Simply an unbelievable finish to this investing year!
In November, I had more $ gains than in any previous month of my life.
Well, in December, my portfolio beat that, and gained even more than in November!
…and that was despite my biggest holding at the beginning of the month, TTD, being down more than -11% in December.
Monthly Cumulative Performance
Dec 2019 YTD +57.1% (last year)
2020:
End of Jan +15.5%
End of Feb +7.0%
End of Mar -20.0%
End of Apr +0.6%
End of May +27.0%
End of Jun +40.0%
End of Jul +48.7%
End of Aug +57.0%
End of Sep +50.9%
End of Oct +50.1%
End of Nov +94.8%
End of Dec +140.6% (high point +170.1%!)
As in the past, I exclude my 401k funds’ performance from the returns above, which is all in a low cost S&P index fund (I have limited options to invest the 401k), and any cash infusions or withdrawals (mostly withdrawals this year to pay taxes) are adjusted, just as others here do when calculating their returns.
Last year, in 2019, my portfolio held pretty strong in the second half the year despite many SaaS companies’ weakness during those months, primarily due to Nutanix rising about 50% from Aug to Dec 2019, after I added to it in late summer, as well as a strong late push from The Trade Desk.
In 2020, my second half of the year was even stronger. A few weeks ago, I though I was destined to only gain about +50% this year, after missing out on Zoom. Then, I actually hit a high point just above +170% YTD last week before pulling back the past few days, mostly due to TTD coming down this week on no news.
My December gains this month were largely driven by Magnite and MongoDB, and to a lesser extent Smartsheets and Nutanix.
It’s pretty astounding that I had not even heard of Magnite two months ago, yet, 60 days later, I’ve now already made more money from recent gains from owning MGNI than any other investment in my life! Even more than Amazon, which was almost 20% of my portfolio earlier in 2020 with a very low average cost basis around $300/share. It really shows the law of large numbers and the power of compounding.
For most of December, before this week’s pullback, my gains alone over the past 60 days, were more than my entire portfolio was worth on January 1st 2020, which is just crazy to think about.
December 31st Year End Allocations
My year end portfolio breakdown. The second column shows the approximate portion that is in calls, which I present only because the movements from month to month can look confusing or misleading without that information, especially if one assumes they are all common shares.
calls/LEAPs
MGNI 24.7% one-third
MDB 14.0% one-third*
TTD 13.2% one-third
NTNX 12.0% 80%
AYX 7.3% one-half
DDOG 5.9% one-half
SMAR 5.5% all
CRWD 5.2% all
DOCU 5.1% one-half
GH 4.2% one-half
AMZN 2.4% none
ESTC 0.6% all
*MDB will drop to only about 15% calls when I exercise my Jan’21 ones next month
Every company I own, I discovered on this board, which makes me feel incredibly grateful to The Motley Fool, Saul, and everyone that posts here. Well, AMZN I did own beforehand, but it was also widely held by many folks on this board not all that long ago, too.
A year ago, I said I probably wouldn’t own as many options at 12/31/20 as I did at 12/31/19. Well this year’s volatility in the markets, especially during the spring, gave me too many opportunities where I felt that certain companies were really undervalued and whose future potential was being mis-read by the overall market, so I probably hold a similar amount of options as last year. It’ll probably be less next year, but again, anything can happen.
I would strongly caution against putting nearly as much of any portfolio into options, as my current breakdown. Besides the holdings that are essentially 100% calls, in most cases, I didn’t invest such a big percentage (e.g. one-third, or one-half) of my position in any company into options, they were originally much smaller percents when I bought them, but the calls just grew/appreciated much faster than the regular shares this particular year and became a high percentage of my holding of that company now, it terms of total dollar value of the investment. It just happens that there was lots of volatility this year which made for lots of unusual opportunities where I felt certain companies were temporarily undervalued, and in many cases, those calls have grown a lot in recent months. If those purchases were ill timed, or simply unlucky, it could have a very bad impact on a portfolio, so tread very carefully if you don’t have much experience using options. My KMI calls essentially lost -100% this year, becoming worthless, and I (very wrongly) thought those were among my safest investments at the beginning of the year.
