Mekong22 Feb 2025 Portfolio update

Investment Analysis Clubs Saul’s Investing Discussions
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February started out rough with the poor results from The Trade Desk, and had a couple good earnings reports from Mercadolibre and Crispr Theraputics, while my large Tesla position drifted down quite a bit lower than where we started the month.

As with all of my TMF posts, nothing that I post here is intended to be, or should be considered, investment advice. I post summaries of my investments and performance to help me think through and review how I manage my own portfolio and to participate in the great discussions on this board.

Here’s how things look cumulatively for 2025:

+3.1%  YTD Jan
-17.9% YTD Feb

My portfolio is still very concentrated, particularly with an outsized large position in Tesla.

These were my positions at the end of February 2/28/25

Large/Oversized  (TSLA)  Tesla    
Large            (TTD)   The Trade Desk  
Medium           (MELI)  MercadoLibre
Medium           (CRSP)  Crispr Theraputics
Medium           (MDB)   MongoDB
Small            (AMZN)  Amazon

It is a very concentrated portfolio which I don’t generally prefer, but as of right now I don’t have many other companies that I have a high level of confidence in to allocate investment funds towards.

Note that a portion of my holdings includes December 2026 (TTD and TSLA) and June 2027 (TSLA*new) LEAP call options.

Mercadolibre and Crispr both moved ahead of MongoDB this month on the positive reaction to their strong earnings. This is the first time that Mongo hasn’t been among my top holdings in a few years. MDB reports this week so hopefully we’ll see something positive from them too.

Despite the big haircut that Trade Desk took after their weak earnings and guidance this month, it’s still in the #2 spot. This quarter was really disappointing and I’ve lost some confidence in TTD for sure, although I’ll likely hold on for a few more weeks until their Q1 earnings report and see if they show any signs of turning things around.

Tesla was the biggest contributor to the decrease in my portfolio this month, giving back much of the gains they had picked up at the end of 2024. Granted, TSLA shares are still up more than 30% over the past six months. With supervised full self driving launching this month in China (and more recently there are signs that it may become available in Europe soon!) and several other potential catalysts for Tesla expected in the next few months (robotaxi launch, new low priced vehicles, etc), I couldn’t resist and added some additional Tesla holdings to my already large stake.

I sold my Rubrik stake and sold about half of my Amazon shares, this month, pulling some of the funds out of the portfolio permanently and putting some of them into TSLA when those shares got cheaper late in the month.

I continue to believe that, if Tesla can perform well and succeed with their newer business segments, that the company could be worth much more in the future than it is today. So I am comfortable allowing it to be an outsized large portion of my portfolio.

Company Updates

I’ll keep it brief this month as I already wrote up a lot about my two largest holdings, Tesla and Trade Desk recently.

Tesla

My latest thoughts were well covered during the discussion in the “Customer Confidence…” thread a little bit down board, so I won’t re-hash the details.

Ultimately if Tesla does unveil their new low cost vehicles during Q2 and launches the robotaxi service this summer as they have suggested, it should give the company a boost, with more big items expected to come a couple quarters later with possible volume production of Semi Trucks and Cybercabs expected to begin in late '25 or early 2026.

The Trade Desk (TTD)

I gave my thoughts on the Q4 results and earnings call in a reply to last month’s portfolio update.

Disappointing to see TTD miss their own internal targets for the first time in company history, and even more disappointing that I didn’t feel they could really communicate details of what exactly went wrong and the path to get it back on track. I still have a very low cost basis in my shares, so I’m willing to see how things look in the Q1 release and call before doing anything too drastic, but I could see myself reducing TTD significantly if I don’t regain optimism that they are on the right track.

MongoDB (MDB)

Mongo reports Q4 this wednesday. Last quarter, the initial earnings report and guidance was viewed positively and the shares moved up more than +10% before falling after the earnings call when analysts felt that some of the commentary going forward was too bearish. Will be interesting to see how the quarter actually played out.

Note Mongo calls the periods that mostly fall in 2024 as “fiscal 2025” because the year ends in Jan’25, but I have them labeled as 2024 below as I tend to think about them as taking place during that year:

MDB YoY growth

       Q1    Q2   Q3   Q4
2020   46%   39%  38%  38%
2021   39%   44%  50%  56%
2022   57%   53%  47%  36%
2023   29%   40%  30%  27%
2024   22%   13%  22%  13%(q4 guide)

And MDB sequential growth

      Q1   Q2  Q3   Q4
2020  6%   6%   9%  13%
2021  6%   9%  14%  17%
2022  7%   6%  10%   8%
2023  2%  15%   2%   6%
2024  -2%  6%  11%  -2%(q4 guide)

Mercadolibre (MELI) and Crispr (CRSP)

Both MELI and CRSP had strong results in the quarter recently announced. Both stocks moved up sharply afterwards and have retreated back a bit since. These are two of the of the top companies that I would consider moving some additional funds into if more cash becomes available to invest if I sell other things in the near future.

