This is the question everything else has been building toward, and you deserve a straight answer. So here is the track record behind the method, what the Zen Alpha Portfolio actually is, and a couple of real examples. Including the uncomfortable parts, because a pitch that only shows the good days isn't worth your trust.
The long-term record
Since January 2009, I've published a set of model portfolios every single week — and I've kept a time-stamped record of every one. Eleven of those models have run the full seventeen years, through the end of 2025.
All eleven beat the S&P 500. Not the average of them. Every single one. My worst performer over seventeen years still finished about $11,000 ahead of the index on a $10,000 initial investment.
The average of the eleven compounded at 16.4% a year. The S&P 500 returned 12.7% over the same stretch. Both figures are price-only — no dividends counted on either side. So the models beat the benchmark by roughly 3.7 points a year, for seventeen years, on the record, called in advance.
And they did it carrying less market exposure than the market itself. The eleven average a beta of 0.76 against the S&P — eight of the eleven sit below 1.00. That's the part I’m most proud of. Beating the index is one achievement. Beating it while riding three-quarters of its swings is a different and better one.
That last part matters more than any single number. This isn't a backtest — it's not me going back and finding what would have worked. Every weekly portfolio was published and dated in real time, week after week, since 2009. You can check the dates. A model that has called its shots in advance for seventeen years is a very different thing from one that only looks good in the rearview mirror.
What this number is — and isn't
Let me be straight with you, because the caveats matter as much as the number.
It's a model record, not an audited real-money one. I publish the portfolios; what each subscriber actually earns depends on their own account, their timing, and their costs. That's why I don't claim audited real-money returns — the only brokerage statements involved are yours, not mine.
It's an average across eleven models. No single subscriber earns exactly 16.4%. You pick the portfolio you want, and the spread is wide: over seventeen years, $10,000 in my strongest model grew to about $271,000, and in my weakest to about $86,900. Both beat the index. They are not the same outcome, and which one you'd have picked in 2009 is a real question, not a footnote.
Both figures are price-only. Neither my 16.4% nor the S&P's 12.7% includes dividends. That's deliberate: counting dividends on my side and not the index's is the oldest trick in this business, and it's how a lot of newsletters manufacture an edge that isn't there. Comparing like to like costs me something — an investor collecting dividends did better than either number suggests. But a fair comparison is worth more to you than a flattering one.
Lower beta is not the same as lower risk, and I won't blur them. My models average 15.2% annual volatility against the index's 13.5%. So the ride is bumpier year to year, even though the exposure to the market's direction is lower. Both things are true. Anyone who tells you they've delivered more return with less risk on every measure at once is selling something.
And it's before costs. The models are reviewed weekly, but most weeks nothing changes — substitutions are the exception, not the rule — so turnover is more modest than "weekly" might suggest. Still, in the real world some trading costs and the gap between a model price and your actual fill would pull your net return a bit below the model's. The S&P figure is before costs too, so the comparison stays fair — but I'd rather you size that up front than discover it later.
None of those caveats is small, and I'd rather hand them to you myself than have you find them.
What it would have meant in dollars
Here's the concrete version. If you'd split $10,000 evenly across all eleven models in January 2009 and simply left it alone, you'd have about $139,800 at the end of 2025. The same $10,000 in the S&P 500 would be about $75,900. A difference of roughly $63,900 — on the same starting stake, over the same seventeen years.
That blend works out to about 16.8% a year, slightly ahead of the 16.4% average I quoted above. The reason is worth understanding rather than glossing: with equal dollars in and nothing rebalanced, the strongest models compound into the largest positions. The winners grow into a bigger share of the pot. That's arithmetic, not skill, and I'd rather explain it than let you find the discrepancy and wonder.
That's the case for a small, steady edge applied with discipline over a long time. Not a spectacular year. A few points a year, held for seventeen of them.
The two models I left out — and why
I run thirteen strategies. Eleven are in the record above. Here are the other two, because leaving them out silently is exactly how track records get shaded.
Factor Rotation launched in 2016, so it hasn't run the full seventeen years and doesn't belong in a seventeen-year average. Over its own life, 2016 through 2025, it compounded at 15.7% a year.
Zen Defense has run since 2009 and compounded at 14.2% a year — also ahead of the index. It's excluded for a different reason: I've never published it. I maintain it internally in case I ever bring it to market, but nobody can go check its dates, and a record whose whole value is that you can verify it shouldn't contain a component you can't. So it stays out, and I'm telling you its number anyway, so you don't have to wonder whether I buried a loser.
It's not a straight line — and I won't pretend it is
No honest investment record goes up in a tidy line, and these models don't either. There have been stretches where the disciplined move was the uncomfortable one — holding cash while everyone else partied, or sitting tight while a popular stock kept climbing. Discipline has a cost, and the cost is usually paid in those exact moments. The whole point of the method is that it pays that cost willingly, because the alternative — abandoning the rules when it's hard — is what wrecks most investors.
