My portfolio at the end of Jan 2019
Here’s the summary of my positions at the end of January. As I usually do, for my convenience I’m figuring as of the last weekend of the month, and the remaining days will spill over into February. Think of it as a four-week summary, if you prefer. Please note that I almost always use the adjusted figures that the companies give.
As I did last January I want to give some continuity, context and perspective instead of giving just one-month results. Therefore for January only, I will give my results for:
13 months (Jan 2018 continuing through this month), and my results for
25 months (Jan 2017, through this month), as well as my results for
1 month (Jan 2019)
Contrary to my expectations, January rose enough to be equal to a pretty good year, all by itself. (At the end of February it will be back to just year-to-date results.)
MY RESULTS FOR 1 MONTH, 13 MONTHS, AND 25 MONTHS
These are rounded to the nearest whole number:
My portfolio closed 2017 **up 84%**.
My portfolio closed 2018 **up 71%**.
My portfolio closed the two years **up 216%**.
My portfolio closed this month **up 17%** (16.5%, actually)
My portfolio closed 13 months **up 100%**
My portfolio closed 25 months **up 268%**
That’s doubling in 13 months and approaching quadrupling in 25 months (just over two years).
And here’s a table of the monthly progress of my portfolio since January of 2018 (thirteen months):
**End of Jan +16.9%**
**End of Feb +21.4%**
**End of Mar +29.1%**
**End of Apr +25.8%**
**End of May +38.3%**
**End of Jun +44.3%**
**End of Jul +55.3%**
**End of Aug +86.0%**
**End of Sep +86.8%**
**End of Oct +47.7%**
**End of Nov +80.5%**
**End of Dec +71.4%**
**End of Jan +99.7%**
Many others on the board had similar results, a little better or a little worse. We are not magicians. We just invested in great companies. How often have we heard that no one can beat the indexes? That stock picking is a waste of time and effort? That we will all “return to the mean”? That books have been written that prove it? Well, guess what, Folks, the books are wrong!
Believe me, when we started 2017, I never would have dreamed that we’d have this kind of result over two years. I am astonished by it and very happy with it. And we achieved it in spite of a wild and crazy last few months of 2018, with most of the general indexes hitting “Bear Market” territory (down 20% or more from their highs), and all of them hitting “Correction Territory”, and with a Bear Market frenzy in all the media the last few weeks.
A VOLATILE LAST FIVE MONTHS
I have to admit that it was pretty wild for my portfolio too! To summarize (rounded off to the nearest whole number) and figuring percentage change from Jan 1st of last year.
On Sept 11 my portfolio hit its high for the year at up 96%.
By Oct 24 it had dropped 26% to just up 45%.
On Nov 7, just two weeks later, it was back up to up 85%!!!
By Nov 20, just two weeks after that, I was down again to just up 50%.
On Dec 3, two weeks later, I was again back up to up 86%.
By Dec 24, I was back down to just up 48.5%.
And now, at Jan 25, just a month later, I’m back up to up 99.7% for the 13 months, moving up over 50 points points in a month!
Talk about volatility! Just read back over that and imagine how easy it would have been to get scared out of the market!
WHAT WAS HAPPENING WITH THE MARKET?
The average of the indexes finished 2018 well into minus territory, and are still negative for the 13 months (see below). Compare that to my up 100%.
HOW DID THIS RESULT COMPARE WITH EXPECTATIONS?
Let me tell you that that was not at all the story line that all the skeptics of our investing style had been feeding us. Our overpriced, no-earnings stocks were supposed to get killed when the market was down. We were told they would fall “much more” than the indexes; “multiples” of what the indexes fell.
ON MARKET TIMING
Let me remind you that I’m no good on timing the market, and I don’t try. If I did, I would probably have exited all my positions at the end of April 2017, when I was up 26% in four months and was “aware” that “it couldn’t continue” like that. After all, it had already beaten my total results for 2015 and 2016. It was time to get out and wait for a pullback. Ha! I would have missed all the rest of 2017 and all of 2018. We never pulled back to the levels of April 2017 again, or anything close!
Well-intentioned people have been warning us constantly that another bear market and/or recession is coming. “The bull market is too old.” or “The market is too high.” or “This technical indicator proves it.” Honest to God, I’ve heard that all of their charts and indicators proved it in 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, again in 2017, and loads of it in December of 2018 (a month and a half ago). Eventually they’ll be right, and they will say, “See! I told you so! I was right all along!” But what a price those people paid for “keeping their powder dry” and staying out of this market for the past ten years, waiting for the big correction that never came.
Picking good companies makes much more sense to me than trying to pick good companies AND trying to time the market too. I have stocks in a small group of remarkable companies, in which I have high confidence for the most part. I feel that they mostly dominate their markets or their niches, they are category crushers or disruptors, they have customers that absolutely need them, they have long runways, and they will have great futures.
HOW DID THE INDEXES DO?
