Mekong22 Jan 2025 portfolio update

Investment Analysis Clubs Saul’s Investing Discussions
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January was a bit up and down, with some days showing really strong gains while others had significant pullbacks. A little surprising for a month when very few earnings and significant updates came from the companies themselves, as macro news has been moving the markets a lot in early 2025.

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 the first month of 2025:

+3.1%  YTD Jan

My portfolio is still very concentrated, with two of the companies I own (Tesla and The Trade Desk) making up the majority.

All of my companies were higher in January, which was nice, although the largest ones were only slightly up from year end, so the overall gain was only about +3%. I’ll take it!

As I noted last month, going forward, I will just provide allocation categories (oversized, large, medium, small, etc) below rather than the exact portfolio percentages.

This was my allocation at the end of January 1/31/25

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

*edit - I mistakenly showed MSFT where RBRK should be above when I posted this morning. Corrected now

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. TTD and MDB have been two of my top three or four holdings pretty consistently for the past five years.

Note that a portion of my TTD and TSLA holdings includes some 2026 Leap call options.

The only change since last month is I sold the last bit of my small Micron MU position when it got back up around $105, close to where I had bought the shares in early December. Those funds were mostly pulled out of the portfolio permanently for other needs.

So overall there was no significant changes to my holding allocations.

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. I doubt that I would lose sleep even if it grew to even a significantly larger percentage than it already is now.

Company Updates

There haven’t been many updates for my companies, other than Tesla, in January, which tends to be a slow news month for earnings releases.

Tesla

Production and Deliveries Q4

Tesla released their auto production and deliveries numbers the first week of January.

Although the deliveries number was about -1.8% lower than analyst expectations, I believe Q4’24 was still the highest quarterly deliveries number in company history.

Many of the headlines that seemed intent to pan the results emphasized that full year 2024 was the first decrease in total annual deliveries in company history…which is true, 2024 1.79m deliveries was -1% lower than last year’s 1.81m, mostly due to Q1 being weak last year which was well known already.

The one percent drop is still much better than most of the world’s auto companies. But at the end of the day, auto production and deliveries are probably not going to be what is going to drive the company’s value over the next several years.

Earnings/Costs/Margins

Although Q4 earnings were not particularly strong, Tesla announced that, for the first time in company history, the average cost per vehicle is below $35,000 (including an average of their smaller cars and larger vehicles like cybertruck). This is particularly impressive given the high rates of inflation in recent years that caused most auto companies to be spending more to build their cars than they had in the past.

And this is before Tesla even launches thier new “unboxed” production method and facilities which are expected to reduce costs quite a bit in the future, and will likely be used to produce cybercabs for the robotaxi business and other models of future cars.

Major Initiatives

I’m more focused on making sure that things are still on track with automation, self driving, robotaxi ride sharing, energy, optimus, and semi trucks, all of which seem to be progressing nicely.

Robotaxi Ride Sharing Launch est. June 2025

During last week’s earnings calls, they provided updates on several of these. One of the biggest announcements during the call is that the company expects to be ready to launch fully self driving, driverless, robotaxi ride sharing in June 2025 in Austin TX, and that they anticipate, not only launching in Texas and Californaia this year as the company previously estimated, but that they aim to launch in other cities in other states later in '25.

Energy/Battery Production

During the call, they also revealed that a third battery megafactory is under construction, which I don’t think was known or expected previously. Tesla’s energy business has grown significantly, over 100% in some recent quarters, as the company completed their second megafactory in Shanghai (the first one was in Monterray California), which essentially doubled capacity.

A third factory would likely grow the capacity another 50% once completed (from 2 to 3). They didn’t say where the new factory is located, but some have suggested that it might be in Berlin Germany.

