The $10,000 Paper Portfolio: Tracking an Undervalued Screen Over Time
A note on authorship: The research, analysis, and opinions in this article are the author's own. Claude (Anthropic's AI) assisted with drafting and editing the prose.
The Most Undervalued ASX 300 screen tells you what looks cheap this week. The obvious next question is the one a list can't answer on its own: what if you'd actually followed it? The paper portfolio is our attempt to answer that honestly, in the open, over the long run.
At the top of each undervalued screen there's an amber card showing what a hypothetical $10,000 would be worth today if it had tracked that screen from the start — equal-weighted across the list and rebalanced every week. It's a paper portfolio: no money is invested, no trades are placed. It exists to keep the screen honest. A list of "cheap" stocks is easy to publish and easy to forget; a running total that follows those picks week after week is much harder to look away from.
The short version:
- A starting stake — $10,000 on the ASX (and the same idea, in its own currency, on all six Most Undervalued screens) — is spread equally across the list.
- Every week the portfolio rebalances: stocks that leave the list are sold, the cash is spread evenly across the new list.
- Returns shown are total return — dividends paid while a stock is held are credited, on top of price movement.
- It's a long-term experiment. A few weeks of movement is noise — the point is what happens over years.
- It is paper only: a transparency tool, not advice and not a real track record.
Equal weight, rebalanced weekly
The rules are deliberately simple, because the whole point is to mirror what a disciplined retail investor might plausibly do — not to run a clever strategy on top of the screen.
Equal weight means the stake is split evenly across every name on the list. If there are twenty stocks, each gets a twentieth. There's no conviction-weighting, no "this one looks better" — the screen has already done the ranking, and equal weight is the honest way to say "I'll back all of them the same." It's also simply what most people do when handed a shortlist.
Weekly rebalancing means that each time the screen refreshes, the portfolio is rebuilt to match it. This matters more than it sounds. The screen is a living thing: companies that have run up are no longer undervalued and drop out, while new bargains appear. A portfolio that bought the week-one list and never touched it would slowly become a museum of last month's ideas. Rebalancing keeps it pointed at whatever the screen actually believes today.
How a stock leaves the list
This is the part that makes the tracker feel real. When a stock falls out of the list — usually because its price rose far enough that it's no longer undervalued — it is "sold" at that week's snapshot price, and the gain or loss between its entry and exit is locked in.
A concrete example from the ASX portfolio: JB Hi-Fi (JBH.AX) entered the list on 10 July 2026 at $78.10. By the 17 July refresh — one week later — it had climbed to $79.81 and no longer cleared the undervalued filter, so it left the list — a +2.2% move banked on paper in a single week. The cash from that sale doesn't sit idle: it's pooled with the rest of the portfolio and spread equally across the new list at the next rebalance. Below the main table, a "stocks exited" section records each departure with its entry and exit prices, so you can see exactly what left and why.
How the running total is tracked
The headline number on the card is cumulative, not just today's wiggle. Each week, the price movements and any dividends earned by the holdings are baked into a saved running value. When you open the page, the only thing calculated live is today's intraday movement, layered on top of that stored base. So the percentage you see is the whole journey since the start date — every week stacked together — not a single day's change.
At the time of writing, the ASX portfolio sits a little above its $10,000 start. That figure will move every week, sometimes down, and on its own it means very little — which brings us to the most important caveat.
Dividends count too
The tracker counts total return, not price alone. Any dividend a holding pays while it's on the list is credited to the portfolio at the next rebalance, on top of whatever the share price did. For income-heavy sectors — banks, insurers, resources — dividends can be a large share of total return, and folding them in keeps the tracker honest about what an investor following the screen would actually have received. It's still an approximation: franking credits, withholding tax and brokerage aren't modelled, so the figure is closer to a total-return benchmark than an after-cost investor outcome.
Why this is a long-term experiment
The tracker only started in June 2026. A few weeks — even a few months — of data tells you essentially nothing about whether valuation screening works. Markets are noisy over short windows; a portfolio can be up or down 5% for reasons that have nothing to do with the quality of the picks. Reading too much into an early number cuts both ways: an early gain isn't proof the method works, and an early loss isn't proof it doesn't.
This is built to be watched over years. The question it's trying to answer — does patiently buying what a conservative DCF model calls cheap, and rebalancing weekly, actually pay off? — only becomes meaningful across many cycles. Treat today's figure as an illustration of the machinery, not a scorecard. The honesty of the experiment is the whole point; the verdict is a long way off.
The same system now runs on all six Most Undervalued screens — the ASX 300 ($10,000), the S&P 500 ($10,000), the NIFTY 500 (₹1,00,000), the KOSPI 200 (₩10,000,000), the Nikkei 225 (¥1,000,000), and the Europe screen (€10,000) — so you can follow whichever market you care about.
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