A while ago I posted a summary of all the portfolio allocations posted in this forum. Several people seem to have found it useful, so I’ve updated the portfolios summary for November’s end in this link:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15WYEG7cX2mdErck42Im4…
I’ve also added some additional financial information on each company (revenue growth, gross margins, stock price growth), and a filter on the columns (so if you download the sheet as an excel file you can now sort it by any column). I personally find it useful to look at companies’ financial data side-by-side in order to learn which companies I should investigate more in depth, while focusing on the companies handpicked by the experienced investors here. It also helps me to know in which person’s portfolio update to look if I want to read opinions on a specific company. I hope this will prove useful to other people as well.
In addition, to understand a bit more on what drives companies’ success, I summarized (in other tabs of the same sheet) the boards’ portfolios at the end of 2018 and 2019, and how these companies’ stocks have done during the following year. Several insights from doing this:
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Unsurprisingly, the stocks held by members of the board have done quite well – in fact, if you just bought the top 6-10 stocks held by people here at the end of 2018 and made no changes, you would finish 2019 with gains of 40-60%; if you did the same in 2019, you would have 140-180% gains in 2020 (ytd).
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Despite this, some stocks that were held in high percentages by people here at the end of 2018 (e.g. TWLO, ZS, SQ, NTNX, NEWR) or at the end of 2019 (AYX) did relatively poorly in the following year, and sometimes even had negative growth. I think that this emphasizes two of Saul’s principles – 1) do your own research on each company, and 2) constantly look for signs that the story is intact and get out if the story has changed.
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YoY revenue growth seems to be a great predictor of future stock price rise (at least for the companies held by people here) – almost all of the companies that had >50% yoy revenue growth in 2018 did extremely well in 2019, and similarly for 2019 to 2020. This seems to be even more true for companies that had successive high growth for the prior two years. For example, ZM and CRWD had >100% yoy growth in both 2018 and 2019, even before covid.
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Gross margins seem to be a less reliable predictor – while most of the “consensus” companies here have high gross margins (and obviously perform well), other companies with high gross margins perform poorly (e.g. NTNX).
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As noted by GauchoRico in his monthly portfolio review, the price and valuation of the stocks discussed here has gradually increased – by the end of 2018, only one company held by many members here had a stock price above 100 (TTD); by the end of 2019, there were four with a price above 100 (AYX, MDB, TTD, OKTA), with one of them (TTD) above 200; and now all of the top companies held by people here, except for NET, have a stock price above 100. However, stocks’ prices do not seem to be related to their success (so far) – in fact, when sorting by stock price, it’s evident that the cheapest stocks each year kept doing poorly, while many of the most expensive stocks did well. Which again seems to strengthen Saul’s principle of looking at companies’ performance and not their valuation.
I will try to keep the summary sheet updated month-by-month (at the same link), and possibly add more financial information (if anyone knows of ways to automatically extract financial information for a list of tickers, please send me a message). As always, many thanks to the incredible people here, and most prominently Saul, for their generosity in providing access to their portfolio allocations and to their investing thought process – this is an invaluable resource that is greatly affecting people’s lives, including mine. Thank you.