Friends,
I’ve had two pieces of mail this week that I want to address directly, because both are fair, and because I suspect more of you are quietly thinking the same things.
The first came from a new subscriber in Austria, who wondered — privately and politely — why he had paid when so much of my work has been free. The second came from a reader in France, who was frank with me: he paid for market analysis, and he didn’t appreciate me drifting into political commentary about the Trump situation. He’s right. Both are right. And I want to explain what happened, what I’ve done about it, and what the next four weeks look like — because if you’re a paid subscriber, an unpaid subscriber, or someone who’s just been quietly following along since when I started publishing in 2004, you deserve to know exactly where you stand.
Here’s the honest version of the last twelve months. I had spread my publishing across four Substacks and a Ghost site, and somewhere along the way the administrative weight of running all of it crushed the actual work. I was spending ninety-eight percent of my time on IT and admin, and two percent on market analysis. My days had stretched from seven hours to seventeen. I was exhausted, and the output reflected it — including, frankly, some political writing that drifted away from what my brand is about. The reader from France caught me at exactly the right moment to say so.
So here’s what changed, what most of you already know. My long-time IT associate, Alexei, watched these issues happen and refused to let me bring in outside consultants. Instead, he proposed something better: he would become my business partner, take over the IT side entirely, and build the Cara Fiduciary Protocol from scratch into a new billcara.com. The new system we planned will auto-generate the reports, manage the publishing, and hand me back my time. Within a month, I’ll be down to seven-hour days and spending ninety-eight percent of those hours where they belong — on market analysis, decisions, and writing. The inversion is the entire point. If you have read my latest Portfolio reports, you will see the immediate results.
To get there, I had to do some hard housekeeping. The four Substacks have been consolidated into one — caraportfolio.substack.com — with a single, clean subscriber list that distinguishes paid from free. Ghost is being wound down; the URL conflict between the old billcara Substack and my twenty-year-old billcara.com domain forced the issue, and Ghost added administrative overhead I hadn’t bargained for. All content has been migrated to a new server, which I own, and Alexei is rebuilding billcara.com from the ground up. It goes live in two weeks.
Now to the part that matters most to you: what you actually get, and when.
Starting Monday, the three portfolios — P1 (ten names from the Cara US 50 Top Quality), P2 (six from the Dow 30), and P3 (ten from the Cara Top 50 US Durable Growth) — begin a regular publishing cycle, Monday through Saturday. Each portfolio is published twice a week: P3 on Monday and Thursday, P2 on Tuesday and Friday, P1 on Wednesday and Saturday. Six reports a week, every week. I started today, and today is the last day any of this is free; it’s also the day the third of the three portfolios is introduced. From Monday onward, only paid subscribers — from Substack and Ghost — see the full reports, and only here. Free subscribers at the caraportfolio.substack will see the top few paragraphs of each premium report and nothing more. The P1 portfolio was published today free to everyone, like I did this week with P2 and P3 in the past few days. After that, however, full reports for free comes to an end.
In about two weeks, when the new billcara.com goes live, all paid subscribers — from Substack and Ghost — get the full portfolio reports there as well, on the same paid basis. The INSTAT and Playbook reports that paid subscribers were getting before the chaos resume publication on billcara.com, paid-only, along with a new daily report called Perspective. The articles and the Navigator that I used to publish free on Substack will move to billcara.com and continue free there. Free subscribers at billcara.com get what free Substack subscribers used to get: the Navigator and the articles. Paid subscribers get everything they pay for.
The Navigator itself is being rebuilt. It used to take me sixteen hours every weekend. Under the new system, it auto-generates, and my role drops to about thirty minutes — creating the NotebookLM audio discussion and inserting the downloadable link into the cover. That’s the kind of time I’m getting back.
To the reader in Austria — and anyone wondering the same thing — here is the direct answer. Free subscribers have been getting the Navigator and the articles. That continues, and at billcara.com it will be a cleaner, better version of the same. What paid subscribers get, and have always been meant to get, is the actual portfolio work, the INSTAT analysis, the Playbook, and now the discipline of three portfolio reports, twice a week each, under the Cara Fiduciary Protocol — every one of them under Alexei’s rebuilt system and every one of them seen by Ermanno Pascutto, former global securities regulator in Canada, Hong Kong, and Dubai. Major Daniel DeNeve, a US Army Operations Research and Systems Analyst and a close associate of mine over my 22-year publishing at billcara.com is also in possession of the proprietary Cara Fiduciary Protocol. If paid subscribers have comments, one or the other will see them, and ensure that I respond appropriately. That’s my way of showing accountability.
To wrap this up: Paid subscribers from Monday forward are not paying for access to what’s free. They’re paying for the analysis, the decisions, and the discipline, from me. That distinction has been blurred for the past year because I was drowning in admin. It will not be blurred from here on.
To the reader in France — and anyone, including my brother, who shared his discomfort — you have my word. The political op-eds were a symptom of exhaustion and overload, not a brand decision. Honestly, I do feel that way personally, but articles like that are counter to what Bill Cara the publisher stands for, and now that my full-time attention is where it belongs, I have no intention of publishing them again. Markets, analysis, fiduciary discipline. That’s me.
There’s one more thing coming, and it matters. The new billcara.com will include The Forum, a feature for paid subscribers to have a voice. It replaces the old Cara Community that I ran for twenty years — at its peak, five hundred comments a day. I’ve missed having that conversation with Baz and Kaimu and others. And, apparently so have many of you.
And finally, with my hours back where they should be, I’m finishing the books. I have eleven in various stages — four needing updates, seven in earlier drafts. I expect to have at least eight of them published from late June to the end of September. Every paid annual subscriber will receive free copies as they’re released. Anyone else can buy them on Amazon when they appear.
That’s the picture. One Substack, going to one new billcara.com in two weeks. Free readers get the Navigator and the articles. Paid readers get the portfolios, INSTAT, the Perspective, the Playbook, the Forum, and the books. Six portfolio reports a week starting Monday for those whoare paying for Portfolio. Alexei running the IT, the system running itself, and me running the analysis — the way I wish it had been all along.
If any of this is still unclear, please send me an email. I’d rather answer the same question five times than have anyone in any of the three groups — paid, free, or undecided — still wondering what they’re entitled to.
Thank you for your patience through what was, by any honest measure, a difficult year. But, I assure you, the admin is under control. The work is back at the center.
Onward.
/Bill