The three indexes I traditionally have followed were down 11.1% for 2018. When you throw in the Dow and the Nasdaq, the five indexes averaged down 8.5%, for 2018.
Now let’s look at the month of January:
The three indexes that I’ve been tracking against closed this month as follows.
The S&P 500 (Large Cap)
Closed up 6.3% for the month. (It started the year at 2507 and is now at 2665).
The Russell 2000 (Small and Mid Cap)
Closed up 9.9% for the month. (It started the year at 1349 and is now at 1483).
The IJS ETF (Small Cap Value)
Closed up 10.7% for the month. (It started the year at 131.9 and is now at 146.0).
These three indexes
Averaged up 9.0% for the month.
If you throw in the Dow, which is up 6.0% and the Nasdaq, which is up 8.0 you get up 8.2% for the five of them for this month.
For the past 13 months, the three indexes I follow are down 3.1% and the five indexes are down 1.0%. If you compare those results with with my gain of 99.7% in those 13 months, I must say that it doesn’t make investing in the averages seem “conservative”, to put it mildly. Clearly, picking stocks that will be winners, the way we do, has beaten investing in ETF’s and Indexes, and by huge amounts.
Why do I use those three indexes? Well, they give me 500 large caps (the S&P), 2000 small and mid caps (the Russell), and 600 small cap value stocks (the IJS), which combined ought to give me a very representative set of standards to compare against. I have felt that they give me a pretty good approximation of how the market overall is doing. However, in recent months I’ve also thrown in the Dow and the Nasdaq, so as to hit all the major indexes. I probably will continue to do that, although I consider the Dow a nonsense index with 30 stocks weighted by stock price, instead of by market cap like the S&P and almost all other indexes…. Weighted by stock price! Just think about that. A $45 stock has almost twice as much influence on the Dow than a $25 stock has, irrespective of the market caps of the two companies. Does that make any sense to you?
To simply state my goals, I’m trying to measure my performance against that of the average return for an investor in the stock market, and combining those five indexes gives a pretty good approximation,
(The averages would be very slightly higher if you use the S&P with dividends added, but I’m continuing to use the straight values for consistency with past results. I consider the roughly 0.1% per month that the average of the three indexes would be changed by including S&P dividends to be irrelevant considering the magnitude of the differences between our results and the results of the indexes.)
HOW CAN WE EXPLAIN THE DISPARITY between our results and the averages? Well these were the years the cloud came into its own and the years that Software-as-a Service (SaaS) blossomed, and we were there to profit from the revolution. I have to say again that we seem to have caught a secular wave, in which our companies are exploding in function and importance as well as in revenue, which is mostly recurring. It’s the wave of big data, the cloud, and artificial intelligence, and all enterprises, whatever field that they are in, are using more and more software, wanting to use the cloud, AI, and the rest, and needing the software that our compaies are selling. I had some big winners outside of that area, but that has been that big wave that has carried us. In general, most of our companies provide the picks and shovels for enterprise companies switching over to the cloud, and the enterprise companies NEED what our companies have to offer.
I continue to believe that intelligent stock picking with a modified buy-and-hold strategy can beat any index or average? How could it not? When an “average” is just that: an average of good, mediocre, and poor companies?
LAST FOUR MONTHS REVIEW
Here’s my last four months review:
October. Early in the month I sold my little try-out position in Arena and bought a smaller position in another little biotech, Amarin. Why? Arena had two or three years until marketability (if everything went right), while Amarin had its product out there already, approved and on the market, although its market might not be as large as claimed. I also bought a starter position in The Trade Desk at about $121, after reading a lot of positive opinions about it on the board, even though I have been stung in the past by advertising companies.
November. In my end of October post I mentioned starting two try-out positions in Amarin and The Trade Desk. My position sizes were 0.6% and 1.7%. The two try-outs had very different outcomes. I sold out of Amarin by November 9th, and bought a lot of TTD, building it up into a mid-size position.
At the end of October I also had two small (3% and 2%) positions in PayCom and Wix, which I had started in August. One was up 3%, and the other was down 2%, at the end of October, and I rated them each at three stars of confidence (out of six). I sold out of both of them in early November. Paycom’s results were good but so-so at the same time. They said they had a lot of extra expenses that would continue into the next quarter. I like Wix, but this is the third time I’ve tried it, and I can’t seem to get enough confidence in it to stay in it.
I decided to take a new position in Elastic in the first week of November with an average buy-in point $65.50.
I sold out of Nutanix for cash. I had been reducing my stake for a number of months. It had become a complicated, hard to figure out, low-confidence position, and went into my “too-hard-to-figure-out-what-is-going-on” basket. It seemed to me that I had to make too many guesses of what was actually happening… I’ve read commentaries on the board since then that made me think that Nutanix will do fine after all. I wrote here (in November) that I may re-enter some time, and I actually did in December.