How this connects to Zen Alpha — and how it doesn't
I want to be precise here, because it matters — and because the honest version of this is better than the version I could sell you.
Those eleven models are not eleven flavors of the same idea. They're genuinely different animals. One is an ETF rotation. One is a pairs book. One rotates across sectors. Several are stock screens built on different factors — value, quality, momentum, earnings revisions. Different instruments, different logic, different holding periods.
Every one of them beat the market for seventeen years.
That's the claim worth making, and it's a claim about discipline, not about any one algorithm. What travels across all eleven isn't a formula — it's a way of working: rank things honestly, respect the evidence, don't chase, don't flinch, keep score in public. That approach has now worked eleven different ways over seventeen years. If it only worked one way, I'd be much less confident it wasn't luck.
Zen Alpha is the newest one — and the first where everything I've learned across those seventeen years runs inside a single book. I built it and ran it in beta starting in February 2025. Subscribers have been receiving the finished weekly portfolio since March 2026, and on July 17, 2026 the system officially came out of beta. That's the day its performance record begins — from a clean start, at real prices, in real time. Which means it has no track record yet. Not a short one — none. Its record starts now, and you'll watch it accumulate the same way you can check the other eleven.
So don't read the 16.4% as "Zen Alpha returns 16.4%." It doesn't make that claim, and neither do I. The long record is the reason to trust the operator and the discipline. It isn't a promise about this particular portfolio's next twelve months. If that distinction makes you trust me a little more rather than less — good. That's the point. I'd rather earn a smaller yes you keep than a bigger one you regret.
What you actually get
Enough about the past. Here's the product, in plain terms.
One portfolio. Roughly fifteen to twenty stocks. Not a screener, not a watchlist of eighty names for you to sort through, not a firehose of ideas. A single, finished portfolio — the names, and nothing you don't need.
Every position is sized. You don't get a list and a shrug. You get the weight for each holding — how much of the portfolio belongs in each name. Those weights aren't equal, and they aren't arbitrary: they come off my sector-momentum ranking, so the money concentrates where the strength is. I won't walk you through that machinery here. What matters is that you never have to guess how much of anything to own.
The names are chosen by the system, not by my mood. Every holding cleared the same gates: the five-category score, the sector-relative ranking, the risk screens. If a stock doesn't clear them, it isn't in the book, no matter how much I might like the story.
And it reads the weather. Underneath the stock selection runs a separate read on the market's overall condition — eight indicators covering trend, breadth, credit spreads, the yield curve, volatility, earnings revisions, and financial conditions. That read sets the portfolio's cash level: fully invested when conditions are healthy, progressively more defensive as they deteriorate. It's a design feature, built to act before I have to feel brave. Stock picking tells you what to own. This tells you how much to own at all.
It arrives every week. Most weeks, very little changes — and that's the system working, not the system sleeping.
A couple of real examples
Why one got cut — KALV. KalVista Pharmaceuticals was a holding until a larger rival acquired it outright in a cash buyout and the stock was taken off the exchange. There was nothing left to own — it had stopped being an investable public company — so the system dropped it, no second-guessing. Not every exit is dramatic. Sometimes a name simply drops out of the universe, and the discipline is just letting it go without fuss.
Why one is in — CARE. Carter Bankshares currently carries a ZenRank of 3.87 in my system — a Strong Buy by my scoring — and it holds a place in the Zen Alpha Portfolio because it cleared every gate the system puts a stock through. Here's the part worth noticing: Wall Street is lukewarm on CARE, with most analysts parked at Hold. My system sees it differently. That's not a bug — it's the whole point of running an independent process. The value of a disciplined system is precisely that it sometimes points you somewhere the crowd isn't looking yet. Sometimes that pays off and sometimes it doesn't — but it's an honest, consistent read rather than an echo of the consensus.
CARE's ZenRank of 3.87 is a point-in-time score as of the date of this writing and will change as the data updates. This example is shared to illustrate how the system works, not as individualized investment advice or a recommendation that you buy, sell, or hold any security. Do your own research, and consider your own circumstances, before acting on anything mentioned here.
What I want you to take from this
Not a promise about the future. What I want you to see is that a disciplined process, followed consistently through good markets and bad, produces results worth having over time. Eleven strategies, eleven different ways of working, seventeen years, eleven wins — at three-quarters of the market's exposure. That record isn't the product of brilliant calls. It's the product of not making the dumb ones, over and over, for a long time.
Zen Alpha is where all of it finally lives in one portfolio. Twenty names, sized, every week.
In the final piece, I'll show you how to come along if you'd like to — and, just as honestly, who this isn't for.
— Erik Conley
ZenInvestor.org