FinallyFoolin May 2023 Portfolio Update


May was a MUCH better month!!
Its been tough managing my portfolio thru this huuuuuge drawdown. However, I’m doing my best to focus on the next year or two. This is part of why I re-opened my TSLA position last year and this month, re-opened MELI & BILL.

I’m THRILLED to be up over 30% (barely). Hopefully we can get a few more months like this.

Transactions:
First week of the month:
Reduced outsized TSLA & SNOW positions on 5/4. Brought them to around 20% of portfolio holdings. This was essentially the Cloudflare money that I didn’t know what to do with when I sold it. The way the month went, would have been just as good to keep in Cloudflare. Anyway, I added my ZScaler position & re-opened positions in MercadoLibre & Bill (after their report).

If you recall from my April report, when I sold my NET the end of April, I didn’t know where to put it and I have a difficult time holding on to cash. So I put that money into my two highest convictions, TSLA & SNOW. The ZS price kept dropping and although I had a healthy position, I “topped it up” opportunistically. This part ended up being brilliant as they pre-released earnings and have shot up since. The rest I re-opened positions in Bill (after report) as I was very impressed by the report and they might just be getting into an area of not having to worry about quarterly results.

Last week of the month, re-opened small position in Crowdstrike. Looks like I should have waited a few more days and gotten a better price!!

A bit more about Cloudflare.
While I missed the Cloudflare correction (and AM jealous of y’all who caught it) the sales issues are concerning to me but there are small things here and there they mention on calls that when added up together make me concerned that a lot of what they are is potential. It reminds me of dating, watch their actions, not their words. Cloudflare seems to be a lot of buzzwords. One quarter, all they discuss is security, a few quarters later, they barely mention it. Now they discuss AI a lot. They don’t break out money by segments. Makes me wonder if their traditional CDN business is still really their core and that their foothold in other areas is very very small.

A few more recent examples of things I don’t like:

  1. Talking about R2 - “there are PETABYTES of data on R2”
  2. Talking about AI use cases - “Its growing 20% QoQ” – Most likely a single customer (PLTR) using R2 for a data lake.
  3. Descaler campaign - When PANW & ZS discuss competition, its basically just the. Even NET admits they aren’t even considered for most deals. Sure, its a newer product but… I mean… its one thing to have a descaler type campaign when you’re in the running, its a whole other thing to have it when you aren’t even in consideration. NET is like the proverbial 4 year old “little” brother trying to compete with his 14 year old “big” brother, oh, and big brother is also a top flight athlete & in the running for valedictorian.
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Brilliant. I completely agree, and I too am very happy for those who have kept Cloudflare, even very large positions, but man I would be scared to press my bets at these levels. I think of the analogy of the man walking dogs in the park (Very simple post on UPST - #6 by chang88), and it seems this dog has wandered waaaaaaaaay too far ahead of the man. A good opportunity (if I’m right) for moving money from Cloudflare to something else…if one is so inclined.

Bear

PS - unrelatedly, congrats on this move:

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