Inside the Lunar Landing Portfolio: Understanding the Selection Criteria

How the Lunar Landing Portfolio Was Built

When I first began shaping what would become the Lunar Landing Portfolio, I didn’t realize I was building something that would one day feel like a small extension of myself. It didn’t start with ambition or a grand design—it started with a quiet question that had followed me for years: How do we find the companies that rise consistently, not by luck or bursts of frenzy, but by their own steady strength?

The answer wasn’t in any single metric. It lived in the spaces between them, in the rhythms of years stacked one on another, in the way a company reveals itself not through a single season but through a long unfolding. I didn’t want a portfolio that chased the highest flyers or the loudest stories. I wanted one that whispered the truth of resilience.

When my son asked how I actually choose the stocks that become part of the Lunar Landing Portfolio, I realized how much of the process has become second nature to me. Yet beneath the instinct lies a deeply deliberate structure—one that begins with historical performance.

I start by looking back five years. Not because the past predicts the future, but because those five years show how a company behaves through cycles. What has its total return been from then until now? How has it moved through the moments of quiet growth and sudden disruption? I rank the stocks based on that long arc, searching not for the brightest flare but for the most consistent glow.

But a single measurement never feels complete to me. Life doesn’t happen in one continuous sweep; it happens in seasons. So I break those five years apart into rolling one-year windows. Five years ago to four years ago. Four to three. Three to two. Two to one. One to now. Each window tells a slightly different story—how the company handled uncertainty, how it recovered from pressure, how it steadied itself after stumbling. When you line up those windows, patterns begin to emerge. You see which companies have a temperament you can trust.

Then comes drawdown—the part of the process most people avoid because it forces us to look directly at loss. Maximum drawdown measures how far a stock fell from its highest point before it found its way back. This number is not just about volatility; it is about character. It reveals whether a company collapses under pressure or gathers itself and rises. I’ve learned over time that the companies with low drawdowns, the ones that don’t lose themselves in the downward swing, often carry a deeper strength. I gravitate toward those.

All these metrics—total return, rolling-year performance, maximum drawdown—are strands of the same thread. When woven together, they create something I can trust. Not because it is infallible, but because it is intentional. The Lunar Landing Portfolio is simply a reflection of that intention: to find companies that contribute meaningfully to the broader market, that rise without excessive turbulence, that hold steady when others falter.

What I want my readers—and my own children—to understand is that this portfolio isn’t meant to be a shortcut. It’s a guide, a companion for those learning to see the market through a lens of steadiness rather than spectacle. You can rely on it while you learn. But more importantly, you can learn from it—learn how to analyze, how to observe, how to choose for yourself.

In the end, the Lunar Landing Portfolio is just a structure I built around the values I’ve come to trust: resilience, consistency, clarity. The market will always move in ways we can’t predict, but the companies that endure reveal themselves in the long quiet stretches of history.

If we listen closely enough, their stories are right there, waiting to be read.