Following the stock market certainly hasn’t been boring lately.
I’ve been travelling all week so just getting a chance to update and post this morning
My large Tesla position (even larger in terms of shares now) is valued lower than where it was at the end of February, but is higher than where I added to my position three weeks ago now.
I do think, for those with cash to deploy, the current situation could ultimately look like a gift when it’s in the rearview mirror. I get that it’s painful to see your portfolio way down. But it’s part of investing, and often times, the harshest reactions of the market create the best opportunities.
Despite my broker statement showing a lower value at the end of March than it did a month ago, I look at the number of shares of the companies I own, and I truly believe I now own shares that are, well will be, worth a lot more than the shares I owned a month ago (had I never got the opportunity to reallocate into more of the companies that I think will be huge long term winners).
Time will tell, but I’m not losing any sleep over what’s happening with Mr Market lately. Lots of great things to come for the best companies in coming years, I have little doubt!
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
-31.2% YTD Mar
My portfolio is still very concentrated, particularly with an outsized large position in Tesla.
These were my positions at the end of lsat month, in 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
and this is what it looks like now at the end of March 3/31/25:
Large/Oversized (TSLA) Tesla
Medium (MELI) MercadoLibre
Medium (TTD) The Trade Desk
Medium (CRSP) Crispr Theraputics
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) LEAP call options.
I sold MongoDB after their last earnings report, which I wrote about in a reply to my February portfolio update.
I also sold a good chunk of my Trade Desk, not so much because I thought I needed to sell at these prices, but simply because I thought the prices of other companies (mainly MELI, TSLA and CRSP) had gotten low enough to the point where I felt better owning more of those.
This is the first time in a few years that TTD hasn’t been one of my top two holdings, I believe.
I also sold most of my small Amazon stake. I still own a little, but sold quite a bit early in March when the shares were higher, using the funds to buy more Tesla (at prices lower than where it is today) and adding to CRSP.
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. The company continues to reiterate that their robotaxi service is going to launch (on a small scale initially) in Austin this summer. If the economy continues to be soft, it could be a real boon to that service which will likely be able to provide ride hailing for a fraction of what competitors charge today for other services like Uber, Lyft, and Waymo.
Company Updates
MongoDB
I wrote up my MongoDB update in a reply to my February update already. Long story short, I’m not optimistic that their revenue accelleration will happen until at least a year from now and there is no reason for my to stay on the ride right now and I sold, adding to MercadoLibre, and a little bit across my other holdings when they got cheap.
Tesla
I won’t delve much into Tesla since this board had some lengthy conversations about TSLA recently, but I will add one real world observation from this month.
Although I’ve seen more and more Tesla vehicles picking me up for Uber rides, before March, I don’t believe any of the drivers were ever using Full Self Driving (supervised) before. Well in March, it happened not once but twice. One time in Connecticut and once in Florida. It was pretty cool to see. I bet most of their riders would have no idea that the car was in FSD mode and the car was driving itself essentially the whole way (one of my rides was about an hour long).
In both cases, the driver was putting his hand on the wheel every now and then, probably for show, so most riders wouldn’t realize it was in FSD (I suspect 90% of their riders would have had no idea), but the vehicle was clearly operating in self drive and they weren’t actually turning the wheel manually or touching the gas or brake pedals at all.
It really felt like the future is here. Tesla cars won’t be able to be used in Uber’s service in unsupervised self driving mode (with no driver at all) when it launches. The FSD license agreement stipulates that, but there is nothing stopping drivers from manually inputting the destination when they pick you up and letting the car drive, even today (It might be against Uber’s terms, I don’t know, but nothing physically stopping them from doing it).
It won’t be long before there are very few ride services with human drivers. Things will change fast!
All I can say about the Q1 deliveries and production numbers is, I think it’s pretty clear that they were almost entirely due to the switchover for the model Y lines in all three factories, essentially right in line with what most “real” estimates had been expecting, about 100k units lower than normal due to the weeks that the Y lines were down and then re-ramping. It doesn’t appear that there is actually a demand problem (despite what some outlets will have you believe) and the new model Y Juniper is really amazing!
In the next few months, we’ll also have the launch of the new lower cost vehicles and then before you know it, we’ll be into early 2026 when the new Semi factory will be online and getting toward volume production, and volume production for the cybercab vehicles next year. They’re expecting that, at scale, they’ll be completing another cybercab every 5 seconds! And we should be seeing more and more progress with Optimus, which is still a few years away from having a meaningful impact to the bottom line, but could be the most valuable part of the company a few years from now.
The Trade Desk (TTD)
The Trade Desk is my holding that will probably be the most tied to the current macro challenges. I’m fortunate that I sold a good chunk of them earlier in March when the price was at least a little bit higher than it is now, tho well below where it was earlier this year.
Although I’m pessimistic for the near future, I’m probably more curious to see how their next couple quarters look than any other company I own. It will actually be really interesting. Probably not as bad as what is baked into the expectations and stock price today, but will likely be a bit of a rollercoaster. I kind of can’t wait to see what they report, tho it might not be that good.
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^ | Mar 31 2025 | YTD Gain | |
|---|---|---|---|
| TSLA | 403.84 | 259.16 | -35.8% |
| TTD | 117.53 | 54.72 | -53.4% |
| AMZN | 219.39 | 190.26 | -13.3% |
| MELI | 1,700.44 | 1,950.87 | +14.7% |
| CRSP | 39.36 | 34.03 | -13.5% |
^ 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.
The shares I hold in TTD were purchased in 2019 at much lower costs. The largest portion of my Trade Desk shares were purchased in January 2019 for $11.39 and are up +380% now.
That’s it for this month.
Thanks as always to Saul and everyone else that makes this board so great!
-mekong