June just FLEW by for me. I can’t believe tomorrow is July!! July 1, First day of the Battle of Gettysburg.
Despite this week’s down days, June has been MUCH better than… well, every month this year and probably since October!! While it looks like we’ll officially be in a recession soon, there are a lot of signs that inflation is cooling off. I think we’re at the point where the FED will now over-correct; which will lead to reversing course at some point.
In any case, here is my portfolio at the end of June. A POSITIVE MONTH!!
YTD: -53%
June May April
Snowflake 25% 23% 19%
ZScaler 22% 22% 20%
Data Dog 16% 20% 20%
MongoDB 13% 11% 12%
Crowdstrike 10% NEW
Cloudflare 8% 10% 11%
SentinelOne 6% 13% 12%
Transactions:
Sold half of S and re-opened CRWD position. Did this after the reports. Currently staying in both positions because both have strengths. I love the growth of $S and the margin improvements but am a bit nervous as to if the improvements will continue. For CRWD, they’re rolling along, very solidly. Cash looks good. Both companies not seeing much macro headwind.
Sold some DDOG and put that into CRWD to bring it to a full position. Sold some DDOG as it was slightly outsized in my portfolio. Still the 3rd highest position.
Company thoughts:
Snowflake
I’ve said before, but I believe Snowflake is the closest thing we have to investing purely in a hyperscaler. How they do their workloads, save customers money (which leads to companies loving them), make analytics MUCH easier than it used to be, and profit basically on a per query basis is brilliant. Data will continue to grow and they will continue to profit.
In addition, they are facilitating and creating entire new kinds of business and adding more workloads. The mantra of bringing applications to the data is very much more than just words, its in their actions.
They intro’d support for TRANSACTIONAL workloads is huge. A company could build their custom transactional application on Snowflake and not even need to worry about moving the data in order to do analytics on it!!
They now provide the ability for a NEW kind of SaaS company. One in whch CUSTOMER data continues to be OWNED by the customer and stays on CUSTOMER controlled environments, not the SaaS vendor. Speaking of which, I think SaaS is just not the right term anymore. Its more cloud software than anything.
Anyway, there are a lot of companies sensitive to allowing their data to a cloud software company where the data is in the control of the cloud software company (think Salesforce with data that is specific to the customer). Lets say Saul’s Investing Company uses Salesforce. We don’t want Saul’s Investing data in the Salesforce ecosystem. Now Salesforce could build a Software application to work with a certain schema and such. Saul’s Investing Company moves our data into Snowflake into a defined structure as per Salesforce. Now we use this new Salesforce application to do our stuff and the we 100% control the access of that data. Its in OUR snowflake environment, nobody else’s.
The innovation, ideas, thougths etc… going forward. These are things that were not even thought possible!! Very impressive!
ZScaler
I know Saul has sold out and others have lowered their positions. Its good to see others decisions but as my lessons learned, do not let the fact they sold or lowered influence my decisions. Saul gave very good clear information as to why. It makes complete sense and selling is a logical conclusion. I see the company continuing to execute. While I’m excited for the government stuff, that’s not really a part of why I hold ZS.
One thing I’m just ASTOUNDED by is seeing Gartner say something like 70% of companies will be SASE by 2024 or somethign like that (my exact numbers and year are probably wrong, the point is a high percent of companies in a short time). Remember, technology evolves quickly but adoption does not. If Gartner is even HALF right, then ZS and others in this area (Cloudflare), will do very well!! In addition to the solid growth and cash flow numbers, this is a big big reason for my outsized position in ZScaler.