I trimmed a little Twilio when it went over a 20% position.
I added two small biotech positions in Abiomed and Guardant Health in the last two weeks. I said that I was not sure that I would keep them, but that I was leaning that way. I said that I would keep them small.
December. Early in the month Mongo, Okta, Elastic and Zscaler all released their October quarter results at once. They were all beautiful results, and I added to all four of them, continuing to trim New Relic and finally sold out of it for cash as it continued to not rebound off its lows and I didn’t know why not, which made me very uncomfortable!… Square was also way down from its highs too, but I was assuming that was because Sarah Friar, the CFO, was leaving them.
At the end of the second week, I decided to buy back into a 4.5% position in Nutanix. I cut my position in Square by about half and used that cash to buy the Nutanix and add to Mongo, Elastic, Okta, etc. Then during the next week, with the big sell-off, I sold another quarter of my Square and added to Alteryx, The Trade Desk, Mongo, Twilio, Nutanix, Okta, etc.
Why would I cut Square? That’s a good question. I had been pretty enthusiastic about it before. Well, part of the reason was that companies like Mongo, Okta, Zscaler, Elastic, Twilio, and Alteryx have huge goals, and huge expectations of literally taking over worldwide fields of storage, identity, security, search, communication, and data analysis, and have huge runways, while other companies are successful in little niche markets but have limits to where they can go. This may help explain higher prices in relation to revenue for the Zscalers, Twilios, and Alteryxs of the world.
Well, this made me think about Square and how its market is unbanked tiny merchants, (and restaurants), and:
first of all, their clients will be hit hard in any recession, and
second, while they can go up-market from ‘tiny’ merchants to ‘very small’ merchants, they are really in a small niche with no way to actually take over the world, and
thirdly, thinking of leadership, their admired CFO, Sarah, left, and their CEO responded to this by going off on a meditation retreat in the South Pacific,
fourthly, they have plenty of competition (PayPal, etc), while companies like Alteryx, Twilio, Okta, Zscaler, etc, don’t seem to have much effective competition, and
fifthly, unlike the above mentioned SaaS companies, Square went down much more than the SaaS companies, and hadn’t bounced with the them either, and
finally, Square’s market cap is $23 billion, and that is much harder to quadruple than a a market cap of $3 billion.
I said I didnn’t feel I needed to sell out of all my Square. After all, their rate of growth of adjusted revenue for the last 7 quarters has been accelerating each quarter, and has been (in percentage of growth): 39…41…45…47…51…60…68%. That’s pretty amazing, but I felt that it sure shouldn’t be my 3rd largest position, and probably shouldn’t be in the top half of my portfolio.
Okay, why did I buy back into Nutanix? Well, a lot of the posts on the board influenced me, and press releases from Nutanix, but probably the straw that broke the camel’s back was when Bert quoted the Morgan Stanley analyst who said that Nutanix was the most innovative company she had seen in almost 20 years of experience. However it’s only a 4.5% position, and it will have to prove itself.
Finally in December I also added another small biotech, Vericel, that Ethan had brought to the board. All three of my little biotechs moved down with the market and didn’t move with my SaaS stocks, but then bounced later. They march to a different drummer.
In January, I was busy. I sold out of Vericel which I had recently added, feeling that of the three try-out biotechs, it seemed to have the smallest niche. I took small positions in three little SaaS companies (Anaplan, Zuora, and DocuSign). But these are really smallish get-to-know-you positions and may be gone in a couple of weeks, or a month, so please don’t buy them because I dipped my toe in! I later exited my small position in Abiomed for cash to add to these and other positions.
In January, one of my stocks, MongoDB, had a very uncomfortable month, with Amazon entering the field as a competitor, and then Red Hat, representing the pure open-source point of view, attacking Mongo too, for trying to protect their open source model from being used free them as Amazon was doing, a veering away from pure open-source. I read all the positive opinions on Mongo which seemed very convincing, and all the negative opinions on Mongo, which also seemed very convincing, and decided, since I have zero technical knowledge to help me decide which is right, or if the truth is somewhere in-between, that Mongo was just too much of a battleground stock for me, and I sold out of part of my position, and then all of it. There are simply much less controversial and complicated stocks for me to be in, and where I can sleep better at night.
I am in no way sure that I was correct in doing so. I may have been completely wrong. In fact the preponderance of evidence seemed to be that this could be even a positive for Mongo, and I know that they will have great results for their Jan quarter, but it made me worry about the long term viability of their open source business model, when perhaps using the open source solution may turn out to be “good enough” for many companies to just use it for free. As I said, I simply have other companies without that kind of issue and existential worry. Again, I may be completely wrong but that’s what I did.
I continued to build up my Nutanix position throughout the month, encouraged by its partnership with Intel, Darth’s great collection of comments by users, Bert’s enthusiasm, the general release of Xi cloud services, and Nutanix achieving FedRamp ready designation, and my position is double the size that it was last month, at a little over 9% now. I also added to Okta, Elastic and others.
