock in a guaranteed yield at those levels, the case for paying a stretched price for stocks weakens considerably.
What this means for an investor
Broad market pull-backs are like the ocean tide. Unless you’re a particularly strong swimmer, it’s difficult not to lose ground when the water goes out. Most investors will give back some of their gains in a meaningful correction — that’s the nature of the cycle.
But there is one thing every investor can learn to do: stop chasing stocks whose one-to-three-month gains have been excessive, regardless of how positive the corporate earnings reports look. By the time those earnings hit the wire, they’ve usually already been presumed and baked into the price. Buying after the fact is buying the news, not the value.
That discipline — refusing to chase — is exactly the kind of independent judgment the Maverick portfolio is designed to teach.