Aurelion Index One-Year Anniversary
First-Year Performance Review & Current Positioning.
It has now been 1 year since we officially launched the Aurelion Index.
The goal has not changed since day one: to create a portfolio that outperforms over the long term while limiting risk through appropriate diversification.
What has changed is how it can be used. The Index started as a table to read. Today, many replicate it automatically through our partner Plutus (runplutus.com).
The 1 Year Performance of the Aurelion Index is 120.37%
We are long-term investors who largely sat out the AI trade, avoided or missed, depending on who you ask. Not every call worked, and publishing every trade means being wrong in public. The good news is that this year, we’ve been right far more often than we’ve been wrong. What we didn’t expect, however, was how much your feedback would shape our work. Thank you!
What pleases us most about the performance is how many different trades drove it: mining, tankers, Canadian defense, life-science tools, and chemicals…
It was an active year: 57 trades since the portfolio was set up.
That number is higher than we would like. We are long-term investors at heart, but when a short-term opportunity appears, we tend to act on it.
We took the time to go back through our calendars and counted 43 meetings with management teams over the past year. These included CEOs, CFOs, and investor relations teams at public companies.
We also had a team member travel to Japan, we visited company facilities across Canada and the US, and attended investment conferences to source new ideas.
This is not a long report because we are focusing on what’s ahead.
That includes our Trades of the Year 2027, which will be released in December. It’s a familiar concept, but we believe it provides exceptional value and is a great exercise for positioning for the year ahead.
We also have more thematic reports and stocks in the pipeline.
We only publish them when the timing is right, so we continue speaking with public companies. Those conversations help so much in understanding individual businesses while also identifying emerging trends that could become tomorrow’s investment themes. Some interesting companies are on our schedule:
Our growing reach and contacts (as well as new website, check it out here: aurelionresearch.com) allow us to talk to the biggest public companies in the world, so we are looking to develop this series.
We also discuss below our current stance of the market and portfolio.
And something fun we had to do…
A note on methodology: 2025 performance was calculated in-house from our published trades and verified by Plutus. Since early 2026, it comes directly from Plutus, in real time, from actual invested accounts. Every trade behind these numbers is in the archive if you want to reconstruct it yourself.
As you might know if you have been following us for a long time, we put a high weight on investment themes to select companies.
Below is a look at all the themes we discussed last year:
Some of those themes have now been exited (like gold & silver, when we sold our mining equities in January 2026).
It's been nice watching these themes unfold in the news:
And now something fun we had to do…
We are fully conscious that this is not a good comparison, but you’ll get the picture.
Below, we compare all mutual funds from Morningstar (biggest fund data provider) that are within either the “Global Small/Mid-Cap,” “Small-Cap Blend,” or “Mid-Cap Blend” categories, which amount to 1,023 funds across the world.
The Aurelion Index consists of 20-25 small and mid-cap companies, ranging from approximately $100M to $15B in market capitalization. As a result, the companies we invested in over the past year directly overlapped with the investment universe of these 1,023 funds.
And with no surprise…
Another important point is that these are generally after fees. Some funds charge quite a big chunk of fees, while if you replicate the Aurelion Index on Plutus (runplutus.com), you are only paying a 1% fee per year on assets, with no performance fee. Also, the Aurelion Index has not been investable for the entire year using Plutus, making the comparison not ideal.
Of course, we do not face the same trading fees or liquidity constraints as some of those funds, both of which would have negatively impacted returns.
However, given the companies we invested in over the last year, we believe it is fair to say that even after accounting for those factors, the picture would look similar. And obviously, past returns don’t predict the future.
That is for you to decide!
If you are curious, we have attached the procedure we used to get the numbers and funds using Morningstar below.
Moving on from this not-so-perfect comparison;
Drivers
Biggest Losers
Thematic:
Nickel: prices are down about 10% since we first expressed our positive stance on the commodity in April 2026. Though much of the thesis is long-term.
Fertilizer: Our prediction of where fertilizer stocks would go following the reopening of the Strait was wrong. We realized the trends were moving in the opposite direction and sold shortly after, with the position down 15%. Since then, the stocks have continued to decline.