Optimus Humanoid Robotics

Optimus robots continue to progress. CEO Elon Musk said they are aiming to have 10,000 autonomous robots doing useful tasks in Tesla’s factories by the end of 2025. he went on to say it’s an agressive goal and the actual number could be less than 10 thousand but is likely to be at least a few thousand. If all goes well, I think they are aiming to build 10k optimus robots per month (on average, less early in the year and more later in the year) during 2026.

Semi Trucks

and the Semi truck division also progressing well as the big Nevada semi factory is further along, although it is likely that volume production will not be significant there until 2026.

New Automobile Models

Funny how this goes last on my list, for a company that is still today, largely an EV auto company. Shows how low this ranks on what I think will drive the value of the company in the future.

The new version of Tesla’s Model Y (the best selling car in the world), Model Y Juniper was launched onsale in January and seems to be getting favorable reviews. The company still plans to launch more new vehicles in the first half of 2025, including multiple lower priced (probably less than $30,000) new vehicles.

MongoDB (MDB)

Only one quick comment on MongoDB as it’s stock price moved up in the second half of January, after Chinese AI company Deepseek has been widely discussed as potentially reducing the costs of developing real world AI, which could be benefical to companies like MDB, SNOW, etc if their clients are able to more quickly and inexpensively bring AI applications to market and generate increasing usage and fees for Mongo.

Here are a articles on MDB’s site, much of which goes over my head as I am not super tech-savvy, but I will re-read again to try to digest:

Upcoming earnings releases for my companies:

AMZN February 6th
TTD February 12th

MELI and CRSP should be releasing later in the month, toward the end of February, although I don’t believe they’ve announced specific dates yet

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^ Jan 31 2025 YTD Gain
TSLA 403.84 404.60 +0.2%
TTD 117.53 118.68 +1.0%
AMZN 219.39 237.68 +8.3%
MDB 232.81 273.32 +17.4%
MELI 1,700.44 1,922.19 +13.0%
RBRK 65.36 73.27 +12.1%
CRSP 39.36 41.59 +5.7%

^ 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 +942%, while most of my MongoDB shares were purchased in July 2018 for $57.39 and are up +376% now.

That’s it for this month. Good start.

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

-mekong

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I see you have some TTD bought around the same time as me. It’s just been a nice holding and they finally hit a roadblock last week. Curious to know if you think this is a blip and the ship will be righted … or if this hit is a correction and it won’t be going back to where it was anytime soon?

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I was definitely pretty suprised and disappointed at the quarter that TTD reported.

As CFO Jeff Green said on the call, it was the first time in 33 quarters, more than eight years, as a publicly traded company that they fell short of their own internal expectations.

I wasn’t really impressed with anything on the analyst call either. Although Jeff kept saying he takes responsibility and admitted that the company made execution missteps that resulted in the weak quarter, he was dissappointingly vague about giving any specifics. After not giving details in his answer to the first analyst question, the second analyst immediately followed up asking essentially the same thing about what the missteps were, and Jeff still wouldn’t give us much.

He seemed to suggest that he didn’t want to throw anyone under the bus internally but that they were making changes. Maybe that’s true maybe it’s not. I really have no idea. I’m definitely less confident and optimistic about TTD than I’ve been in a long time

If the stock was still in the mid $90’s, I’d probably sell half of my stake right now, given my lower confidence. I did sell a very small amount before earnings a few weeks ago, fortunately while the stock price was much higher. But given how low it has dropped into the $70’s and I do think they are still positioned to do well over the long term, and without any short term need to sell right now, I’m not inclined to sell any just yet.

I may regret that and it may fall further when they report Q1. The good news is that Q1 reports come out relatively quickly after Q4, given the extra time that companies get to report year end, so we won’t have to wait too long.

They say they are making decisions for the long term that have been at the expense of the short term (typical mgmt speak after a bad quarter), and they were upfront a year or so ago when they signed deals with all of the big tv streaming services telling us up front that it would be a year or two or more before they saw much in terms of financial benefits and growth boost coming from them.

