(repost: fixed a link + subject line from the original post - mistakenly used Saul’s, apologies and thanks for the warnings)
This is my monthly portfolio update for the month of June 2021 (ending the reporting period at June 25th).
I am extremely thankful for this board and the tons of knowledge from various quadrants that are shared here continuously. In the short time I’ve been here, have found out about new companies that weren’t on my radar, reinforced conviction on companies I was already holding, and also found the conviction to get rid of many others. Thanks, everyone.
June 2021
An overall great month of stock price performance! To top it off, tomorrow my wife and myself will finally get vaccinated. The future looks bright. More of this, please!
Re: trades this month, I sold a couple of the smaller positions (Fulgent and ZoomInfo). Also trimmed Upstart when it was up in the clouds and added back when it came down to earth. Added a little bit to Snowflake and Palantir, and trimmed Cloudflare only slightly.
Portfolio split/tiers:
* Top Conviction or Tier 1 - Crowdstrike, Cloudflare, Datadog, Snowflake, Palantir, Roku, Upstart. Unless something goes horribly wrong with company performance, I expect to hold the Tier 1s for a long time and keep adding to them as I think they are executing well and some have good chances of becoming gigantic in the future.
* Tier 2 - Magnite, Fiverr, EXP, fuboTV
Tier 2 are companies I believe in, am happy with their results so far and happy to hold them for now, but have doubts on whether I’ll be holding past this year. No plans to add significantly at this point.
June Additions:
No new positions.
June Sales:
Fulgent Genetics (FLGT)
The recent board discussion around “would you still buy that company today?” gave me pause, and led me to realize, in all honesty, I was mainly holding FLGT in the hopes it would go back to the near-$200 levels from earlier this year. Going over their results again, my guess is they’ll have impossible comps in the upcoming quarters including next year, among other uncertainties, so I decided to just move out of it and invest in higher conviction companies (put it into SNOW, PLTR, UPST).
ZoomInfo (ZI)
Had bought a very tiny number of shares last month, looking to find out more about the company. Upon doing so, got bored and decided to move the money into Upstart instead.
Company Stock evolution ytd
For positions started this year, starting price is where I first bought it.
For companies I was already holding in December, starting price is Dec 31 Close.
**Price 06/25 Starting Growth**
UPST 122.2 87.4 39.8%
NET 104.84 75.99 38.0%
ROKU 430.94 332.02 29.8%
FVRR 243.42 195.1 24.8%
EXPI 39.2 31.56 24.2%
FUBO 34.25 28 22.3%
CRWD 253.24 211.82 19.6%
MGNI 36.5 30.71 18.9%
PLTR 26.78 23.55 13.7%
DDOG 106.06 98.44 7.7%
SNOW 247.09 281.4 -12.2%
All Time Highs
It looks like the companies that are getting back to all time highs faster after the rotation earlier this year are the usual board favorites.
**Symbol ATH Date Current SP Off ATH**
CRWD 258.39 6/24/2021 253.24 -2.0%
NET 109.98 6/24/2021 104.84 -4.7%
DDOG 119.43 2/9/2021 106.06 -11.2%
ROKU 486.72 2/16/2021 430.94 -11.5%
FVRR 336 2/16/2021 243.42 -27.6%
UPST 191.89 6/4/2021 122.2 -36.3%
PLTR 45 1/27/2021 26.78 -40.5%
SNOW 429 12/8/2020 247.09 -42.4%
MGNI 64.39 2/9/2021 36.5 -43.3%
FUBO 62.29 12/22/2020 34.25 -45.0%
EXPI 90 2/16/2021 39.2 -56.4%
Portfolio Results Year to Date
End of Jan +24.7%
End of Feb +14,0%
End of Mar -6,9%
End of Apr +0,5%
End of May +6.23%
End of June +29.66%
I’ve been consistently adding a chunk of my salary each month, will now reduce the amount added or stop altogether for a while, as we’re looking to make a down payment for a house at the end of next year, so need to save for that (the plan is to not take money away from the portfolio, if at all possible).
