October was a good month for my portfolio, driven by a +10% increase in The Trade Desk, partially offset by a -4% decline in my shares of Tesla
After selling about 10% of my TTD holdings (3.5% of the total portfolio) last month in September, as TTD continued to rise in October, I sold another 15% of my TTD shares (5% of the portfolio), so now I’ve sold about one-quarter of my Trade Desk over the past two months. Despite this, I have a similar $ amount invested in TTD due to the appreciation of the stock price.
Here’s how things look cumulatively in 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
+11.8% YTD Jul
+18.8% YTD Aug
+33.6% YTD Sep
+36.0% YTD Oct
My portfolio is still very concentrated, the same seven positions as last month, and two of the companies I own make up the majority.
This was my allocation at the end of last month 9/30/24
42.2% (TSLA) Tesla
34.0% (TTD) The Trade Desk
8.7% (MDB) MongoDB
4.9% (AMZN) Amazon
4.4% (MSFT) Microsoft
3.4% (MELI) MercadoLibre
2.3% (CRSP) Crispr Theraputics
and here it is at the end of October, 2024 now:
39.7% (TSLA) Tesla
33.1% (TTD) The Trade Desk
8.7% (MDB) MongoDB
6.0% (AMZN) Amazon
5.2% (MSFT) Microsoft
4.6% (MELI) MercadoLibre
2.7% (CRSP) Crispr Theraputics
Note that a portion of my TTD and TSLA holdings includes some 2026 Leap call options.
With the proceeds from the Trade Desk that I sold in October, I added to my Amazon and Microsoft holdings, and added a small amount to Mercadolibre and Crispr, also removing a portion of the funds from my portfolio permanently for other uses.
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 holdings pretty consistently for the past five years.
Despite selling 25% of the TTD shares I owned over the past two months, Trade Desk is still a similar percentage of the portfolio due to the rise in stock price.
Trade Desk TTD - TTD will release their Q3 earnings next Thursday, November 7th.
The only significant piece of new information on Trade Desk this month was their deal with Spotify, which Stocknovice did a good job describing in their monthly post earlier today
Other companies with significant advertising revenue that have already announced their third quarter results reported advertising revenue growth YOY of the following (“advertising” revenue only included below, except for SNAP which doesn’t break it out but I believe is probably largely advertising in their total revenue):
META (Facebook) +18.5%
GOOG (Alphabet) +10.5%
SNAP (Snapchat) +15.0%
Trade Desk’s guidance is for +25.3% revenue growth in Q3, which they typically beat. So TTD should continue to take market share during the third quarter.
Tesla TSLA - nothing much more to update since I wrote a post in the “Why Tesla’s rippin higher” thread earlier in the week with the signfiicant updates from Tesla’s Q3 release and earnings call. I continue to believe the multi year opportunity for Tesla is huge and plan to hold most of my shares as it plays out.
Here is the year to date performance of each of my current holdings. Also note that the companies that I didn’t own at the beginning of the year (MELI, CRSP, AMZN, MSFT), this only shows the performance since I purchased them:
| Dec 31 2023^ | Oct 31 2024 | YTD Gain | |
|---|---|---|---|
| TTD | 71.96 | 120.21 | +67.1% |
| MDB | 408.85 | 270.40 | -33.9% |
| TSLA | 248.48 | 249.85 | +0.6% |
| MELI^ | 1,409.42^ | 2,037.18 | +44.5% |
| MSFT^ | 402.50^ | 406.35 | +1.0% |
| AMZN^ | 177.88^ | 186.40 | +4.8% |
| CRSP^ | 55.06^ | 46.39 | -15.7% |
^ Because I didn’t own MELI, CRSP, AMZN, MSFT until this year, the “December 31st” numbers above are not their 12/31/23 prices, but the stock price of my initial, most significant purchases.
The TSLA Jan 1st number above is somewhat misleading as, although the stock was $248 at the start of 2024 and I still own those shares, I added a decent amount in the $170-200 range during 2024 this year, so my actual percentage performance from Tesla investments this year is higher than what the simple table above indicates. I also sold a good chunk of my MDB early in the year when the stock was over $400 and even over $500, so my total MongoDB investment hasn’t taken the full negative 2024 hit shown above (although my remaining shares that I still hold, have).
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 +955%, while most of my MongoDB shares were purchased in July 2018 for $57.39 and are up +371% now.
That covers it for another month.
Thanks as always to Saul and everyone else that makes this board so great!
-mekong