Saul is the perfect example that you don’t need options or leverage to have incredible market beating returns, so especially if you are more risk averse, I’d suggest sticking to buying and owning regular common shares.
December Activity
My last two companies to report quarterly results in early December were MDB and SMAR, both of which had positive stock reactions afterwards, Mongo more so than I expected, and Smartsheets, not as much of a move as I feel it deserves.
Although I had initially put about 6% of my portfolio in MGNI in early November around $10/share, and it had doubled by early December moving it up to about an 11% position, looking across all of the companies I follow after earnings were in for everyone, Magnite still looked like the best place for new money, and I pretty aggressively added to it some more this month while it lingered around $19/share, even buying more June ’21 calls. Overall, I only put about 13% of my portfolio into MGNI, it just grew to about 25% from stock gains over those few weeks.
I primarily raised the cash for those purchases by selling calls, particularly NTNX, that were going to expire in January ’21 where I didn’t anticipate much news that would move the stocks over next few weeks. Although I still like TDOC’s prospects and could see myself investing in it again next year, I decided to sell my small remaining Teladoc holdings, as well as most of my small Elastic stake, and the last of my KMI, to raise more money for more Magnite. I also slightly trimmed my DDOG and GH just a little bit.
Although I still like Elastic’s prospects and valuation (and TDOC, and KMI, for that matter), I just felt Magnite was too much of a higher conviction for me at the time. I still do have a very small ESTC stake, only because those calls are up a few hundred percent, in a taxable account, and will become long term capital gains in mid January of ‘21, so I expect I’ll be selling off the last of my ESTC next month when the taxes will be less.
The only other other companies I bought this month besides MGNI, was to add just a little bit more Alteryx and Smartsheets.
The Companies
Magnite
Although the valuation has increased in recent weeks, most of my original writeup in early November still describes pretty well why I think this company is going to be extremely successful over the next few years. And I still feel it is quite undervalued today. Although revenue doesn’t look as impressive in 2020 given that global advertising stalled during the pandemic, this company, and programmatic digital advertising in general, have moved ahead by leaps and bounds in 2020, and I won’t be surprised if Magnite’s growth rate rivals many of the our most widely held companies next year, although, in my opinion, even if MGNI only grows at a much more conservative 25-30% next year, which I think it will, it should make their current stock price look cheap in retrospect.
For whatever reason, the market’s reaction to positive news about the company has had a lag, giving us opportunities to buy in at great prices even after the news was out recently. When the reported good quarterly earnings in early November, the stock actually dipped for a couple days below $10 before it quickly doubled over the next few weeks. Then in December when Disney had their investor day and had amazing things to say about their future streaming plans (Magnite powers Disney and Hulu’s streaming ad platform), Disney stock moved up but MGNI stayed low, under $20, for a couple days, which was when I added to it quite a bit, before it soon rose to $30+.
The Trade Desk
More programmatic advertising? Yes, more programmatic digital advertising. Although TTD is a demand side platform (DSP), vs Magnite on the sales side, much of the overall macro factors that limited ad spending in 2020, but accelerated the move to programmatic during the year, and should bode well for the future, hold true, and also apply to The Trade Desk.
The big question for TTD going forward is how will they navigate the cookie-less future. Apple has made it clear that they aren’t going to make it easy to track users, even with all of the anonymous features that a new “unified ID” would have. If you’ve read some of the recent stories about Facebook vs Apple lately, TTD is essentially team Facebook. Although I have little doubt that Apple is going to move forward with their plans and require users to opt-in to tracking, which, let’s face it, most people will decline, and that will hurt TTD, I see little chance that Google follows Apple’s lead. Google won’t make advertising and user tracking ultra difficult on Android devices or the Chrome browser because Google makes their money off advertising. Those of us that have iPhones and iPads probably think that Apple is the whole world, but in reality, a huge portion of the world’s online user base is on Android and other non-IOS operating systems. So I expect there will still be lots of data to use and target ads for many years that will drive further programmatic advertising growth, even if a giant such as Apple uses a different set of rules.
