What a difference a week makes! February was wild, to say the least
Similar to my January update, I will do a brief update for February and plan to do more extensive portfolio reviews at the end of each quarter.
At one point last week, my portfolio was up about 40% year to date. It was crazy watching the gains, day after day, skyrocketing. In terms of dollar gain, six weeks into the year, I was up more dollar value than the entire year in 2019 (and I was up nearly 60% last year)!
Then this week happened. Coronavirus fears dragged everything down, despite pretty universally great earnings reports for my companies this month. Uncertainty and fear took over. At one point this morning, I had given up all of 2020’s gains and was briefly in the red, down for the year. But things turned around this afternoon. Although I was down for the month of February, I am still 7% up for the year.
Cumulative year to date progress of my portfolio for 2020
End of Jan +15.5%
End of Feb + 7.0%
Here’s my 2/29/20 allocation, with comparisons to the last couple of months, and just a reminder that many of these holdings are a blend of both common stock and call options. Options particularly make up much of the NTNX, KMI, CRWD, DOCU, and GH, that I own.
12/31/2019 1/31/2020 2/29/2020
TTD 18.5% 16.6% 18.6%
AMZN 18.3% 17.2% 17.4%
MDB 15.0% 17.6% 16.4%
AYX 12.3% 15.9% 16.3%
KMI 11.7% 10.9% 11.7%
NTNX 6.9% 6.5% 5.3%
DOCU 3.5% 3.2% 4.0%
OKTA 4.9% 2.8% 3.0%
ESTC 1.7% 1.8% 2.4%
DDOG 2.1% 2.0% 2.1%
CRWD 2.3% 3.2% 1.7%
GH - 0.5% 0.7%
SMAR 1.0% 0.9% 0.4%
ZS 1.5% 0.6% -
ZM 0.4% 0.4% -
So TTD moved back into the top spot. KMI moved up slightly…although their stock price was actually down this month, but I added quite a bit to my KMI position in recent days as the price got cheaper. DOCU and ESTC both gained a bit too.
So what did I sell this month?
Zoom - ZM was a very small position for me and one that I was never too into (great company, but I’m still not on board with the high valuation) so on the heels of a nice rise, I parted ways with them with a nice, albeit small, gain. Will definitely keep following them and may get back in at some point
Zscaler and Smartsheets - I sold the last of my ZS and most of my SMAR too. I will probably regret one or both of them, but with other stocks on sale this week, it didn’t make sense keep much in my lower conviction ones.
I also sold about half of my CRWD and slightly trimmed a little bit of TTD, MDB, and AYX, not because I wanted to own any less of them, but because I wanted to take advantage of dropping stock prices by putting more into other companies.
A couple times this month, I thought about selling my small GH stake (again) too, but at least for now, I’m holding on.
And what did I do with all of those proceeds?
Unfortunately, this is not going to be interesting to many folks here because the two companies where I moved funds from all of the sales above are not much followed on this board.
Nutanix - A few of my posts yesterday described why I still like Nutanix. I get it, it’s not loved here, so I won’t re-hash.
KMI - it’s a big natural gas pipeline operator, so not a tech company and OT here, but I couldn’t resist buying a lot more this week as the stock got cheaper, as I feel they were unfairly dragged down with falling oil prices, although they have almost no exposure to oil. I timed a very large purchase of KMI call options really well/lucky this morning, which are already up 31% by the end of the day.
So that was my February. With the impact/uncertainty of the virus, I literally have no idea what to expect for March. I could easily see my portfolio being up 20% next month or down 20%. The next few months will probably be a bumpy ride, but I have no hesitation to stay fully invested. It was somewhat painful hitting the sell button on even a small amount of my three highest conviction companies, TTD, MDB, and AYX shares this week because I do think they can all be life changing investments over the next few years, but where I reallocated my funds just feels like the best opportunities for the short term, next 6-12 months, while still leaving me with plenty of exposure my big 3.
Congrats to Saul and everyone else that had a good month despite this market craziness. Hopefully I’ll be able to do a more thorough review at the end of the quarter next month.
-mekong