Stock Performance

Here is the year to date performance of each of my current holdings. Also note that, if I invest in new companies that I didn’t own at the beginning of the year, this will only show the performance since I purchased them (none yet in 2025):

Dec 31 2024^ Feb 28 2025 YTD Gain
TSLA 403.84 293.05 -27.4%
TTD 117.53 70.29 -40.2%
AMZN 219.39 211.96 +3.4%
MDB 232.81 267.43 +14.9%
MELI 1,700.44 2,121.87 +24.8%
CRSP 39.36 43.92 +11.6%

^ For any companies I did not own prior to 2025 (none so far), the “December 31st” numbers above are not their 12/31/24 prices, but the stock price of my initial, most significant purchases during 2025.

Most of the shares I hold in TTD and MDB were purchased in 2018 and 2019 at much lower costs. The largest portion of my Trade Desk shares were purchased in January 2019 for $11.39 and are up +517%, while most of my MongoDB shares were purchased in July 2018 for $57.39 and are up +366% now.

That’s it for this month.

Thanks as always to Saul and everyone else that makes this board so great!

-mekong

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I won’t do a separate thread since I don’t think many others even follow MDB anymore

But MongoDB reported Q4 yesterday afternoon. Revenue grew 20% beating their 12% top end guidance pretty handily, but the guidance was disappointing.

During the earnings call, they said from the start not to expect next year to be that good but the opportunity beyond this year is still great.

Well that was all I needed to hear and I don’t intend to stick it out for another year of possible acceleration in 2026, and I sold all of my remaining shares in the after hours within the first few minutes of the call (something I almost never do). Glad I did as the stock price is down even more this morning.

While it’s been disappointing that the last few quarters weren’t stronger, it’s still not a bad ending to my journey with MDB, as Mongo was one of the best investments of my life so far. I sold a lot of my stake (largely purchased in 2018) in 2023 and 2024 when the stock was over $400 and even some when it was over $500, nearly ten times what I had paid just a few years earlier.

Even the last shares I sold last night, despite the recent drops, were still up about 300% from my purchase price. Not too shabby.

Some of the cash I redeployed into more Mercadolibre this morning, some of it will be permanently pulled out of the portfolio and I’m debating what to do with the rest.

-mekong

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It took me this long to get fully out of MDB, as well.

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I had bought in starting Jan 2, and thru January on Bert info. Started selling when it his >$285 on valuation. dumped last 20% yesterday, and made about 11% overall.

However, I entered the stock thinking it would be a long term beneficiary of AI, applications (along with GTLB, SNOW etc). However, it is becoming quite unclear who will benefit and who will get torpedoed.

Given the 2026 forecast, I think the above thesis for AI growth remains.

For 2025… I think some companies are factoring in uncertainty (perhaps being conservative) and others are not. The truth is, who knows? The clown show continues with daily reversals of policy on tariffs and who is our friend and who is our foe. Markets not happy with that.

What DOES look clear is that DOGE will reduce the headcount (and thus seats) at the US Gov. That will have an impact on revenues I would think when it comes to “ATLAS for Government” and Fedramp kicker to growth.

I’ve taken the cue that this is a headwind and likely a big hit for growth for companies such as ZS, CRWD etc.

edit: I think some companies are putting that in their forecast and others are not given all the unknowns. I know forecasting my business right now is next to impossible.

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This is exactly what I’m thinking. But I didn’t sell quite as quickly and am slowly selling almost my entire position.

Really low guidance is par for the course with this company. But the margin expectations, combined with today’s uncertain macro environment make me want to move out and put the funds into Snowflake and perhaps a couple of hyper-growth companies (I need help with this).

I love MongoDB as a company and the market capitalization of under $16 billion is so low that I’m convinced it has a great long term future, especially with the prospect of growth in AI applications over the next few years. I’ll stay invested a little bit just so I keep abreast of what’s happening. Once this turns, one won’t have a lot of time to take advantage.

Thanks for your updates.
DJ

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