HOW THE INDIVIDUAL STOCKS HAVE DONE
Here’s how my current positions have done this year (this month for now) . I’ve arranged them in order of percentage gain. I’ve used the start of the year price for stocks I’ve been in all year, and my initial buy price for stocks I’ve added during the year. Please remember that these are from the beginning of this year, and not from when I originally bought them if I bought them in earlier years. I’m including my small mini-positions in this list but remember that they are recent, small, and possibly transient.
**Square from 56.09 to 77.97 up 39.0%**
**Nutanix from 41.59 to 52.23 up 25.6%**
**Okta from 63.80 to 79.62 up 24.8%**
**Trade Desk from 116.1 to 137.8 up 18.7%**
**Alteryx from 59.47 to 69.90 up 17.5%**
**Zscaler from 39.21 to 45.89 up 17.0%**
**Twilio from 89.30 to 104.18 up 16.7%**
**Docusign from 43.75 to 48.57 up 11.0%**
**Anaplan from 28.75 to 31.80 up 10.6%**
**Elastic from 71.48 to 78.72 up 10.1%**
**Zuora from 19.80 to 21.36 up 7.9%**
**Guardant from 37.59 to 39.25 up 4.4%**
Exited positions this year (this month) showing my gain or loss from the beginning of this year, or from when I first bought if it was during the year, and my average exit price. Please remember that these are from the beginning of this year and not from when I originally bought them, if I bought them in earlier years.
**Abiomed from 325.0 to 334.0 up 2.8%**
**Vericel from 17.40 to 17.38 down 0.1%**
**MongoDB from 83.74 to 76.2 down 9.0%**
MY HERO COMPANIES.
Square, Alteryx, Twilio and Okta have all been in my portfolio for more than a year now, although I did reduce my position in Square a couple of months ago and built it partially back this month. Square is up 346% (that’s 4.5 times what I paid for it, or more than a quadruple), since I first bought it in March 2017 at $17.50, getting close to two years. Twilio is a quadruple in a year, at 4.1 times what I paid for it in January a year ago ($25.70) and up 305.4%. Alteryx is up 152%, or is two and a half times what I paid for it in December 2017, just over a year ago, at $27.72. Okta is 2.7 times what I paid for it ($29.95), also last January, up 166%.
This is how you make money in the stock market, buying exceptional companies and holding them as long as the story doesn’t change.
And another point from this is:
Imagine if I had decided that these companies were overpriced and decided to “wait for a better entry point” or “buy on a pull-back” or “wait until it hits my entry point,” and it never did?
Do you think I care, or even remember, if I bought Twilio at $25.90, $25.70, or $25.50, now that it’s over $104.00? I know that I belabored this in the Knowledgebase, but the decision that matters as far as making money in the market is “Do I want a position in this company?” and not “Can I buy this 25 cents cheaper?”
POSITION SIZES. I’m still trying to keep my portfolio concentrated and streamlined. I’m now at 12 positions, 4 of which make up almost 66% of my portfolio, and 8 of which make up 91%. The remaining four include three little SaaS companies that I’m still thinking about and may not keep (although I probably will). By the way, keeping my number of stocks down really makes me focus my mind and decide which are really the best and highest confidence positions.
Here are my positions in order of position size. Note that Alteryx and Twilio positions are larger than I usually like, but they are very high conviction Category Crushers.
**Alteryx 20.6%**
**Twilio 20.3%**
**Zscaler 12.9%**
**Okta 11.8%**
**Nutanix 9.2%**
**Elastic 6.1%**
**The Trade Desk 5.6%**
**Square 4.7%**
**Zuora 2.8%**
**DocuSign 2.6%**
**Guardant Health 2.0%**
**Anaplan 1.5%**
STOCK REVIEWS
My top stocks are Twilio and Alteryx. As you can see, they are by far my largest positions, and are each over 20% of my portfolio. Last month they made up 40.5% of my portfolio. This month they make up 40.9%. They are both small companies but in my opinion they have each created their market categories and each dominate the market they are in with no credible competition (except do-it-yourself). I’d have to call both of them Category Crushers. I wouldn’t recommend to anyone to have over 40% in two stocks, but that’s the way it is.
I’ll start with Alteryx. This is my largest position at 20.6% of my portfolio. What they do is to enable non-techies to quickly and easily analyze data. Their clients therefore love them. They announced splendid third quarter results, and had a euphoric conference call. I won’t get involved with their preliminary results for the Dec quarter because they are preliminary. They announced them early because they were changing accountants because their current accountant was reselling so much for Alteryx that they wanted to avoid any conflict of interest.
Going back to the Sept quarter results, their revenue percentage growth looks like this:
**2016: 57 67**
**2017: 61 50 55 55**
**2018: 50 54 59**
That looks solid as a rock to me.
