I’m quite delayed in posting a June 30th update as I’ve been enjoying some extended summer travels the past couple of weeks so I’ll make this a dual June and mid-July update
I’ve made very few trades over the past 45 days so that will simplify things a bit.
My portfolio has been on a good run in late June, and even more so in early July, largely due to Tesla’s stock performance, which is up about +55% over the past month or so, from about $170 the second week of June to $263 today.
Here are my updated results, cumulatively by month so far for 2024:
-9.7% YTD Jan
+11.0% YTD Feb
+3.7% YTD Mar
+2.3% YTD Apr
+1.2% YTD May
+9.7% YTD Jun
+26.6% YTD July 15th (mid month)
My portfolio is still very concentrated, eight positions, and three of those make up the majority.
This was my allocation at the end of last month 5/31/24
41.3% (TTD) The Trade Desk
26.2% (TSLA) Tesla
14.2% (MDB) MongoDB
6.2% (ZS) Zscaler *New
5.0% (AXON) Axon Enterprise
4.2% (MELI) MercadoLibre
2.9% (SNOW) Snowflake *New
this is what it looked like at the end of June 2024:
39.6% (TTD) The Trade Desk
29.0% (TSLA) Tesla
12.8% (MDB) MongoDB
6.4% (ZS) Zscaler
4.7% (AXON) Axon Enterprise
3.8% (SNOW) Snowflake
3.6% (MELI) MercadoLibre
and here it is today July 15, 2024:
36.2% (TSLA) Tesla
35.6% (TTD) The Trade Desk
11.2% (MDB) MongoDB
4.5% (ZS) Zscaler
4.2% (AXON) Axon Enterprise
3.4% (MELI) MercadoLibre
2.5% (CRSP) Crispr Theraputics *NEW
2.4% (SNOW) Snowflake
Note that a portion of my TTD and TSLA holdings includes some 2026 Leap call options.
In June, I essentially made two trades
Early in the month, I sold some of my Snowflake shares to add to my already large Tesla stake. A bit later in the month as The Trade Desk shares were rising and approaching $100/share, I trimmed a little of TTD and added back to the Snowflake holdings.
So the net effect in June was essentially to reduce a small amount of TTD and add to TSLA (and slightly increasing the SNOW shares)
In the first two weeks of July, I really only had one transaction
I decided to start a position in Crispr Theraputics (CSPR), so I sold a portion of my Zscaler and some of the Snowflake shares to free up funds for a small CRPR position.
The rest of the allocation movements so far in July are primarily due to Tesla’s rise which caused the relative allocation size of most other holdings to become a little lower proportionately.
Company comments:
Snowflake (SNOW)
To some extent, I view my positions in SNOW and MDB as one combined holding. Both well run companies that are hardly cheap, but both positioned well to benefit when AI moves from testing to production tasks.
It may well not be until 2025 (or later) until they start to really realize the benefits, but I’m fine to hold for now and let them play out at least unless I find something that I feel stronger about reallocating to in the short or long term.
When I sold about half of my Snowflake in early June to add to my already large Tesla stake, it had more to do with wanting to add to TSLA at what I thought was a good stock price with some posible near term catalysts (Q2 deliveries, Q2 earnings, robotaxi event) coming up, not to mention the progress with their Semi trucks, which I wrote about in my May 2024 update. SNOW was just at the lowest end my conviction at the time, so that’s where I made the funds available from.
As TTD rose from the low $90’s to about $100 a week or so later, I decided to trim a small amount and add back to the SNOW.
Tesla (TSLA)
Tesla’s stock price climbed a bit in recent weeks after they reported their Q2 deliveries numbers. Expectations were low, but they came in a little better than expected for vehicle deliveries. The bigger surprise in the announcement was that the energy business far exceeded expectations, up more than 100% to a new all time high (albeit this is a small percentage of revenue).
My confidence in the future of the company is driven by my expectation that they will be successful with at least some of their longer term initiatives (self driving, robotaxi, humanoid robots, energy, semi trucks, etc). They don’t have to all be winners, but if just a couple of those do really well, I think shareholders will be well rewarded. However, I’m betting the company will have success with more than just a couple of those.
So I frankly don’t care too much what their vehicle numbers look like for the next few quarters. I expect that I’ll hold most of my shares for several years to come as long as the updates on the future initiatives sound like they remain on track.
If Trade Desk’s stock price were to increase 30, 40, 50% over the next few months, I would likely trim a pretty significant amount to reallocate and diversify a bit. But with Tesla, I suspect the stock price could grow another 50% on top of the 50% that it is up over the past month and I might trim a little, but I doubt I would sell a signficant amount (again, assuming the long term initiatives are on the right track). Maybe that would be the wrong decision, but that’s just what I suspect I would do today.
Last week there was a story in Bloomberg suggesting that Tesla’s planned August 8, 2024 robotaxi event would be postponed to October and the stock dropped -8%. Thus far the company has not confirmed or denied the story. But as far as I’m concerned, it really makes little difference whether the event happens in August or October. Elon Musk has historically always set unrealistic targets for many things and the timelines often shift, but ultimately they often find success. So this does strike me a bit as Elon being Elon.
