2025 YTD Monthly Closing
Jan +9.8%
Feb +1.6%
Mar -13.8%
Apr -6.7%
May +8.5%
Jun +19.0%
Jul +24.6%
Aug +30.8%
Sep + 42.1%
Oct +55%
Nov 28th: +36.2% YTD (down from an YTD intraday peak of +57% on the first trading day of November and up from April low of -25%).
Notwithstanding a strong comeback in the last week of the month, this was a bigly down month which interrupted the ascent from the pivot point in April following the dramatic pull back in the first half of the year. I estimate that I am back to about ~20% away from reaching my portfolio ATH (2021) after having momentarily touched my ATH on Nov 3rd (I’m hoping that’s not some kind of double top formation).
Thematically, I’m principally invested in:
eCommerce (20%) - Shopify, MercadoLibre, Global e-Online & SEA
AI & Cloud Infrastructure (25%) - Cloudflare, Pure Storage, Nvidia, Nebius, Astera Labs, Micron, Tempus Ai, IREN, HIVE & Electrovaya
Software (SaaS/DevOp/Data analytics) (25%) - Palantir, Datadog, Snowflake, GitLab, Monday, Samsara & MongoDB
Cybersecurity (10%) - Crowdstrike, ZScaler, Rubrik & SentinelOne
Fintech/Payments/Crypto (10%) - SOFI, Toast, Robinhood, Upstart, Bill, Pagaya & Bitmine Immersion Technologies
AdTech (10%) - The Trade Desk, Applovin and Reddit (ad community)
Recent Activity -
No real activity this month besides having a first nibble at AXON following its pullback.
Considering trimming Palantir further, maybe Pure Storage and Shopify. Would like to enter Transmedics. Also considering Lumentum, Rocket Lab and EOS Energy.
Holdings in GitLab, MDB & BILL sit closest to the exit door whilst I missed the window to sell or top slice TTD and IOT further.
I took strong encouragement from Calendar Q3 results from: Cloudflare, Nvidia, Datadog and ZScaler whilst I felt was Axon was mixed and Monday concerning.
Portfolio holdings -
25+ positions with a long tail of 1-2% positions (made up of high conviction, scaling down and scaling up plays):
SHOP - 10.5%
DDOG - 6.5%
PSTG - 6%
NET - 5.5%
PLTR - 5.5%
SNOW - 5%
IREN - 4.5%
NVDA - 3.5%
CRWD - 3.5%
MELI - 3.5%
SOFI - 3%
MU - 3%
APP - 3%
NBIS - 3%
RBRK - 2.5%
ZS - 2.5%
IOT - 2.5%
HOOD - 2.5%
ALAB - 2.5%
MDB - 2.5%
TTD - 2%
MNDY - 2%
UPST -1.5%
RDDT - 1.5%
GLBE - 1.5%
TEM - 1.5%
SE - 1%
S - 1%
GTLB - 1%
HIVE - 1%
BMNR - 1%
TOST - 0.5%
PGY - 0.5%
BILL - 0.5%
ELVA - 0.5%
AXON - 0.5%
Bright spots in the portfolio include: SOFI, Robinhood, Micron, Shopify and Pure Storage which are closest (within 15%) to their YTD highs.
Watch list includes…
Rocket Lab, TransMedics, Lightspeed, Sezzle, ROOT, FOUR, Arista, Fortinet, Palo Alto, EOS Energy, Raspberry PI and Grab.
Bigger Picture -
As sectors, Cyber Security, AI and Cloud infra/DevOps and ex US eCommerce have been relatively strong - as well as profitable SaaS plays/software providers with rising consumption and ones with demonstrable AI use cases. Payments & Fintech had been strong with rate reductions back on the cards, expectation of spending resilience and a boom in crypto/alternative/private investing whilst AdTech is showing signs of weakness in pricing and demand.
Specifically with this latest clutch of results it feels as though every part of the data space is doing well and reaccelerating; (semiconductor, memory, storage, servers, data center infra, databases & data cloud). It remains to be seen whether AI is going to “eat” software but data still appears AI resilient. (I see the 3 questions of: i) will it won’t it “AI eating software”, ii) higher for longer vs AI bubble and iii) Macro (tariffs & trade), fiscal (tax & spend) & monetary (Fed Rates) policies are the critical determinants of market success right now - certainly for my portfolio holdings).
The potential for macro damage on a sector and company basis is clearly having an impact. With the prevailing politics and in particular economic and trade policies as well as sector/company targeted government interventions we are facing some hyper volatility with big winners and losers and not necessarily driven by innate company consideration.
I still think that seeking out growth companies with defensive qualities, (cloud infrastructure, cybersecurity, energy generation, storage and supply even and consumption based rather than seat based software models), might do better in these volatile and uncertain times as well as ex US eCommerce and trading plays that benefit from US currency weakness but more importantly are removed from US import/export movements on an intra regional / local to local basis (e.g. MercadoLibre, SEA and Grab).
Ant