Their adjusted gross margin was 91%, up from 86% a year ago. That’s 91% gross margins!
Their deferred revenue at the end of the year the last four years, in millions of dollars, has gone: 29, 44, 71, 114…. Take a good look at that!
Their dollar based net retention rate has been over 130% for the last eight quarters. Before that it was in the 120’s, so it’s improved with age and size.
Their number of customers, 4315 at their last report, is almost quadruple the number of customers that they had three years ago, and up 41% yoy.
The number of shares is growing fairly slowly, which is remarkable for one of these super fast growing companies.
They feel they have no competition. From one of their conference calls: “We are in a space where there’s little to no competition and a much larger TAM.”
I didn’t sell any at all during the last six months, and added trivial amounts opportunistically. They finished 2018 year up 135% for the year. I still feel very justified in calling Alteryx a Category Crusher, with very high confidence level. I’d give it six confidence stars out of six.
Next Twilio, a 20.3% position. They provide communication services and they seem to have no viable competition in what they do besides “do-it-yourself”. One company, Uber, who had been a big customer, decided to do-it-yourself, which caused weak year-over-year revenue growth comparisons for Twilio over the past year. That is, if you can call 40% revenue growth weak…that was the lowest yoy comparison, back in the December 2017 quarter… Revenue growth is now back up to 68% and climbing. It had always stayed above 60% yoy growth if you excluded Uber.
Twilio announced results for the September quarter in November and proved it is still a Category Crusher, a Juggernaut, a One-of-a-Kind company, and a pure phenomenon of nature. Its revenue growth accelerated from 41% a year ago to 68% this quarter. The last five quarters’ growth rates have been:
41%
41%
48%
54%
68% !!!
Most companies would cut off their right arm for that 41% growth they had a year ago, but that growth rate is now up to 68% !!! And accelerating. It was 70% growth excluding Uber!!!
Now look at dollar based net retention rate: 122% a year ago. That was great. But now it’s 145%. That’s greater! The last five quarters have been:
122%
118%
132%
137%
145%
They hit adjusted profit in the June quarter unexpectedly, making 8 cents, and this quarter they made 15 cents.
They had 61,153 Active Customer Accounts up from 46,489 a year ago.
They also had a euphoric conference call:
… I think that that means there’s a runway for us for many, many years to be replacing old legacy technology… I think there is going to be no shortage of opportunity for us to do that for years to come.
They are also euphoric about their new Flex call center product, for which the beta was oversubscribed, and which they just released for general availability. They also launched Twilio Pay, Twilio Autopilot, Twilio Super Sim, acquired Ytica, and extended their partnership with T-Mobile by creating a new developer platform for the T-Mobile Narrowband IoT network, a new network technology for the Internet of Things (IoT), that has the potential to open up a substantial market for new categories of lower-cost, battery-efficient, internet-connected devices that don’t exist today.
I’ll give it six confidence stars as well. To be honest, probably seven stars on a one to six scale. Do I like it? I’ll let you figure it out. Actually I think of each of these two companies as juggernauts. They are each a one-of-a-kind company. Each controls its space and is growing like mad. Oh, by the way, the day after results were released Twilio rose $24, which was 35% in one day!!! (As I remember it, anyway). I’m not the only one who feels this way.
Zscaler is still in third place at 12.9% of my portfolio. I’ve been building my position gradually. It has an interesting, innovative, and revolutionary idea in Internet security (and insecurity). They feel that putting a hardware firewall around a company doesn’t work anymore, now that the enterprise company is partly in the cloud and people can sign in from anywhere, and sign on to other outside programs from within the enterprise. Zscaler provides native cloud-based security, and as far as I can tell they are far and way the leader in this, if not the only player. They have 100-plus data centers all around the world, which would be difficult for most potential competitors to replicate. Zscaler has been operating them for ten years.
Here’s what their earnings looked like:
• Revenue up 59% to $63 million. This was an acceleration from 49% growth a year ago, and from 54% sequentially.
• Calculated billings up 56% to $65 million.
• Deferred revenue up 68% $165 million.
• Adj net income of $2.0 million, improved from a loss of $7.5 million. (They hit a profit before they expected!)
Adj op income was 2% of revenue or $1.2 million, improved from a loss of 19% of revenue or $7.4 million.
Adj EPS was 1 cent, improved from a loss of 7 cents
• Op Cash Flow was 17% of revenue or $11.0 million, improved from a loss of 11% of revenue or $4.4 million
• Positive free cash flow was $5.2 million, or 8% of revenue, improved from negative $8.9 million, or 22% of revenue
• Deferred Revenue: $165.3 million, up 68%
• Cash $314 million, up $15.5 million and no debt.
• Named a leader in Gartner Magic Quadrant for the 8th year in a row.
• Zscaler Private Access (ZPA) became the first zero trust architecture to achieve AWS Security Competency status.