China’s crackdown on tech companies recently is probably a negative for TTD too, which has partnered with most of the big Chinese tech companies and is uniquely positioned to help global companies target ads in China without some of the usual risk inherent with doing business there. Ultimately China would be gravy for TTD, and I think they’ll still have lots of success even if China doesn’t move the needle. But I do bet that CEO Jeff Green finds a way to make it work in China, although I wouldn’t expect it to contribute too significantly during the next two or three years.
MongoDB
Although MDB has been one of my bigger holdings most of this year, even I am surprised how well the stock has performed in recent months despite the COVID headwinds. Their results are likely to continue to be held back for another quarter or two (they have a particularly tough comp vs Q4 of last year), but the market is looking ahead, as am I.
I believe it is still early days in the transition to NoSQL databases…but MongoDB management doesn’t even consider themselves just a NoSQL database. They think they should be considered a “modern general purpose data platform” and want to be the “premier place to build applications”. Maybe that’s all just hyperbole, but I think they have a long way to go. And the increasing quantity, and power, and value, of data is going to make the ways that MDB can categorize and store that data, more and more valuable.
I don’t think that Snowflake is going to replace the growing need for MongoDB. I could be wrong, and that is one of many things I’ll be keeping an eye on, but I’m really interested in seeing how MDB grows in the second half of 2021. I know that feels like a long way away, and we have three more quarterly results to look at before we get there, but that’s when I feel like I’m going to get a real sense of what to expect. MDB management have always been serial under-promisors and I expect that to continue. As long as they keep over-deliver’ing, that will be fine by me.
I have some Jan’21 MDB Leaps that are in a taxable account and are up more than 1,100% which I plan to exercise next month, so I’ll be slightly increasing my MDB holdings in January by paying to exercise them.
Nutanix
I know it’s not a popular company here anymore, but they’ve performed even better than my own expectations over the past year. On the surface, it may not seem like it, due to the two transitions they’ve undergone recently, from hardware to software, and then from software to subscription, which is well ahead of original plan, but I do think the “hidden” growth they’ve been experiencing will be more visible over the next year. Subscription billings are now 88%, compared to 73% a year ago. They still haven’t even started to realize the benefit from subscription billings renewing (much lower cost related to renewals than initial subscription deals), which they’ll be seeing in the not too distant future.
The stock has had a nice run since the lows in March when I added quite a lot of calls, so I’ve made some nice gains in my NTNX holdings this year. The newly hired CEO coming from VMware seems like the right guy for the job and I expect will be a good hire. This is only reaffirmed by the fact that VMware is taking legal action against NTNX over the CEO hire. Any time a company poaches their main competitor’s top talent, there is going to be a lawsuit, but the way this is playing out tells me that this guy is probably very good, and more than worth whatever legal costs they incur over the near term.
Bain Capital invested $750 million in Nutanix in August, and I bet that means we’ll see NTNX get acquired, probably not this year, but maybe at some point in 2022. My expectation is that the stock will at least double or triple, beforehand, but obviously the market continues to think this company is worth a lot less than I do, so I’ll just have to wait, continue to evaluate how they perform, and adjust as needed.
Alteryx
Continuing the theme of companies I own that had COVID headwinds this year, rather than tailwinds, AYX has had the challenge of trying to get into new doors in 2020 while everyone was tightening their belts. But there’s just no doubt in my mind that the value of data, and the ability to analyze it will grow and grow in future years. With 5G phone service rolling out now, more and more devices will be connected and communicating and more and more data being collected and stored and then analyzed and the businesses that can unlock the value of that data will always have an edge. Alteryx helps them do that. AYX’s licenses are certainly not cheap, but the companies that use them know it’s worth it, and I expect they will be some pent up demand for new business when the economy reopens next year and 2021 budgets expand compared to what companies could spend in recent months.