But given that the company and Elon have been silent on the Bloomberg story now several days later, I have a hunch that they were contemplating pushing back the event, and then the story leaked and I wouldn’t be surprised if Elon decided to make an extra push to try to prove the rumor wrong. Who knows.
One of the more interesting news items on Tesla in recent weeks has related to their newly filed patents relating to the processes to sanitize and clean their robotaxi’s (both automated processes that will take place while on route from one dropoff to the next pickup, as well as more substantial cleaning measures that will be needed to take the vehicle offline temporary or to be performed at the end of each workday).
It’s not something I had thought much about previously, but it’s kind of unbelieveable how much they’ve already contemplated how it would work. Interior cameras will certainly be monitoring passengers throughout the rides (that shouldn’t be a big surprise as they’ll need processes in place to stop the ride and probably automatically open the doors when any “inappropriate” behavior takes place in the car), but it will also be monitoring literally every single surface that gets touched by a passenger during the rise and will have various systems to clean those spots, either by heating them up internally to kill any germs, or by using UV light, etc.
Ultimately, I would bet that riding in a robotaxi will some day not only be the least expensive and safest taxi ride someone can take, it will also probably be the most germ free environment, on average, of any taxi/ride share that has ever been available. I’m sure taxi’s/ubers that I’ve ridden in, in the past, don’t get any sort of cleaning in between rides, maybe they get wiped down at the end of the day (or maybe not even that). But Tesla is really thinking through keeping passengers protected from previous passengers’ cold/flu or any other contagious germs that might have been brought into the robotaxi vehicles.
This video really dives into some of the details of what is in the patent and I found to be a very interesting discussion:
Tesla’s Q2 earnings release will likely take place sometime later this week or early next week. They have a habit of not announcing the date very far in advance, so I’m sure the status of the robotaxi event will be asked on the analyst call if they don’t provide an official update beforehand.
Crispr Theraputics (CSPR)
After learning a little bit about Crisper Theraputics, I decided to take a small entry position this month.
I’m not sure if the company is on topic for this board or not so I didn’t do an intro post on them. We have had other health companies that have been held and discussed here in the past (Butterfly? Or was it called Monarch? that got acquired a few years ago when several here owned it…and Moderna a couple years ago, etc), so maybe it is, but I’ll just share a few thoughts I why I bought here rather than starting a full thread on them, unless it’s deemed ok to do so and there is interest.
CRISPR is a (generic?) term for a gene editing tool that won its’ inventors the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 2020.
Crispr Theraputics is one of, what I assume are several (many?) companies attempting to use the new CRISPR gene editing tool to find therapies that will cure disease.
They already have one FDA approved therapy (cure) for sickle cell disease, which was just approved in December 2023. It is called Casgevy and is a (collaboration? I don’t know the exact term) between Crispr theraputics and another company called Vertex.
This therapy literally cures sickle cell disease in most all patients that have gone through the therapy and it sounds like it dramatically improves their quality of life afterwards.
It’s not all smooth sailing though as the therapy itself is not fun and does include a round of chempotherapy. But once you get through that one round of chemo and treatment, it sounds like the therapy consitently totally cures the disease. There are also only certain locations where the therapy could potentially be provided today, you can’t just walk into any doctors’ office or hospital and get treated.
The other catch is the cost of this therapy, which is currently over $2 million (but will certainly come down substantially in the near future as it gets marketed for the first time).
One possible reason to be optimistic that this will bring in substantial revenue from Casgevy, is that the highest rates of sickle cell disease are in Saudi Arabia, where the country and government probably has the desire and funds to make sure their people that struggle with this disease can get the treatment they need, even if it is an expensive proposition.
How and when the treatment will realistically be monitized consistently in the USA or get any health insurance to cover it (certainly won’t happen today at $2m despite what will probably be significant future cost savings for each patient after the disease is cured)
Crispr Theraputics today has a market cap of just below $5 billion. There are various online discussions using different estimates that suggest that a succesful Casgevy alone would have a value to CRSP of that, or even more. I frankly have no idea if those are realistic or not. But the company also has lots of other treatments that they are working on for other diseases, including diabetes. Granted other companies are certainly working on these too.
It sounded interesting enough to me, especailly with one therapy already FDA approved, to take small position. It is certainly very speculative (but aren’t all biotech companies?). It also helped diversity my portfolio a bit from my other holdings.
Here is a video that I thought was quite good with a fairly short, 12 minute summary of how the CRISPR gene editing technology works
elf beauty (ELF)
I don’t currently own EFL today. I had two successful, profitable swing trades in ELF earlier this year. Each time the stock comes down to about, or below, $200/share recently (like today), I’m tempted to buy back in a bit. I’d like to own some headed into earnings next month, which I think could be strong results based on some of the various reasons identified in the discussions on this board regarding retailers struggling to keep it on the shelves.
It’s at the top of my watchlist and one I consider and reconsider a lot right now.
That covers a pretty good catch up of my update for the past 45 days. Best of luck to everyone and as always, thanks especially to Saul and Bear and everyone else provides and enables such a great discussion and education on this board.
-mekong