Single Company:
PTAL: -29%. The company abruptly suspended its quarterly dividend and announced lower production forecasts for 2026.
CNC: Although we made >100% with the stock in 2025, recent performance after increasing our weight has been poor, down about 25%.
IFOS: -26%. Fertilizer.
VU: -19%. Short-seller attack on the stock.
Those were the main misses.
Biggest Winners
Thematic:
Chemicals: Went against consensus by pinpointing the exact month of the sector’s cyclical turnaround after a five-year bear market.
Tankers: Made 100%+ returns with several names by predicting renewed investor interest in the space and the cash generation of the companies.
Space: Expressed a bullish view through MDA in January, up 60%.
Gold & Silver: Sold in January at the peak of the market.
Aluminum: Predicted the early innings of the bull market; our pick CENX is up >100%.
Canadian Defense: Played the theme through two specific holdings, up >50% in a few months.
Japanese Equities: Rode the up-cycle since early 2026.
Rare Earths: ETFs are up 80% since our bullish stance.
Single Company:
GURU: +150%
ECO: +112%
GG: +130%
BOGO: +102%
KRY: +102%
MRX: +96% (in 4 months)
CGY: +61% (low risk stock)
RNG: +39% (in 1 month)
We did not rely on a few single outsized winners. Instead, we generated returns across multiple companies, taking profits and continuously reallocating capital into new opportunities to compound returns throughout the year.
If you want more discussion of the performance, we published quite a few articles that you can find here.
Current Positioning & View of the Markets
Currently at 20 stocks, we are looking to expand the list to 25, with new stocks being added over the coming weeks/months.
Given that we have exited a few themes, here are the themes the companies in the Aurelion Index currently benefit from:
How We Currently See the Market
Since the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, markets have been acting in a very unpredictable way. Every day seems to feel different from the previous one, which makes our job a little harder. You think you have the right timing on a theme, but the next day stocks are down 5%, and the day after they are back up 5%.
When markets are behaving in a way that we believe is less rational, we tend to become more cautious in our approach. Right now, we are adding fewer new companies to the Aurelion Index and being more selective when entering new themes that we find compelling.
The latest development is renewed tension between the US & Iran, with Trump threatening new strikes and a potential US blockade, while Iran has again raised concerns around the Strait of Hormuz. As a result, oil is up more than 4% as we publish this.
At the same time, shipping tanker rates are also rising, which is positive for our tanker holdings. It is difficult to know exactly what Trump’s plans are or what is driving his decisions, but the important point is that we believe the Aurelion Index is well positioned to perform across different market environments.
We still see great undervalued opportunities and continue to monitor them closely. We will probably be adding new positions later this month. Sectors that look interesting to us right now are LATAM, tankers, IoT, utilities, and pharma. We like some AI themes but are cautious of the short-term sentiment.
Within LATAM, we believe we might be at a turning point. We have seen similar situations before, where periods of high tension and uncertainty in the US market create attractive opportunities in markets that are less directly impacted by global issues. There are also several important elections that have recently happened or are coming later this year, including Chile, Peru, Brazil, Argentina, and Colombia.
And of course, paid subscribers can always view the positions and weights of the Aurelion Index here.
We often get asked what our favorite theme or stock of the moment is, so here it is:
Current highest conviction theme:
The sentiment around the sector is improving sharply, with emerging signs that the theme is taking shape.
We were the first to discuss that theme. No media or investment research publication had discussed it. It is slowly starting to get more attention. Pharma companies are increasing spending, and drugs are being discovered faster with the help of AI. Wall Street is starting to raise price targets, and we think sentiment has reached its bottom.
Current highest conviction stock:
This is definitely the most volatile stock in the portfolio, but we think it has been down recently due to weak sentiment around chipmakers. They are reporting earnings at the end of July, and we expect them to be strong again. So, higher risk, but certainly higher reward.
Otherwise, if you want something non-AI, Chartwell Retirement Residences (CSH) is a Canadian name we like a lot, more here.
The Aurelion Team
Questions? Reach us directly on Substack or at contact@aurelionresearch.com.
Congratulations and well done
Great read