It won’t be a rocket ship, but these shares could prove to be quite undervalued if their growth ticks up a bit over the next few quarters.
Datadog
Datadog gets plenty of coverage here so I won’t go into detail. Only a few months ago, it was one of my biggest holdings when I was probably overweighing some comments management made on an earnings call. It’s a great company, that has performed well. Although I have a high level understanding of what they do and how their customers benefit from using them, it’s just not a business that I feel I will ever have my arms around, or am as confident in their competitive advantages, as much as other companies I own, and, for that reason, it’s unlikely that I would be comfortable holding a much more significant portion of my portfolio in them in the future.
There’s still lots that I like about DDOG and I’ll be following the story with a lot of interest as it plays out over the next few quarters and beyond.
Smartsheets
SMAR is a company I hadn’t owned in a while, before buying back in, in early November. I initially intended to keep it a pretty small allocation, and only bought LEAP calls, but I ultimately decided to build it into more of a medium sized holding (tho still all LEAPs).
They’ve gained about +40% so far over the past two months. I’m legitimately confounded that the market values Smartsheets as cheaply as they do. Their growth is up there with companies that have been much higher multiples, and it’s not like SMAR had some one-off pandemic benefit or is expected to be needed less, or to grow less, a year or two from now. To me, it feel like that Peter Lynch scenario where companies’ stocks sell cheap when they have boring names and maybe people think Smartsheets is some cheap cloud version of Excel, or something like that?
I really think this company should be worth much more than it is today, see my comparison to NET below. I would bet that SMAR will be the first of my companies to get acquired in near future, possibly sometime next year, in 2021. I think someone will recognize the bargain that it is, even paying a pretty nice premium over the market price. The question will be how willing is management, or their Board, to sell at such a price, as I suspect the suitors are already out there.
Docusign
Docusign I’ve been holding since mid 2019 as a fairly small position, which has grown into a medium sized one. DOCU is pretty well covered here, it’s a technology that is not going to go away. Yes, there will be cheaper alternatives, but I expect they will continue to keep most of their e-signature market share, as the total market continues to grow. And I do feel that their Agreement Cloud is going to be a pretty big deal and will be a strong driver of growth in future years, tho not contributing significantly until late 2021, or more likely some time in 2022. I don’t see any reason to sell DOCU anytime soon.
Crowdstrike
Crowdstrike falls into the category like Datadog, in terms of, I have a high level understanding of their business, but will never have a great understanding of why they are so much better than other security companies, and for that reason, will probably never be a significant percentage of my portfolio. I think I originally invested only about 1% of my portfolio in CRWD last year (all LEAPs) and they’ve grown nearly 10x for me, now making up more than 4% of a now, much larger, portfolio. Been a pretty fantastic result. They’re in my taxable account, so these are calls I would consider exercising in Jan’22 if they are still chugging along with good prospects, a year from now.
Guardant Health
This is a longer term bet, where, while I hope revenue moves positively now that they’ve received FDA approval for Guardant360 this year for their late-stage liquid biopsies that are already available commercially, the real money and potential lies in whether Guardant’s LUNAR program (early stage liquid biopsy cancer detection) can be successful, and there are already a couple significant competitors (Grail, etc) working on development of these tests as well. Obviously the dream is that GH becomes the leader and early stage cancer liquid biopsies become standard at very routine annual medical exam because the costs to the insurance companies of the tests plus treatment of cancer caught early, is much less than the cost of treating something that is discovered later, or after it has spread.
