My portfolio in March, more thoughts:
I had written this month that the biggest reason that Skechers was down as a percentage of the portfolio is that it has stubbornly refused to advance with the rest of my portfolio and is actually down 8% in price from my February report. However, at the end of February it had actually been my largest position. I wondered how I had managed to be up 9.4% in March with my largest position down 8%? Well, it turns out that it was some of the little positions in my portfolio that turned in the best performance (little companies that almost no one had ever heard of before). In the five weeks that went into my March calculation:
PN was up 95%
MITK was up 26%
CBM was up 21%
SNCR was up 16%
And of course, SWKS being up 20.5% didn’t hurt.
On the other hand, LGIH, INFN, CASY, AMZN and SBNY were all up, but up less than the 9.4% that the portfolio as a whole was up. But that’s by definition. After all, my positions can’t all be up more than the average for the portfolio. Some have to be up less…Duh…
PaulWBryant was concerned about Skechers and asked: Have the weekly reports from SKX been encouraging?..a couple that I stumbled across randomly had sales increasing just single digits YoY.
Well here’s what the company said about this quarter in their fourth quarter report on Feb 10th (already half way through this quarter). Here it is, slightly shortened:
As we look at the coming year, our company-owned retail stores are on target with mid- to high-single digit same-store comps in January and we are continuing to gain market share. We have had a very strong start to the first quarter with January sales up approximately 35%…as well as a strong first week of February. Our backlogs were up 9.5% at December 31, in spite of being impacted by some distributors pulling forward orders from January to December. During the fourth quarter, our distributor sales increased 91.6% as compared to last year. Additionally, our incoming order rate in January was also very strong… which is resulting in increasingly improved backlogs for the first quarter.
Wow! And they predicted earnings of 50 to 55 cents, up 42% at the midpoint. I’m not particularly worried about them. And that estimate is based on a sales estimate of $902 million at the midpoint, up just 17% from $768 million last year. As January sales were up 35%, an estimate of sales up just 17% for the quarter seems very conservative. No, I may be quite wrong but I’m not worried about them.
There was also a question about SEDG: For SEDG – have you considered getting back in? Can you say a little more about why you sold? I’m sure the risks you spoke of are disruption risks…but so far all seems well with them, right?
Here’s what I wrote at the end of February, brought up to date: I decided to exit it when I was reducing the number of positions. While they clearly have a dominant position in their field, I sold out for several reasons. First, they had increased in price almost 100% from about $15 to $29.50 in a few weeks with the passage of the renewing of the tax credits, and this was at a time when others of my stocks were way down at PE’s below 15, so I had better places for the money. Second, they have so many risks. Risks for the solar industry, risks of electric utilities fighting back, risks because Solar City, a very large customer, greatly cut back their growth strategy, risks of a competitor coming up with a better mousetrap, or making the product that they sell completely obsolete, and finally, their ASP (average selling price) falls continuously so they have to continuously cut their costs just to keep up. I sold out at an average price of about $26.25. It closed this week at $24.66, down a penny from the close at the end of February.
For the discussion about holding 50 stocks and only really following your larger positions, I know some people do this, and more power to them, but it makes no sense to me. Why not 100 stocks in tiny amounts? Or 200?
I feel you can only really follow and understand and keep up with perhaps 15 stocks. Twenty would be difficult. Fifty is impossible. Also, your chances of finding a dozen really good companies that can average 25% gain in the next year, is enormously greater than your chances of finding 50 or 100 really good companies that can average 25% gain in the next year. That seems so obvious that it almost doesn’t require saying. But that’s just my opinon.
Have fun investing,
Saul
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