Cue the music…
(struts up to the polka-dotted mic)
Ahem. Should have had some water. Wow…crowd is smaller than I remember.
Anyhoo. So I am up around 30%, finally putting me over my Jan/Mar 2022 ATH’s.
2022 kind of sucked. It was the Matt Eberflus of investing years for me. I correctly expected it to be a down year, yet still wound up on wrong side of the Spring/Summer collapses, and then when I recognized some deals (NVDA, SPG, TTD, and many many others) I bought in light-weight amounts and sold too quickly for meager gains. So while it wasn’t as bad percentage-wise as it could have been, I single it out for the missed opportunties.
I hate you, macro. Macro certainly cost me money in 2022 and 2023. I didn’t believe the 2022 dip was the big correction I had been waiting for, and so I could never quite commit to going long and most of the stocks I liked seemed a bit too rich and it felt like I would be chasing.
For some stocks, that proved correct…CELH or ELF or SMCI, etc…
Others, like IOT, AXON, and of course NVDA just defied gravity.
Now I believed that whoever won the POTUS was going to inherit a market collapse…still too many commonsense signs of that abound and printing money to keep GDP going should make us all question just how good is this economy exactly. But I flipped the switch, waaaaaaay too late, around Summer and went all in on stocks. I didn’t want to advertise this too much, as I don’t want others to follow me blindly, but I went heavy on ESPR when it retraced to the $1.60’s-1.80’s. I was/am confident in my own DD and this go-big or go-home strategy has, right or wrong, served me well over the years.
It was NVDA for datacenter expansion in 2015-2016. Hey…I still made a 3-4x on them, but obviously selling in 2017 was a tad early. Although 2018 was a big collapse for them. I didn’t see the AI boom coming that soon…I was ironically on pause bc I (correctly) did not see the Autonomous Vehicle revenue expansion yet, and I thought that was their next big thing…that and the short-lived Metaverse hype.
Then it was TTD from about 2017 to Jan 2020. There were a lot of other stocks along the way, but NVDA and TTD were my big allocations during those years.
Then I couldn’t buy into the 2020/2021 over-valued hype, and I instead went for beaten-down value in SPG over those two years, selling at end of 2021 and early 2022. There was an “attaboy” for GLBE at end of 2021 also.
Been a lot of blah since then, waiting for companies I liked at prices I liked.
I totally would have been all over CELH if I had paid any attention to it early on. Honest to god I thought it was probably a tech/SaaS company when I would see it mentioned. I am a huuuuuuuge Monster fan and been longtime envious of the MNST stock run that I missed out on. By the time I got wind of what it was, it has gone nowhere and most of the big gains were already gotten, I imagine.
Being biased towards tech, everything looked expensive. So I had to start snooping around and stumbled across ESPR. Sadly I bought a tiny allocation at $0.99 and by the time I was comfortable with my DD my cost basis was around $2.
Since 2016 I am up 2185% for a CAGR of 41% over the past 9 years. Despite falling on my face for 2022 and being flat in 2023.
Being heavy in a volatile stock, I am poised to both rocket farther up or plummet.
This year has NOT been comfortable, and I have definitely gotten more backbone vs the quick profit-taking in 2018/2019 in all the misc stocks not named TTD.
Honestly, I didn’t even want to post this, as it probably will be a jinx, and technically I hit the ATH yesterday, but wanted to see if ESPR price would hold for a 2nd day before grabbing the mic.
But I wanted to celebrate a win. With 3 teens driving cars and/or in or shortly in costly college, an expensive ex, and the joys of inflation, it is nice to see the ol’ balance defying gravity after a long respite.
Currently I am in small caps…ESPR mainly, EVGO in 2nd place, and RBOT a distant third. Will be interesting to see if I remain disciplined if ESPR shoots up rapidly from here vs cashing out and getting back to a 5-8 stock portfolio of sorts.
Let’s face it, this mic is a bit lame and I have my eyes on bigger prizes:
Candy-Cane striped: 50-74%
Psychedelic: 75-99% (comes with fried food sampler platter)
Good luck out there!
And remember - I am just a guy on the internet.
Dreamer
