It’s been a while!
I mentioned when I last posted (June 2025 update) given that my portfolio is pretty concentrated around one company (Tesla) and that is largely driving the ups and downs from month to month, it’s not as useful for me to post an update each month, but I’ll aim to continue to post quarterly or when there is more significant news.
As with all of my TMF posts, nothing that I post here is intended to be, or should be considered, investment advice.
Here’s how things look cumulatively for 2025:
+3.1% YTD Jan
-17.9% YTD Feb
-31.2% YTD Mar
-26.3% YTD Apr
-12.3% YTD May
-19.8% YTD Jun
-25.3% YTD Jul
-16.5% YTD Aug
+28.0% YTD Sep
My portfolio is still very concentrated, particularly with an outsized large position in Tesla.
That is a nice flip from -25% and -16% in July and August to now positive +28% YTD at the end of Sept. Things happen fast sometimes when investing, often when you least expect it. Particularly in August and September, my portfolio has had a good run, up more than +70% overall during the past two months.
Tesla is up 40% since my last update three months ago, and +33% in September alone.
I also have a new position in IREN Limited (IREN) which has quickly grown into a pretty large position after increasing more than +150% in the seven weeks since I purchased IREN in early August last month.
My next largest holding, Crispr Therapeutics (CRSP) has also been strong lately up +36% in Q3.
These were my positions when I last posted a portfolio update, at 6/30/25
Large/Oversized (TSLA) Tesla
Medium (MELI) MercadoLibre
Medium (CRSP) Crispr Theraputics
Small (TTD) The Trade Desk
And these are my positions now, at the end of 9/30/25
Large/Oversized (TSLA) Tesla
Medium/Large (IREN) IREN Limited
Medium (CRSP) Crispr Theraputics
Small (MELI) MercadoLibre
Small (TTD) The Trade Desk
It is still a very concentrated portfolio, now 5 companies, although technically my same pool of invested funds are now spread over 6 total investments as I made my first crypto investment, in bitcoin this quarter (via an index, IBIT). I didn’t include it above as I believe crypto is off topic for this board. The short version is that I think some big corporations are going to accumulate bitcoin in future years and it may continue to increase in value. My IBIT holdings are pretty small, tho larger than MELI and TTD which are now both very tiny.
Note that a portion of my holdings includes December 2026, and June and December 2027 (TSLA) LEAP call options.
I had sold most of my Mercadolibre to fund the IBIT as well as my new IREN position. Interestingly, in the two months or so since purchasing those, bitcoin (and my IBIT holdings) have decreased slightly while IREN is up more than +150% on little news. I say interesting because so much of IREN’s business today comes from bitcoin mining so wouldn’t have expected those to diverge so much so quickly performance-wise when I purchased them. I’m sure IREN’s outperformance lately has much to do with a growing expectation that they will be successful transitioning their company to AI cloud services business.
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.
Company Updates
Maybe I should have waited a week before posting this, as we will have some incoming news in coming days when Tesla announces their Q3 vehicle and energy deliveries expected before the market opens on Thursday morning, and then early next week IREN should be announcing their September bitcoin mining results, which they release each month.
Tesla (TSLA)
Tesla should be an exciting company to follow in the next few months with some significant updates on the horizon.
Robotaxi Ride Hailing Service Launch
Tesla’s long term goal focusing on autonomy has so far had a successful launch of their Robotaxi service in Austin TX and the San Francisco bay area. They have been pretty slowly expanding the service likely in the interest of safety and still have a pretty small number of cars operating in each city, although I believe the service area for Tesla’s robotaxi’s in both Austin and SF are both already significantly larger than those of Waymo, who has been operating in those cities for much longer.
Tesla’s service also still uses safety riders (Austin) and safety drivers (SF) in all Robotaxi vehicles. They essentially do the same thing (nothing, for most rides) although in CA, the person is required to sit behind the wheel, while the safety rider in TX sits in the passenger seat.
Based on job postings for Robotaxi positions, it appears the company may soon also launch in other parts of Texas (San Antonio, Dallas and Houston), Florida (Miami, Tampa, and Clermont/Orlando), Nevada (Henderson/Las Vegas), New York (Queens), and they have already received an approval to test Robotaxi services in Phoenix AZ.
At least for now, the most important thing is to have an incident free test phase in the cities that they are operating in and at least so far, they have been pretty successful in this regard.
Full Self Driving
FSD (supervised) was recently released in Australia and New Zealand and seems to have been getting surprisingly good press locally. This is the first time that FSD has been released for right side steering and driving on the left side of the road.
