HorsePlayAndrew Update Jan 2021

Summary

An intense and wild ride to kick 2021 off. For the most part it was a strong showing for my companies. I thoroughly enjoyed watching the Game Stop movement, it even caught the attention of my parents (in their 70’s) and I had to explain over Zoom what’s been going on! It’s interesting to see the fear index swing back to fearful. The world is making some great moves with the vaccine roll out so I’m pretty optimistic 2021 will be the year that the global economies come roaring back and the truly great ecommerce, digital and SaaS companies will shine.

My background

See details here.

Performance to date

YTD - 29%
2020 - 209%

January 2020 - 29%

Previous updates

December 2020 - https://discussion.fool.com/horseplayandrew-update-dec-2020-from…
November 2020 - https://discussion.fool.com/horseplayandrew-update-nov-2020-from…
October 2020 - https://discussion.fool.com/horseplayandrew-update-oct-2020-from…
September 2020 - https://discussion.fool.com/portfolio-update-from-london-uk-sep-…

My portfolio

Crowdstrike - 13.44%
Teladoc - 11.52%
Pinterest - 8.64%
Sea - 7.83%
Magnite - 7.77%
Etsy - 7.70%
FuboTV - 7.68%
Cloudflare - 7.49%
Peloton - 5.99%
Roku - 5.76%
Fiverr - 5.57%
Opendoor - 4.80%
Skillz - 2.94%
Lemonade - 2.90%

January 2021 Activity

My young guns continued their acceleration, Magnite and FuboTV with a rollercoaster month and Roku, Etsy and Teladoc also bagged me some impressive gains. I continue a strategy of an oversized portfolio. Ideally I would be more Saul/Bear like with 6-8 but right now I’m still figuring out my high convictions and I am quite excited about the new crop of hyper growth companies coming along.

SOLD

I did some trimming of Roku, Etsy, Crowstrike, Cloudflare, Teladoc and Peloton to support purchases elsewhere but I am also conscious of price run ups and the general state of the market.

BOUGHT

Sea Finally I’ve taken the plunge! I had owned them earlier in 2020 but finally I’m back in with a long term hold. The market cap size has been the main reason, but I think we have a monster in the making here, so I’m in for the ride. I’m also moving to Bali (Indonesia) in September so felt like I owed it to my new country!

Lemonade I decided to have a little sip of the Lemonade. As I said last month, this is a story stock and one to be tucked away for a fair while. Daniel Schreiber comes across as a visionary and appeals to my angel/founder roots. I also really like that they have gone early in listing publicly, I get the feel you’re getting the opportunity to invest like VC’s do before the hyper growth and crony IPO process, because of Daniels principles and strategy. This is a cracking listen about Lemonade and the founders if you wanted to explore further: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/from-launch-to-ipo-in-…

Skillz I’ve posted on the boards already about them so won’t get into too much detail. But I really like the business model, mobile gaming as a space and how they are the leader in a trend which is going to boom. Still early days in their public life though so I will be eagerly listening to their earnings call and there are a few red flags, namely game revenue concentration, quality of games, ethics and the threat of Apple reducing their margins.

OpenDoor The leader of ibuying in Real Estate. Another story stock and one I won’t be crowing too much about as it doesn’t tick many of the Saul boxes (look away at the margins lol). I’m in because I love founder led disrupters with a huge TAM and boy does real estate need disruption. If they stick to their current market share (in the cities they’ve launched in) then they should be doing 40b in revenue in 4 years time, so we could see some fireworks in the share price over the next few years.

I also added to Pinterest, and temporarily large amounts to FuboTV and Magnite to take advantage of their short attacks, where they sold off. I also topped up my Fiverr position after the big sell off, I think it’s a bargain at a 7b market cap, the 80% margins and the potential ahead.

My companies

Crowdstrike - I trimmed a little of Crowdstrike but I am still very bullish on their future growth prospects. A quiet month in terms of news.