“We are very pleased with our operating results, which show the leverage in our business model. Going forward, we will continue to aggressively invest in our business to pursue our large market opportunity."
It is one of four cloud service providers selected to pursue Joint Authorization Board (JAB) FedRAMP certification, at the High Impact level…. This sets the stage to further expand its growth within the Federal market.
Total backlog, which represents remaining performance obligations, was $411 million, up 77% from $232 million a year ago.
Total gross margin was 82%, up 2% sequentially and 2% yoy
Total operating expenses grew 29%, but decreased as a percentage of sales to 80%
“While we are pleased with our profitability ahead of schedule, we’ll continue to aggressively invest for growth. We believe we have a unique opportunity to disrupt and to capture a large market opportunity. We plan to achieve sustained profitability and positive free cash flow sometime in fiscal 2020.”
In my opinion Zscaler is a Disruptor, a Category Crusher, and a juggernaut like Twilio and Alteryx. The traditional security providers can’t compete with Zscaler because their businesses are built around high-priced hardware and firewalls, and they don’t have the data centers all over the world that Zscaler has. I’ve been building my position gradually. I also added a small amount to Zscaler this month, and I give it a five out of six confidence rating. It sells at a high valuation though, as you might expect.
Okta is still fourth and is up to a 11.8% position. Once upon a time I had rated it at just three stars of confidence because I didn’t know enough about the tech to tell whether they could be replaced by someone like Zscaler. I later raised it to a four-star confidence level, having learned, through great posts by Puddinhead, Brittlerock, and others, that they are complementary and not really competing companies. After they released their October quarter results which were way beyond all expectations, I raised them to five stars.
What Okta does is control individual sign-on to all the apps you use using a native cloud SaaS platform. It’s called identity and access management. It is loved by the people who use it, because they no longer need a million passwords for each program they sign on to.
Okta is growing revenue at 58% and its net loss is down to 4% of revenue, improved from 11% sequentially, and from 27% a year ago. That’s enormous improvement. It seems to be in command of its own future.
I added to my position after earnings. I also wrote a discussion of its earnings here: https://discussion.fool.com/okta39s-quarterly-report-and-conf-ca……
This is a Disruptor and Category Leader, and a Cloud-based New Market Stock. I now give it five confidence stars.
Nutanix is in fifth place, and a 9.2% position, replacing Mongo which is gone. I had sold Nutanix in November but bought it back in December, and doubled my position or more in January. You can read all about my ambivalence about this company by going through the last few end-of-the-month summaries, and you can learn why I bought it back from the 4-month summary above. I found the comments from users that Darth found on Gartner to be very impressive. I expect that within a few quarters the effect of the removal of the hardware will be long behind us.
Next, is Elastic which I started in November and is now a 6.1% position and in 6th place. This is a very recent IPO, and it’s has a very high sales to market cap ratio, but it’s growing revenue at 70% to 80% yoy, so what would you expect? Here’s an explanation of what they do, borrowing from Matt’s (TMF BreakerForce’s), discussion:
They are a SaaS company and they do “Search” but it’s nothing like a Google Search, it’s a different animal altogether. When you hail a ride home from work with Uber, Elastic helps power the systems that coordinates nearby riders and drivers. When you shop online at Walgreens, Elastic helps power finding the right products to add to your cart. When you look for a dating partner on Tinder, Elastic helps power the algorithms that guide you to a match. When you search across Adobe’s millions of assets, Elastic helps power finding the right photo, font, or color palette to complete your project. As Sprint operates its nationwide network of mobile subscribers, Elastic helps power the logging of billions of events per day to track and manage website performance issues and network outages. As SoftBank monitors the usage of thousands of servers across its entire IT environment, Elastic helps power the processing of terabytes of daily data in real time….
You get the idea. It’s a different kind of search, a lot of which I don’t understand at all. I’ll leave you with this, and you can research the rest if you are interested.
I think of it as a Category Crusher, but I rate it as only 4 stars of confidence because it’s a relatively new position, and because its business model has it start out letting companies use its basic solution for free, and then selling them extras. Since they are growing revenue at 70%, who am I to complain?
The Trade Desk was a new try-out position at the end of October. Now it’s now a 5.6% position and is in 7th place in my portfolio. I posted a deep dive two and a half months ago. There’s been a lot of discussion since, but no real news. I’d rate them four stars based on their confidence in themselves, but they are an advertising company after all, which is a field that I have zero confidence in, even though I feel that this is a very innovative and creative company, so I doubt that I will ever let the position get very big. I reduced my position a bit this month for cash, mostly to nibble back at Square. The Trade Desk seems to be a Leader in a Rapidly Growing niche Market within the larger field of advertising, which up to now is controlled by the behemoths.
Square was 2.6% of my portfolio last month and is now back up to 4.7%, as I regain confidence in them. I explained why I had decreased my position in my four month summary above.