We are still at least a few years away from knowing if LUNAR will be successful, so it’s way too early to know if they will become the leader, or one of a few very profitable leaders, or successful at all, or when, likely several years away, that it becomes viable or profitable. I do like holding at least some portion of my portfolio in a non software/SaaS/cloud business, as small a portion of my portfolio as this may be.
This is a nice, high risk, high reward company that has some shorter term potential in the late stage biopsy products already approved while we wait and see how the early stage LUNAR program pans out, so it feel like less of a total gamble. Although generous, I like how the stock based compensation awarded to management aligns their interests with other shareholders. And I like how Guardant navigated the FDA approval process twice this year, which gives me some optimism that they can do it again in the future.
Amazon
I’ve owned AMZN for quite a few years, since buying around $300 per share in late 2014. It’s been a great run. As I noted when I sold most of my shares in August and September of this year, I do think Amazon will continue to be a great company and a very good investment. I won’t be surprised if they grow another 25% each of the next three years, which would be a doubling of its already huge market cap again by 2024. But I sold because my tax rate is relatively low now and could be higher in a future year, and I thought other investment ideas could perform even better.
Looking back, my timing was pretty great, as I moved these funds just before many of the stocks that I bought really started moving up. My tax bill for 2020 will be pretty huge, and I will be selling the last of my AMZN shares in early January, using the proceeds mostly to pay taxes, and to exercise the upcoming expiring MDB calls, but it felt like the right time to move on from this life changing investment, and put more into the next life changing investments.
Elastic
My Elastic holdings (all LEAP calls) had just about quadrupled, up more than 300%, in a little over a year. I still think the stock is undervalued and I like the company, but this one definitely also falls into the category of businesses that I don’t understand well enough to really go big on them. I sold most of my small ESTC position last month to buy more MGNI, and I will, most likely, sell the rest of it when it crosses over to LT capital gains in mid January.
Thoughts on Companies I Don’t/Didn’t/No Longer Own
It’s been an interesting year, watching many others’ portfolios rise 200%+ while my own was only up about 50%, until recently. There were moments when I had the thought about whether I was looking at companies wrong, but in the end, I didn’t change from how I evaluate what I think companies are worth, and I stayed true to my methods, and ultimately was rewarded this year beyond anything I could have hoped for.
Zoom
I didn’t really own any Zoom Video this year. Yes, I had a fraction of one percent in a few calls that I bought when the stock was near it’s low in fall of 2019, but I was never particularly comfortable even holding that small amount of ZM in my portfolio, even considering it’s valuation when Zoom stock was still below $100/share. I sold them off the first week of February when the first whispers of a possible virus outbreak started to make headlines and bumped the share price up slightly. Had I continued to hold those calls, they would have risen hundreds of percent, even after Zoom’s subsequent declines at the end of the year.
I didn’t own Zoom early in the year partially because I didn’t think COVID would become a big pandemic. I was obviously wrong. Then when it was clear that there would be a pandemic and the shares rose, I still didn’t buy Zoom because, I wasn’t going to bank on them growing revenue more than +200%. And the stock was valued so high, even early this year, that I felt they needed to grow at a much higher rate than that, in order for the stock to be worth buying. Ultimately, they grew by 350%+ and a Zoom investment did very well. But in retrospect, as nice as it would be to own another stock that went up several hundred percent this year (and yes, of course that would be great), there was never a time this year when I was even really contemplating a Zoom purchase. I wouldn’t have been comfortable owning it, and it’s ok that it got away from me, even despite those big gains this year. It’s not like I’m looking back and wondering why I didn’t own Shopify all year, so I view Zoom in a similar way. That being said, I was still cheering for the stock to do well since there were so many amazing people on this board that I knew were owners and hoping for great things from them.