Teladoc - this sleeping giant finally woke up! A nice 30%+ rise which I think was more down to fresh eyes looking at them again for the year ahead rather than any major breakthrough news. It’s all about future growth expectations and we will soon find out in February. I top sliced after the recent kick because I had bought an oversized position in the $200 range when the technicals were pointing towards a rise.

Pinterest - The tailwinds are there. They have built a platform that is just perfect for advertisers and commerce. If they can crack their programmatic advertising and scale up International revenue, they will enter the social media big league. I increased my position because I have a feeling Q4 will give further evidence of their ascendency.

Etsy - Etsy continued to breakout to ATH’s. Looking at some very basic data sources ie similarweb and Google Trends, it looks like they had a brilliant holiday season. The key though is their guidance for 2021 and the tough comps they have coming up. I took some off the table until we have a bit more clarity ahead. Etsy also has a rival to my e-commerce % of my portfolio that could affect matters, more below.

Sea discussed above.

Cloudflare - I had to do a little trimming to make way for some other buys but I still like the potential. I think they do need to show acceleration to warrant their price tag but all the signs are there and they have a world class product and founders leading them.

Roku - A busy January for Roku. Great user metrics, with over 50m accounts announced and an acquisition of Quibi which enhances the Roku channel play. Again I took some off the top due to the runup but we are still early innings in the CTV advertising migration.

Peloton - We have a big earning report coming up this week. That will go a long way to determining my position size and where this stock is heading this year. Still loving my bike+!

Magnite - It was a wild ride this month. Lots of analyst upgrades and a significant short attack which drove the price down. So I loaded up as I didn’t see anything of concern and was significantly rewarded. I took that money off the table at $40 because we don’t yet have the evidence they are a hyper growth company. I’m excited by the potential BUT they really do have to serve up a knock out earnings report to justify the hype they are getting.

FuboTV If you ignore the share price movements, then they had a cracker of a month. They announced the acquisition of Vigtory, a sports betting and gaming company, and combined with their Balto buy, now adds a lot more weight to the potential of Fubo becoming a big time sports and TV platform. It’s still very early days and the 2-3b market cap reflects that, but I am very excited to see where they go over the next few years. They also got more institutional buy in with a convertible note offering which I think was important for their reputation. The stock has been shorted a lot, and so I’ve managed to ride the waves back up, but I’m not sure this market cap will be around for much longer considering their pace of growth. One to hold on and close your eyes!

Fiverr discussed above.

OpenDoor discussed above.

Skillz - discussed above.

Lemonade - discussed above.

Watch List

IPOE I like the look of SoFi. On the consumer side they are doing a nice job at disrupting retail banking (although CashApp muddies the water here somewhat) but what I really like is Galileo, their Banking As A Service platform. It’s an API that provides all the banking infrastructure consumer facing companies need. I need to dig deeper on them but they are a front runner.

Farfetch These guys are knocking on the door of Etsy for a place in my portfolio. They are the leader in luxury e-commerce. They have signed some juicy looking deals to sell in China alongside WeChat and Alibaba which could do wonders to their revenue growth. They are already killing it with 74% revenue growth but this is just early days in the luxury e-commerce space. They are founder led and have built out shopify like tools to aid boutiques to sell their products online which further strengthens their moat. Keen to hear from anyone if you are invested.

Futu - A chinese Robinhood. Insane revenue and customer growth. I’m not keen on China based companies but their growth is worth looking at.

Square - Less likely to be buying Square now I have gone in on Sea (similar market cap sizes). Still like what I’m seeing but would take something major to buy now.

NGA I had a little dabble with these guys, Lion Electric Co, during the month but decided to sit it out after its run up. It’s very early days, they are aiming to be the leader in electric trucks and school buses. They’ve clocked up over 6 million miles with their early ev’s so far and signed a nice looking deal with Amazon for their delivery trucks. I’ll be watching them closely as the SPAC finalises and their revenue ramps.

Honourable mentions to CCIV (Lucid Motors) an ex top dog of Tesla has assembled quite a team & product but the SPAC is yet to be confirmed, Snowflake (still waiting for a buying opportunity) and Bitcoin.