Its stock price was traumatised in December by their CFO, the charismatic Sarah Friar, leaving to be CEO of a little start-up.
Square announced incredibly good results last quarter. Its total revenue has grown year-over-year by 39%, 41%, 45%, 47%, 51%, 60%, and 68% in its last seven quarters. Instead of revenue growth returning to the mean, as they get larger their rates of revenue growth has increased each quarter, and accelerated. That 68% was up from 60% in the June quarter, and from 45% in the Sept quarter a year ago. Extraordinary!
How is that happening? It’s because its Subscription and Service Revenue which is its high margin revenue, the good stuff, is growing at over 100% (last seven quarters it’s grown year-over-year by 104%, 97%, 86%, 98%, 98%, and finally 131% and 155%(!) the last two quarters.
Adjusted EBITDA was $71 million, up over 100% from $34 million the year before, and was 16.5% of adjusted revenue.
They’ve been adjusted profitable in 2016 and 2017, and 2018 so far… and profits are growing. We also learned that Square’s Cash App passed PayPal’s Venmo in total downloads (which was a big surprise for most of us.
Square also released Square Payroll App in September, and Square Payroll and Square Terminal in October, and Square Reader SDK, and Square Installment somewhere in there, and now Square Card and Square Payments, so Square is still rolling along for now!
As far as Sarah Friah leaving, I’ll miss seeing her but Square will probably get along without her.
So why in the world did I cut my position so markedly? Read my reasons in my 4-month summary above.
I didn’t feel I need to sell out of all my Square, and I’ve added a considerable amount back in January as I’ve regained confidence with the hiring of a new CFO and with some of their announcements of creative new products, but I felt that it sure shouldn’t be my 3rd largest position, and probably shouldn’t be in the top half of my portfolio. I’ll call it a Rapidly Growing Company in a Rapidly Expanding Market, and I’ll rate them three to four confidence stars out of six.
At the end of November I took small positions in a couple of med-tech related companies, Abiomed and Guardant Health. I added a third, Vericel, early in December. I said all along that these were low-confidence positions, and I sold two of them in January, Abiomed and Vericel. There was nothing wrong with them, I just liked my other companies better. I kept Guardant Health as a flat-out 2% speculative position. The reason I kept it is that it has a chance to become a huge company, with very rapid growth, if it gets the approvals and test results it’s looking for. You can read more about it below.
Guardant Health, a new IPO, which has about doubled since its IPO. To way over-simplify, they do cancer biopsies by drawing blood instead of cutting the patient open. They call these “liquid biopsies.” Their workhorse is called Guardant360 …As you might expect, patients greatly prefer them to a biopsy, and biopharmas working on immuno-oncology are another very large set of customers. Guardant now works with more than 40 biopharma partners and reported 67% growth in test volume in the Sept quarter.
Clinical usage growth was slower than biopharma research growth, as the test, although fast tracked, has not yet been approved. None-the-less, Guardant has got reimbursement approval from BC/BS and Cigna as a medical necessity for a type of lung cancer. And even Medicare has approved reimbursement in one of its areas of the country. All this without yet getting FDA approval.
Guardant has a new test released last year, and growing fast, which has more tests in a single panel. It’s more expensive but biopharmas seem to love it. (GuardantOmni)
Guardant is one-third owned by SoftBank, who is also partnered with them to expand in Asia.
In October they had a lung cancer study published in JAMA Oncology (and carried out at the U of Penn cancer center, which shows that their liquid biopsy outperforms tissue biopsy alone in identification of targetable mutations.
Sept results showed revenue up 95%, gross margins at 54%, up from 22% on greater volume and more Omni tests. Operating expenses rose only 15% with 95% more revenue. Net loss was down 26% from the year before, but was still 113% of revenue. (They have more than ten times as much cash as they burned through in the quarter, raised in the IPO mostly, so no chance of running out of cash).
After I wrote the above I read Ethan’s great write-up, which explained the abnormally low growth in operating expense. (The operating expenses were GAAP, and therefore had a large junk factor). Here is the explanation from Ethan:
Operating expenses up 15% to $35.8 million. This isn’t an apples to apples comparison because in the same quarter in 2017 they spent $9.1 million to buy back stock from some officers. If you account for that then opex is up 57%, mostly in R&D and S&M to develop LUNAR, OMNI, and work on FDA approval for 360.
Aside from additional indications they see three main drivers for themselves in 2019:
The first is FDA approval of Guardant360 with a pan-cancer tumor-profiling label;
The second is pan-cancer Medicare coverage, based on FDA approval.
The third is results from their NILE study, a prospective trial measuring Guardant360 head-to-head versus tissue in a first line non-small cell lung cancer. NILE, if it successfully demonstrates non-inferiority of Guardant360 for biomarker discovery, could enable a blood-first paradigm in clinical testing. (Note that it doesn’t have to be better than a tissue biopsy to win, just not inferior, in which case almost all doctors and patients would most likely choose it over a scalpel biopsy).
