Like many others, I’m am happy to be closing the book on my 2022 investing year.
The last two times that my portfolio lost -50% or more (late 2008 and early 2020), it came back in a matter of months reaching new highs again within a really short amount of time. That obviously hasn’t happened this year, and it is so hard to predict what the next few quarters, or year, have in store.
But I have little doubt that continuing to own great companies that are positioned around long term trends, will pay off in the long run.
Here is where things finished up for 2022:
-29.3% YTD Jan
-21.2% YTD Feb
-29.8% YTD Mar
-43.3% YTD Apr
-60.4% YTD May
-65.6% YTD Jun
-62.2% YTD Jul
-54.4% YTD Aug
-64.5% YTD Sep
-65.8% YTD Oct
-69.3% YTD Nov
-70.2% YTD Dec
Although my second biggest position at the end of November (MongoDB) had a strong December, most everything else drifted lower during the past month.
and my allocation at year end:
MongoDB (MDB) 40.7%
The Trade Desk (TTD) 34.5%
Snowflake (SNOW) 7.8%
Datadog (DDOG) 7.0%
Magnite (MGNI) 5.5%
Cloudflare (NET) 2.7%
Crowdstrike (CRWD) 1.8%
I mentioned in my November writeup that I had shifted about 4.5% of my Snowflake holding to MongoDB at the very beginning of December before MDB’s earnings release. That worked out well as MDB was up about +40% since then, (while most everything else I own drifted down last month) moving Mongo back up to the top spot again.
I’m keeping my eye on SentinelOne (S) and Smartsheets (SMAR) as both of those look interesting at today’s valuation and are high on my watch list right now.
There hasn’t been any signficant news or earnings from any of the companies since my November writeup (and follow up post summarizing why I’m comfortable with my large TTD holding), so I won’t add much about the individual companies this month.
I still believe that both MDB, TTD, and SNOW, in particular, will be much bigger companies a few years from now. TTD has been consistently profitable for quite a few years now, even while continuing to grow at a high clip. MDB is just turning the corner to profitability as 2022 is trending toward being their first year with (non-gaap) income as a public company.
December and January are probably my least favorite times of year, as an investor. That’s because public companies get about twice as long after year end before they have to report their Q4 and full year results, compared to the first three quarters of the year, due to additional audit and disclosure requirements at year end.
So that means it is a long, quiet stretch until early February when we start to hear from some of our December 31st companies (unless anyone pre-announces). The good news is that the Q1 results come in very soon after Q4, so we get lots of new information almost non-stop from February until early May, hearing from each company twice, before it goes back to three months in between earnings announcements again until Q2 and Q3 earnings.
I do think the first 2023 guidance we get is going to be interesting. Many of the companies we follow have traditionally been pretty conservative with their guidance, which in a normal year is good. I doubt that will change especially with some of the macro economic uncertainties in the U.S. and around the world, so it may give some management’s even more reason to be careful with their guides at the beginning of '23. Their valuations are already so low in some cases that they may not be too worried about the short term reaction.
If so, we may not get a whole lot of useful information from the initial guidance…but for any companies that do give some strong expectations for the year ahead when they report in February and March, it could get a better reaction than we’ve seen in a while.
So good riddance to 2022. At the end of the day, I do think I learned a lot going through this patch that will help me be a better investor in the future.
Thanks, as always, to Saul and everyone on the board. Happy New Year and wishing you all a happy, healthy, prosperous 2023!
-mekong
