this is a nice board

I’ve been investing for a long time, so this is an interesting board to me. I’m a growth investor, and this board is filled with growth investors. And there are so many people with knowledge on this board. So it’s a very helpful place to visit. I found Smartsheet because of this board, and Elastic, too. These are new investments, but I am very happy to hold them, and happy that I discovered them. And I have ya’ll to thank for this.

David Gardner is easily the biggest influence on me and my investments. I was an early investor in Amazon, and Netflix, and I sold both of them. So I missed out on those 100-baggers. All I had to do was hold. And I failed at holding. So that would be my warning to the board. When you have a great company, do not sell it. Be patient.

My personal port is small, with only five investments:

Square
Shopify
Carvana
Smartsheet
Novavax

The port I manage for the rest of my family is quite a bit bigger, with 26 investments. In order of size…

Intuitive Surgical (11%)
Apple (11%)
Shopify (8%)
Square (6%)
The Trade Desk (5%)
Ionis Pharma (5%)
Schwab (5%)
Amarin (5%)
Sirius XM (4%)
Carvana (4%)
Immunomedics (4%)
Ubiquiti Networks (4%)
Visa (4%)
PayPal (3%)
IPG Photonics (3%)
Elastic (3%)
Arista Networks (2%)
Smartsheet (2%)
MongoDB (2%)
Disney (2%)
Novavax (2%)
NV5 Global (1%)
bluebird bio (1%)
The Meet Group (1%)
Amazon (1%)
Finjan (1%)

We’re up 16% for the year. We were up quite a bit higher, and then Novavax got whacked last week. Stocks that I am tempted to buy include Twilio, MeiraGTx, Seattle Genetics, W&T Offshore. I just added Ascendis Pharma to one of my hypothetical ports, and the damn thing went up 74% two days later.

I have four hypothetical ports, in addition to our real money ports. Hypo 1 is up 24%, Hypo 2 is up 18%, Hypo 3 is up 28%, Foreign port is up 6%. The big winners so far this year…

Roku (up 107%)
MeiraGTx (up 80%)
iQIYI (up 75%)
Ascendis Pharma (up 74%)
Snap (up 71%)
The Trade Desk (up 65%)
Ultragenyx (up 58%)
bluebird bio (up 54%)
StoneCo (up 52%)
Paycom (up 47%)

We own two of those. I track a lot of damn stocks. The 26 we own, plus 80 in four hypothetical ports, plus another 70 in CAPS. 176 stocks I try to follow, more or less. I admire the deep dives this board often does, very helpful to me.

My highest conviction stocks right now are Amarin, Shopify, Carvana, Square, The Trade Desk. They represent about 28% of our portfolios. That’s something interesting Saul does, and probably the most important thing he does. He figures out which companies he has the most faith in, and that’s where most of his money is.

We’ve been buying Amarin over the last couple of weeks. It’s my highest conviction stock, so that’s where our money is going. If you’re not familiar with Amarin, you might start with this New York Times article…

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/25/well/fish-oil-heart-attac…

They’re also published in the New England Journal of Medicine:

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1812792

The stock has been a 7-bagger over the last six months. It now has a $7 billion market cap. Is it still a growth stock? Well, heart attacks are the biggest killer, bigger than all the cancers combined. I think their drug is going to be a monster. It’s already been approved. What we’re waiting for now is whether the FDA will expand the label. The other thing that kind of shocked me was how few analysts were on the last report: three. Man! I know there are a lot of biotechs to follow, and it’s hard to track them all. But that’s a lot of oblivious financial analysts who aren’t caught up to the story yet. The New York Times has the story! But Wall Street is missing it.

Anyway, I wanted to thank the board, and Saul, for all the research here. Very interesting stuff.

Taylor

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