Note that they have competition from Ilumina, and maybe others, but that Guardant is way ahead at this point in time, and that SoftBank is a potent partner. I’d give it two-and-a-half confidence stars for now.
This month, I added three new little SaaS companies, Docusign, Zuora, and Anaplan. I’ll write up Docusign this month, and give you a little more info on it, as it has had so much attention on the board.
Docusign is a new position, brought to the board by Growth Monkey, and I have built it up to a 2.6% position. It seems to be a Category Crusher with no competition except “cats and rats” as Bert referred to them. It’s dominant in its market with a 38% market share and the closest competitior at 13%. The cats and rats generally just provide document signing remotely, which is easy, but that’s just a small part of the whole complex picture of what Docusign provides.
To quote Growth Monkey, it has 454,000 paying customers; out of which 53,000 are enterprise customers. Total customer count has grown by 47% CAGR over the past five years and its enterprise / commercial customer count has grown by 60% CAGR. This is no cats and rats company itself! Its customers include Verizon, T-Mobile, FedEx, Unilever, Visa, Bank of America, Dropbox, Stripe, Workday, Berkshire, Deutsche Bank, etc. This is a land and expand model with a current net retention rate at 114%, and almost all recurring revenue.
Docusign is really a new IPO and we only have three quarters of results, but subscription revenue is 95% of total revenue, and both are growing at roughly 37-38%, while Billings growth has gone 33%, 32%, and 40% the last three quarters. It has been operating cash flow positive for the last six quarters, as far as I can tell. Its adjusted EPS is minimally positive, and its adjusted gross margins are in the 80.0% range these three quarters, up from about 78.3% for the same three quarters last year. It seems to have an enormous potential runway in front of it, and I thought it was worth a try.
I currently don’t have any spare money to enlarge my position further, but a return just to its August high of $68 would give it approximately a 40% gain from here, and new highs would be correspondingly higher.
I feel that most of my portfolio is made up of a bunch of great companies. But that’s just my opinion, and I can’t say often enough that I’m not a techie and I don’t really understand what most of them actually do at all ! I just know what great results look like. I figure that if their customers clearly like them and keep buying their products in hugely increasing amounts, they must have something going for them and, as I’ve often said, I follow the money, the results. And I listen to smart people about the prospects of these companies.
QUOTES OF THE MONTH
And let me conclude with a quote that Mauser posted a year ago. It’s wonderful, and I don’t want you to miss it:
What matters is what you buy, not what you didn’t buy. The latter will ALWAYS include stocks that beat your performance.
What an insightful thought!!! It can really help you to quit berating yourself about the ones you missed, as long as the ones you bought did well. It has helped me.
And here is a wonderful quote from Growth Monkey:
It’s okay to be wrong; but its not okay to stay wrong.
I love it. If you make a mistake, take your lumps and move on. Don’t hang on, hoping it will come back, etc. I have seen so many people do that over the years, often with very negative results.
FINISHING UP
When I take a regular position in a stock, it’s always with the idea of holding it indefinitely, or as long as circumstances seem appropriate, and never with a price goal or with the idea of trying to make a few points and selling. I do, of course, eventually exit. Sometimes it’s after months, and sometimes after years, but I’m talking about what my intention is when I buy.
I do sometimes take a tiny position in a company to put it on my radar and get me to learn more about it. I’m not trying to trade it and make money on it, I’m just trying to decide if I want to keep it long term. If I do try out a stock in a small position and later decide that it’s not what I want, I sell it without hesitation, and I really don’t care whether I gain a dollar or lose one. I just sell out to put the money somewhere better. If I decide to keep it, I add to my position and build it into a regular position.
You should never try to just follow what I’m doing without making up your own mind about a stock. In these monthly summaries I’m giving you a static picture of where I am currently, but I may change my mind about a position during the month. In fact, I not infrequently do, and I make changes in the position. I usually don’t announce these changes until the end of the month, and if I’m busy or have some personal emergency I might not announce them even then. And besides, I sometimes make mistakes, even big ones! Don’t just follow me blindly! I’m an old guy and won’t be around forever. The key is to learn how to do this for yourself.
THE KNOWLEDGEBASE
Since I began in 1989, my entire portfolio has grown enormously.
If you are new to the board and want to find out how I did it, and how you can try to do it yourself, I’d suggest you read the Knowledgebase, which is a compilation of words of wisdom, and definitely worth reading (a couple of times) if you haven’t yet.
A link to the Knowledgebase is at the top of the Announcements panel that is on the right side of every page on this board.
For some additions to the Knowledgebase, bringing it up to date, I’d advise reading several other posts linked to on the panel, especially
How I Pick a Company to Invest In,
Why My Investing Criteria Have Changed,
Why It Really is Different.
I hope this has been helpful.
Saul