So I’m not dumping my shares right now, but I wouldn’t blame anyone that decides that there’s too much uncertainty in TTD now.

I also have a still fresh memory of my worst investing mistake in 2022, which was selling out of Nutanix (NTNX) at the worst possible time, and proceeded to watch it double over the next six months and quadruple over the next two years while I was on the sidelines. I can wait for some new information and fresh data before doing anything too drastic with Trade Desk.

If I was betting, I would bet that they were pretty conservative with their Q1 guidance and wanted to make sure not to have back to back misses of their internal targets. It doesn’t mean they will have a blowout next time, but I hope that the downside from here is limited when Q1 is announced. tho I’ve been wrong before.

If they really are able to fix whatever missteps they had internally and the next couple of quarters are good and then they start to pick up a boost from the expected delayed impact from the streaming giants, shareholders will do well. But if they continue to show subpar results and dance around the exact reasons why, the best days to be a Trade Desk investor may be behind us. High risk and high reward from here in my opinion.

Even after the nearly -40% pullback since earnings, I’m still up around 600% on TTD and want to believe Jeff will get it back on track and they will start to unlock the opportunities of the streaming partnerships, so I’m holding tight…unless it runs back into the mid $90’s before the next report in which case I do think I would reduce my position at least a bit before the Q1 release.

So take that for what it’s worth. If I didn’t already have a TTD position and was newer to the company, I probably wouldn’t be jumping in right now, at least not until we get the first quarter. I wish Jeff had given more detail of exactly how they didn’t execute the way they expected to in Q4.

-mekong

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As another long-time holder, I appreciate the way Jeff Green took ownership. However, I agree with @mekong22 on being unimpressed with the solutions presented. If I’ve got it right:

  1. The supposedly new & improved platform rollout has hit a snag which is going to be addressed by better client customization.
  2. The entire engineering motion is being restructured into smaller teams to become more nimble.
  3. New management hires are on the way to help with the fix.

None of the above sounds quick or easy. For those who remember, this sounds more like Zscaler’s go-to-market misstep in 2019 than CrowdStrike’s update blunder in 2024. As with Zscaler, these fixes are more likely to take 2-3 quarters than 2-3 months. Coming off a year propped up by a few percent in seasonal political spend, the early math looks pretty ugly until TTD comes around again on easier comps in 1Q26.

Having taken more of a basket view toward advertising with APP, RDDT, and TTD, I’d put TTD’s report and medium-term prospects a distant third in that group. I decided to exit our position entirely and bump it back to our watch list until TTD gets its house back in order. A small amount of that money went into APP at $450 and RDDT at $185. I’ll figure out the rest later.

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After this - the first misstep in many years - do you think the company guided aggressively? I don’t. Odds are they will exceed their guidance to get things back on track. Bad time to exit unless you felt they have lost control of the situation, which I believe is what drove you to sell.

Vinnie G

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Actually this is the point I lost confidence in Green and TTD to a degree. The last question of the Earnings Call was about how could TTD reaccelerate. Green basically dodged the question and spoke about TAM and how exciting audio is.

Personally I feel that TTD have been asleep at the wheel for a while and over concentrating on CTV and UID2.0 - just look at what AppLovin has done in mobile and apps.

Haven’t sold out yet although was trimming ~$120 level previously but unless something dramatic happens in terms of transparency and business performance re-acceleration then I feel we are better off elsewhere (AppLovin for instance).

Ant

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I don’t believe they’ve lost control of it. I just believe the situation is going to take longer to fix than I’m willing to wait. And in this case, it’s totally self-inflicted. While Green took appropriate responsibility for the gaffe, I didn’t leave the call with as much comfort in the solution.

This is a more accurate reflection of what drove me to sell. From August 2022 through Feb 12 I thought TTD was one of the best places in the market for our money. After the double miss on performance and guide with a challenging new to-do list, I no longer believe that’s the case. Time will tell if that was the right decision.

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