I’m finding it frustrating that my new companies I’m getting most excited about aren’t SaaS. I looked at Asana but the growth doesn’t seem that exciting (yet) and the product is in a crowded space. There doesn’t seem to be anything that compelling out there at the moment so hopefully some IPO’s come along in 2021.

Thanks for reading and best wishes from a locked down UK. Bring on the vaccine!

Andrew

77 Likes

Hi Andrew,

I see you have OPEN in your portfolio. A friend of mine asked me about OPEN some time ago, and I suggested her not to buy. I understand that this stock has been recommended/purchased by several high-profile tech analysts/investors. Below was my reasoning at that time. Can you elaborate more about your expectation about the stock?

Reasons:
1. This is a highly competitive market. Buying/selling a house is the biggest investment for most of the people – so people compare prices from multiple websites. It is not like when they become a market leader, they got huge pricing power. Zoom, Office 360, CRWD’s falcon platform may charge 30% more than competitors. I cannot imagine OPEN does the same.
So I am questioning their ability in creating a large profit.
2. From Google finance, Q3 growth -72% (declining), Q2 -12%. Some said it might be due to COVID, but I wonder whether there are other factors (execution, etc). We know the housing market in 2020 was actually not bad. OPEN’s declining is so deep and I won’t try it now.
3. Business model: comparing with SAAS, they need to repeatedly buy/sell, and do not have a recurring revenue (worse than SAAS). Also, buying/selling requires a large amount of capital (more and more with revenue growing), worse than SAAS. So I would like to value the business model less than SAAS.
4. Valuation: Q3 revenue is only 338M, and using it may be too harsh for them (Let’s imagine their revenue comes back). 2019 revenue 4.7B, the market cap now 15B, it has an EV/S ratio of 3.
However, I checked its 2019 data. A piece of news suggests it sold 18.8K houses and got $4.7B revenue. It’s 250K per house. So I suspect they are counting ALL sales as revenue, not the 5%-6% price difference (which might be fair in accounting standard). Checking their website gave me the same impression, average house price 200-300k. (Again, it makes sense since owners of low-value houses are more likely to take this hassle-free approach of selling – it’s not a lot of money anyway.)
If you put the 5%-6% of the money as what they can put in their pocket (same as software companies putting sales in the pocket and then deduct costs), their valuation will be 16-20 times higher, i.e., EV/S at 48-60, higher than almost every stock other than SNOW in SAAS field.

Given all above, I won’t buy a declining company (hoping it will improve) with a capital-heavy business model, in a competitive industry, and with such a high valuation.

I appreciate your input here.

Thanks,

DC

3 Likes

Hi DC,

For me, it’s several key factors. I love founder led disruptive companies. You can’t get more disruptive than real estate. OpenDoor are leading the ibuying market by a long way vs Redfin/zillow who are half-heartedly chasing it. The tailwinds of Covid are now going to help them grow back to their hyper growth days. If you look at the market share in the cities they’ve launched, this clearly shows a playbook that they can use to reach 50b in revenue in 3-4 years.

The management team of OpenDoor is pretty impressive too. Their analyst presentation is very good at outlining the potential here:

https://www.opendoor.com/w/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Opendo…

To address your particular concerns:

  1. They have significant pricing power against real estate agents, who they are disrupting. OpenDoor is the leader in this space by 4x currently, and I dont see redfin or zwillow catching up for a fair while, OpenDoor is all in on this model and market. The market size is what makes me convinced this becomes a significantly profitable business in the future.

2)The revenue growth drop was seen across the board with the likes of Redfin suffering as well. I am pretty confident 2021 will see explosive growth again

3)Yep its definitely not Saas. All about taking on the largest undisrupted market in the world.

  1. I’m not sure where you are getting your numbers from on this. The valuation will be pricey no doubt but you have to pay up for the leaders.

That said, this is a low conviction holding of mine, and I will be studying their March earnings call in detail to work out where I go from here.

6 Likes