CURRENT POSITIONS:
Company Ticker % June % May
CloudFlare NET 17.6% 16.6%
Crowdstrike CRWD 17.5% 17.5%
Upstart UPST 11.5% 15.0%
Palantir PLTR 10.6% 7.7%
Snowflake SNOW 9.8% 9.4%
DataDog DDOG 9.4% 9.2%
Roku ROKU 6.4% 5.8%
Fiverr FVRR 4.8% 4.6%
Magnite MGNI 4.0% 3.7%
fuboTV FUBO 3.4% 2.7%
eXp W Hldng EXPI 2.7% 3.6%
Fulgent Gen FLGT - 3.3%
ZoomInfo ZI - 1.0%
Cash 2.30% -
Notes on my positions:
(need to keep it short & quick this month)
Upstart (UPST)
On June 4th, UPST climbed to position #1 on my portfolio, overtaking both CRWD and NET. Seemed too risky to leave it there. I decided to sell half of my position (bought at $87.40, sold at $183 in less than a month) and keep the rest. Even letting go of half, it was still my #4 position and 10% of my portfolio that day.
Price came down soon after that, and very recently, after hearing the CEO interview posted here on the board, I built the position up to around 10% again, buying at $122, $120, $118, $116, and plan to hold.
Excited about this one’s future!
Notes from UPST Q1 Earnings Report are on my update from last month.
Palantir (PLTR)
Some new partnerships and contract renewals announced:
• CDC Renewed partnership for Disease Monitoring and Outbreak Response ($7.4M, 1yr)
• FAA Selects Palantir for Aircraft Certification Safety Monitoring Solution (max. $18.4M if they renew for the full 3yrs)
• AI pioneers DataRobot and Palantir Technologies Inc announced a new partnership designed to create unique, agile, and real-time solutions to help solve the most pressing demand forecasting problems.
Also, Palantir was «named as a 2021 Global AWS Partner Network (APN) Public Sector Partner Award winner for its Palantir platform in its work to combat COVID-19. The AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards recognize leaders in the channel playing a key role helping customers drive innovation and build solutions using AWS Cloud technology.»
Palantir are also keeping up their effort to make the company less opaque, and below are 2 new marketing assets I enjoyed.
There’s this demonstration of Gotham working, it looks like a mix of the movie War Games and current PC strategy games, but it’s the real thing:
https://youtu.be/rxKghrZU5w8
Also enjoyed this interview with the CEO, Alex Karp, talking to Product Lead Parvathy Menon, mostly about the company’s culture, some great insights in there. Right on the first answer I had a moment of panic as the man initially struggles with forming complete sentences. It gets better quickly, though!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjjHdys2Ph4
He seems bullish enough:
«(…) Foundry is objectively the best commercial software product in the world. Feel free to judge it by the numbers, if you’re technical go look at the product, but a simple way, just look at the people we attract to work at Palantir, they go look at Foundry, you’re sitting there as somebody that’s a world class engineer that wants to work somewhere, they look at it and go, ‘ok, I want to work on this’, that’s why our recruiting is so strong.
(…)
Our first commercial products were failures. (…) There’s no shame in our failures, we learned a lot and we applied it when we started building Foundry.
We have the best product in the world, we have also a stature and an access we didn’t have before, we have financial and reputational resources we didn’t have before, and we have a lot of knowledge about how you interact with an institution and how not to interact. I would say we probably matured, at least in our interaction with clients. It’s not perfect – it’s very hard if you’re technical. It’s still the case 70% plus of Palantirians that come in are technical, another 10, maybe even 15% of the people who are not software engineers would be called engineers at any other company. Those kind of people, the people we attract and work hard to retain, don’t always interact well with institutions that are 85% non-technical. It is always gonna be a problem for us, we’re getting better at it but it’s never gonna be perfect.
There will always be a way in which Palantir will overperform technically compared to other institutions, imho, dramatically outperform any other institution in the world on the software production.»
Still waiting for that private client list to grow.
Watchlist:
Nothing serious at this point. I would like to have some stake on the Ecommerce sector, but can’t seem to get excited about any company.
On the data sector, was curious about Confluent, and disappointed when reading analyses on their S-1.
Previous recaps:
May 2021 Update
https://discussion.fool.com/nervokid-portfolio-update-may-2021-3…
April 2021 Update
https://discussion.fool.com/Message.asp?mid=34820121
March 2021 Update
https://discussion.fool.com/Message.asp?mid=34791917