Cloudflare
Put this one in the category of companies that I didn’t feel that I understood well enough to invest in, and always seemed on the higher side, valuation wise. I did own some Fastly earlier this year, but, same situation, I didn’t really understand the company that well, and could never really be excited about owning it. I’m sure NET will continue to do really great, but it’s just not for me. I guess one of the things I’ve learned about myself this year is that I am ok passing on a really great possible investment if I don’t feel like I “get it” well enough to believe that they can be a leader with market beating returns for years to come. This is similar to why I sold my small Livongo stake before the TDOC merger was even announced…although…
Teladoc
Teladoc is a company that I think I could regret not owning. I think their opportunity is huge, their name is already used like a verb for any Telahealth visit. Don’t be surprised if I buy back into TDOC at some point in 2021 if it doesn’t get away from me, price wise, first. Today, I just have more confidence in my other holdings to not want to sell off a significant portion of any of them. In my year end write up last year, I think I said that ESTC and SMAR would probably be the two companies I regretted not owning more of. Ultimately, they both turned out to just be good, not great, investments over the next 12 months, and I ended up building back up SMAR, while selling off the last of my ESTC. I have a feeling TDOC will do better in 2021 than either of those companies did in 2020, but we shall see.
Snowflake
Although Snowflake also falls into the category of I don’t understand exactly what they do well enough to invest in it, it’s growing fast enough, and enough people I respect on this board have confidence in them that, if they were selling at a reasonable valuation, I would probably take a small position. That being said, the price would have to drop by more than -50% from where it is today (or accelerate their already high revenue growth enormously) for me to even start thinking about it. So I’m pretty sure I’ll never be a SNOW owner…but you never know.
Kinder Morgan KMI
KMI is a natural gas pipeline operator that, coming into 2020, I expected would be one of my best performing investments. Then COVID happened and my 12% allocation in KMI, mostly calls, more or less went to zero during the year (so the SaaS/cloud/software portion of my portfolio, excluding KMI was up about 173%, dragged down to 140% by KMI). I still think Kinder Morgan would have been one of my best investments this year if there hadn’t been a once-in-a-generation pandemic, which I never could have predicted in advance, so I’m not sure I would have owned any less of it coming into the year, if I had a do-over.
I did make a mistake buying more in March, when energy prices sank, and I still wasn’t believing the pandemic would persist like it did, but fortunately, I didn’t go overboard with those purchases. I actually still think a KMI investment will do very well over the next couple of years, and that their assets are very undervalued and KMI, including the yield, will probably beat the S&P by a significant margin in the future. I just think the other companies I own have a higher likelihood of doing even better so I don’t anticipate getting back into KMI, at least not unless I decide to start to shift some of the portfolio into higher yield dividend investments at some point in the future.
Quick Comparison of NET vs SMAR
For the past 12 months (last four quarters) through Q3 2020:
Cloudflare Smartsheet
Revenue 12mos to Q3’20 $389m $354m
Revenue 12mos Q3’19 PY $258m $277m
Revenue Growth +50% +45%
Gross Margin % 76.8% 78.3%
Gross Margin $ 12mo Q3’20 $298m $244m
Pretty similar all around, at least over those particular most recent 12 month periods.
However Cloudflare’s market cap is $23 Billion, about three times higher than Smartsheets $8 Billion.
Should Cloudflare have a higher valuation than Smartsheets? Yes, it should. NET’s revenue is a little bit higher today, and growing faster (although their margins are 1.5% lower). And yes the past few quarters, SMAR’s growth has decelerated, while NET had a very strong most recent quarter of accelerated growth.
But should it be three times that of Smartsheets’ market cap? I don’t believe so. Again, I’m no expert on Cloudflare as I haven’t spent much time looking at it, but I’d have a really hard time putting any of my investing dollars into NET shares when a company like SMAR is available for the price it’s at today. If I had reason to believe that Cloudflare’s revenue was going to accelerate and their margins are going to expand over the next couple of years, then maybe it should be worth triple the market cap of Smartsheets. That’s just not something I have any reason to expect, but again that’s not to say there isn’t good reason to think it will, that I’m just not aware of.
