Times They Are a-Changin'

Investment Analysis Clubs Saul’s Investing Discussions
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I was long AYX, DDOG, OKTA, NET, ZM, CRWD, SQ, ROKU.

On 4/3 Friday, I sold my positions in SQ and ROKU and am down to 6 positions. I intend to weather this storm holding onto these.

The reasoning behind NOT SELLING these 6 stocks can be found here:
https://discussion.fool.com/this-is-how-i-see-it-ayx-stock-was-d…

My portfolio at present looks like this (in descending order of allocation.)

1.OKTA
2.AYX
3.DDOG
4.NET
5.ZM
6.CRWD

This is a time for making hard decisions for the well-being of you and your family, friends, community and of course your finances.

From the list, OKTA is my favorite stock for a lot of reasons which I’ll write about someday ( do read muji’s posts for some great insights about this company). A few years back when some of my buddies and I were looking for some great new software ideas, we discovered OKTA. I bought my first position after the IPO in 2017 and have been adding and adding some more ever since. I also learnt a lot about OAuth 2.0 from them while trying to get some code working :slight_smile:

I cannot be thankful enough to Saul and all the other great contributors on this board and am glad to have stumbled upon this board about a year ago. I’m not a business numbers guy but if there’s anything technical that I can help with, please let me know. My entire day is spent writing code and living in the cloud and that’s the only thing I’ve come to understand well :). I added a little more ZM, OKTA and AYX today with the proceeds from SQ and ROKU. Not that I don’t like SQ and ROKU but I like OKTA, ZM and AYX more at this time ( This is something I’ve learnt from Saul by lurking on this board for more than a year). I also think that ZM’s security concerns will be short lived and that’s why I’ve been buying more. The deluge of new ZM users at this time will open up many new use cases for ZM and should bode well for them.

These unprecedented times are an indication to which business and trends are going to ubiquitous in the next few decades…and the signs are pointing to SAAS and Big Data.

Times They Are a-Changin’

Cheers!
ron

long <OKTA, AYX, DDOG, NET, ZM, CRWD>

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Just a follow-up.

The expectations, mood and performance of the stocks in my portfolio are pretty much validating the guiding principles I outlined in this post ( do read it if you haven’t and let me know if you think otherwise :)).

https://discussion.fool.com/this-is-how-i-see-it-ayx-stock-was-d…

During my 20 years of software development experience ( having written code for one of the greatest software companies in the world and being lucky to be among the first guys to move on-premises software/services to the cloud, I cannot emphasize enough that big data and everything about data ( like securing, monitoring, moving, analyzing) is mission critical when it comes to operating in the cloud.

Many traditional enterprises are already embracing the digital revolution to stay ahead and those that haven’t will need to.

So, here’s how my portfolio presently looks (in descending order of allocation.) compared to the beginning of April. And guided by the thoughts in the above post about the “three categories of our software stocks”.

1.OKTA > Secures
2.DDOG > Monitors
3.ZM > WFH
4.NET > Security & Moving data
5.CRWD > Security
6.AYX > Analyzing

In the above post I wrote… “These unprecedented times are an indication to which business and trends are going to ubiquitous in the next few decades…and the signs are pointing to SaaS and Big Data.”</>

The pandemic has hastened that transition…

Cheers!
ron

35 Likes
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Ron:

I like your thinking but disagree with some details.

During my 20 years of software development experience ( having written code for one of the greatest software companies in the world…

For reference, I started writing code 60 years ago with the world’s greatest IT company of its day, IBM. I have been able to keep up to date with many of the multitude of paradigm shifts since then.

In the above post I wrote… “These unprecedented times are an indication to which business and trends are going to ubiquitous in the next few decades…and the signs are pointing to SaaS and Big Data.”

The pandemic has hastened that transition…

Yes! I’ve split my portfolio into two halves, Covid-19 and (mostly) SaaS. My three Covid-19 stocks are Zoom (ZM), Teladoc (TDOC), and Everbridge (EVBG). I’m focusing less on what corporations need and more on what the world needs, Work at Home, Tele-medicine, and Notification. This is more “retail” oriented than your view. Investors often underestimate the importance of retail because they are thinking of the volatility of passing fashions. But in the end, it’s retail that drives the economy – the economy is driven by seven billion people. These people need to work (ZM), they need to stay healthy (TDOC), and stay informed (EVBG).

The other half of my portfolio is dedicated to Saul style stocks but I have given up on trying to forecast each one’s future. Instead I let the market tell me what’s good this week. Beyond saying that I have over 70 names on my “wish list” I won’t go into details because they are off topic for this board.

Denny Schlesinger

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Hi Ron,

Per your links of article you mentioned AYX as your largest and now became the smallest(if I did saw wrong) may I have your update thought?

And NET as your forth position, after both FSLY and NET ER, I do interesting with those two comparison. Seems FSLY got lots of OTT or online game CDN and still very cheap(? EV/s) even after their monster jumped. NET also did a good job on their numbers but not as expected that much contributed by COVID 19. Do you have any idea with these two companies? Thanks

Rick

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captainccs: But in the end, it’s retail that drives the economy – the economy is driven by seven billion people.

Well said, this is an extremely important point missed by many. Way back during the space race era I was involved with a defense program where we had cost plus development contracts with a guaranteed 15% profit with two of the largest semiconductor companies. When the economy picked up, they both tried to cancel. They pointed out they couldn’t afford to allow top designers to work on NASA/defense products which didn’t have any real high-volume profit potential. They pointed out that Defense and NASA never accounted for more than 5 or 6% of either their businesses. Despite all the hype NASA puts out most technology innovations are driven by the total economy.

RAM

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