Mekong22 Jan 2025 portfolio update

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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