My portfolio certainly felt the pain in September as tech stocks continued to have it rough, particularly my large MongoDB holding which has come down a lot after earnings despite what I still think was a good report.
Here’s my latest YTD:
-29.3% YTD Jan
-21.2% YTD Feb
-29.8% YTD Mar
-43.3% YTD Apr
-60.4% YTD May
-65.6% YTD Jun
-62.2% YTD Jul
-54.4% YTD Aug
-64.5% YTD Sep
Most of my holdings were down this month, particularly my large MongoDB stake which was down -38% this month.
and here is the new breakdown at September 30th:
TTD 46.1%
MDB 27.2%
SNOW 10.9%
DDOG 8.5%
NET 2.5%
CRWD 2.1%
MGNI 1.6%
PUBM 1.0%
I didn’t add to The Trade Desk, but it was already a large holding, and it held up better than most of my other stocks in September which caused it’s allocation to increase further to almost half of my portfolio (it was 38% last month at Aug 30th).
I haven’t had any thought of selling any TTD, the opportunity is too big, their leadership too strong, and the valuation too good for me to want to reallocate any of those investment dollars right now.
Mongo dropped from about 36% of my portfolio last month down to 27%. I haven’t sold any of those shares, that is just due to the post-earnings drop. I actually bought a few additional shares below $200, but not much, as most of my new funds have been going into Snowflake this month, with just a little bit in Pubmatic.
I sold a little bit of DDOG, and a tiny amount of NET and CRWD to fund the additional Snowflake purchases as I just felt better about having more in SNOW even if it meant cutting down some other companies I like too despite having pretty small stakes in them.
MongoDB
Plenty has been said about Mongo since they reported earnings in early September. Many of you know that much of my holdings goes back to 2018 and 2019 purchases with costs basis in the $50’s to $80’s.
The guidance for the quarter just reported was only for growth in the low 40%'s and it came in at 53% which was more than I was expecting.
Guidance for next quarter is +34%, which while I of course would have loved to see it higher, given MDB’s penchant for conservative guidance, gives them a good chance to still come in around or above 40%, which as far as I’m concerned would be great. MDB hasn’t been a 70%, 80% grower, it’s just not what they are. Their highest growth rates in recent years have been in the 50%'s so staying in the 40%'s especially given the economic headwinds would be great.
Don’t forget that MDB faced headwinds (not tailwinds) during 2020 when the pandemic broke out, so I won’t be suprised to see some challenges if we do find ourselves in a recession for a while, but I feel optimistic that MDB over the long term will continue to grow and take market share, as the total pie continues to grow at a nice clip as well.
Now the implied guidance for Q4 when looking at their FY guide is only 18%. If things really slow to that level, that will be disappointing and lead me to re-think some things. But given that we still have the liklihood of a beat & raise and then another beat between now and then, I’m not stressing over that number too much.
I put a lot more of my thoughts into the MongoDB Q2 Deep Dive post here
Here are just a few of the comments from management that I quoted on that post
“we remain incredibly optimistic about the opportunities in front of us”
“The new business environment continues to be robust.”
“We have seen no change in deal activity in sales cycles. We believe our strong new sales performance is a demonstration of the critical business value our developer data platform delivers and our superior go-to-market execution.”
“We have very fractional penetration and continue to see robust new business.”
“almost every bank on Wall Street is using us for some important use case. We have large Fortune 500 companies in industries like telecom, media, tech, healthcare, etc., who are using us for very mission-critical use cases.”
“I would say that we’re still early in the journey in terms of having greater share in those large accounts. “
At the end of the day, I heard management sounding extremely positive and optimistic about the future.
I know a couple folks have mentioned something about the earnings call suggesting that MDB was calling customers pleading with them to use MDB’s products more. I didn’t hear anything like that when I listened to the call and I scanned over the transcript again this week trying to figure out where that was suggested but haven’t found it. If anyone knows what quote that was, let me know as I am curious, it didn’t sound like anythng I heard but it’s possible I missed something.
Wrap Up
Only a few weeks until our companies start reporting another quarter. I tend to think that when it comes to the strong resilient companies that we are invested in, there is a good chance that more pessimism is already baked into their stock prices that the actual impact that they are feeling.
Particularly interesting will be what we see from the ad tech companies (TTD MGNI PUBM) given the upcoming seasonally strong holiday season and this big midterm election cycle. I was visiting family in a state that has some very close political races in November, and almost every other ad on the local stations was political. TTD CEO Jeff Green suggested this could be the biggest advertising spend for any election cycle (which is amazing since it isn’t even a presidential one) and I’m thinking he’ll be right. A small amount of that spend will hit Q3, but much of it will be Q4, so will be interesting to hear the impact on the quarter just ended as well as how they are baking it into expectations for the end of the year.
On the other hand, some economists feel that the economy could be weak for a while well into 2023 so management of our companies may still be extra conservative with their new guidance.
As always, thanks for the great discussion. Looking forward to seeing how these stories play out
-mekong