And I think SMAR falls into the COVID “headwind impact” category this year, as opposed to the tailwinds that NET has probably had recently, which could lead to SMAR’s growth reaccelerating in 2021, while NET’s could decelerate next year (strong emphasis on the “could”).
I’m a numbers guy, so sometimes I admittedly probably put too much emphasis on comparisons like the above, and that’s very possibly what I’m doing here. At the same time, I also go big on companies like TTD, MGNI, MDB, regardless of the numbers, where I see them being dominant and growing at a high rate for many years, with the potential to set the standard for their industries for years to come.
I certainly don’t think anyone that owns NET should sell it based on the above, I’m just making the point that, since I don’t have a great understanding of why they will be dominant and grow at a high rate for years to come (as others here likely do), it would be hard for me to get past a more quantitative look at them, and their current valuation, when other intriguing investments exist.
Pullback Risk
In my mind, I look at my companies and have a “gut” belief in how their upside compares to the potential downside, so take this for what you’ve paid for it, which is probably all it’s worth.
The companies that I consider to be the most “fairly valued”, have the highest risk of a major pullback if things don’t go well. I would put these companies into that category, given where their stock prices are today:
Higher Risk of a Pullback - TTD, MDB, DDOG, CRWD, GH
And the others, purely in my opinion, I think are much less likely to have a sustained pullback from today’s prices, even with some bumpy quarterly results:
Lower Pullback Risk - MGNI, NTNX, AYX, SMAR, DOCU
That doesn’t mean that, even if the second group doesn’t drop, that there couldn’t be major opportunity risk by holding them when other companies appreciate. They certainly could. Although I’ve timed my Nutanix purchases pretty well, buying mostly calls in late summer 2019 and then in March 2020, which have worked out well, as we all know, anyone that held the common shares over the past two years, isn’t doing well, especially compared to other companies we follow.
DOCU is kind of in the middle, some days, in my mind, I group it more with the higher risk ones, although at today’s price, I think of Docusign more in group B.
TTD and MDB, in particular, I just think are going to be such long term winners, that I don’t worry about holding big allocations of them even through frothy valued stretches.
Conclusion
So that’s it. I came into this year hoping for a +25% and instead had 140%+ investment returns that still have me wondering if I’m dreaming. Like others on this board, I did make an effort to donate more to some of my favorite charities than I usually do, to share at least a small part of this with others that weren’t as fortunate during this crazy, challenging year.
I do think the likelihood of SMAR getting acquired in ’21 and Nutanix in ’22 are high and it will be interesting to see how they play out. I really just think the market is plain wrong about Smartsheets and how it is being valued today (I know, when I say it out loud, that sounds like something an investor says just before he gets proven to be very wrong). Yet it’s not one of my biggest positions, because I don’t see them as changing the world (at least within their industries) in the ways that the digital programmatic advertising companies and MongoDB could.
It still surprises me how few of the companies we follow have been acquired over the past couple of years although, given the high tech valuations, it would be tough to expect too many new acquisitions in the near future. I do hope that most of my largest holdings continue to remain independent and publicly traded for the next few years while their stories continue to play out.
Thanks, especially to Saul, as well as GauchoRico, muji, Bear, and everyone else that has provided such an educational and constructive conversation over the past year.
Also, tho he doesn’t post here as much these days, I’ll add a shout out to steppenwulf, who first got me excited especially about MDB, as well as AYX, way back when, which have been, and I expect, will continue to be, really great investments.
And big thanks to rockleppard for putting MGNI on my radar!
So I guess the lesson here is, if you see posts by any user whose username ends with what sounds like a predatory animal with an unusual spelling, such as wulf or leppard, pay close attention to what they say 
It could turn out to be very valuable.
I’ll say it again this year, I would be absolutely thrilled to realize even +25% gains next year.
Everyone take care of yourselves, be safe, have a very Happy New Year, and I look forward to more fantastic discussions ahead in 2021!
-mekong