The last major FSD version v13 was released almost a year ago in November 2024. CEO Elon Musk said last week that the long awaited v14 will be released later this week, with the next minor update v14.1 expected two weeks later. He went on to say that the following v14.2 will feel “almost sentient”
Deliveries and New Vehicles
The third quarter is expected to show strong vehicle deliveries as the U.S. $7,500 EV tax credit ended on September 30th and will likely result in strong sales as customer make their purchases before the credit goes away. For customers buying (not leasing) a new vehicle, the timing was clarified to allow most purchasers to get the credit for ordering their car before 9/30 even if it gets delivered later, so we could see at least some of this benefit spill into the early part of Q4.
Model YL - Tesla released their new larger, longer wheelbase, three row, version of the world’s best selling Model Y (dubbed the Model YL) in China this quarter with what appear to be strong demand as production allocations in September and October selling out and customers already facing November delivery windows. There were (unconfirmed) reports of 120,000 pre orders in less than two weeks. It is not yet known when when (or if?) the YL will be released in the U.S. but I would think the model would do well here given American’s favoring large cars especially for a large SUV like this for families.
Model Y Performance - The new sporty version of the Model Y was originally released only in Europe at the end of August and it appears that it was just released in the U.S. for orders today. Interesting timing as this may allow U.S. customers that are quick to place their order and actually receive the $7,500 EV tax credit.
New Lower Priced Vehicle - Although no announcements have been made, it has been expected that Tesla would release a lower priced vehicle (possibly starting around $30,000) to be released in Q4 once the EV tax credit goes away. This will likely be a stripped down version of the Model Y
Energy
The energy business saw a surge when Tesla’s second megapack factory (Shanghai) opened, a few quarters ago, essentially doubling capacity.
Their third megapack factory currently under construction in Texas, which may be much larger than either of the two existing facilities, is expected to start producing in mid 2026.
Other
Tesla’s Semi truck factory in Nevada is largely complete and appears to be receiving deliveries of large equipment in recent weeks. Production is expected to begin at the very end 2025 or early 2026 and then scaling over a few quarters to ultimately have capacity of about 50,000 trucks per year
The new Tesla roadster will not be a big profit generator, but appears to continue to progress. Elon teased that they would have a demo of the vehicle at the end of the year (2025) as being the “Most Epic EVER”. We shall see.
Optimus Humanoid Robots are still a few years away from potentially having any meaningful financial impact. The delay from some of the company’s previous expectations is due to holding off on production of version 2 and waiting for the latest version 3 to be ready, which the company now seems to feel is the right one to move forward with and focus on.
Elon Musk purchased approximately $1 billion of Tesla stock this month on the open market, believed to be the largest insider purchase for any company in history. The stock had already been running up beforehand, so it wasn’t the cheapest it has been at the time, which the market took as a vote of confidence. Tesla shareholders will also be voting on the new CEO Performance Award which, to be fully earned would require, among other things, that the market cap of Tesla rise to $8.5 Trillion over the next ten years, which would be about double the value of the largest company (NVDA) today and about an 6x increase from today’s price. After his foray into politics, it appears that Elon Musk’s focus is turning more and more back to Tesla and his other companies, where most owners would like it to be.
MELI and TTD positions
Both of these holdings are now very small, tiny percentages of my portfolio. Although they both have very low cost bases, I won’t be surprised if I decide to part ways with my last remaining shares in each over the next few months at some point. At the same time, I can still see either of them really outperforming the market over the next 1-3 years, but I’m not not as excited about either of them as I once was.
Crispr Therapeutics (CRSP)
There hasn’t been a whole lot of significant news on Crispr Therapeutics lately, so I’m happily surprised the stock has done so well recently. There wasn’t much of a reaction to their quarterly Q2 earnings release in early August. Part of me questions whether I should continue to have as much invested in this company as I do, but part of me also thinks this has as much home run potential as any that I’ve owned if they start to get momentum on the Casgevy (CRSP’s approved sickle cell disease therapy) or any breakthroughs on others. I think I would kick myself if I sell and then it takes off, so at least for now, I don’t plan to make any changes.
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 (noted with ^), this only shows the performance since I purchased them, such as for IREN below which I purchased on August 11th and has increased over +153% in only about 7 weeks so far!:
| Dec 31 2024^ | September 30 2025 | YTD Gain | |
|---|---|---|---|
| TSLA | 403.84 | 444.72 | +10.1% |
| IREN | 18.50^ | 46.93 | +153.7% |
| MELI | 1,700.44 | 2,336.94 | +37.4% |
| CRSP | 39.36 | 64.81 | +64.7% |
For some reason, I’m having difficulty adding a new row to this table, so for completeness I’ll add that TTD is down -58.3% this year from $117 to $49
Also note that, although TSLA’s stock price is up 10.1% so far this year, I was adding to my Tesla position this spring when the shares were in the high $200’s, particularly to my LEAP calls, so the performance of my own Tesla holdings is doing better than the 10% shown above this year.
That’s it for now. Apologies that this ended up being more of a Tesla writeup than I had intended (they’re just doing so many great things!).
Thanks as always to everyone else that continues to contribute here and makes this board so great!
-mekong