Hey all, it was an up and down month for my portfolio. Fortunately a few companies held up well like IREN, ELVA, and SKYT.
I had a breakthrough with setting up a new screener this month that uses analyst estimates as a way to estimate the company’s guidance. There is a video on my Youtube channel describing how this screener works if that sounds interesting.
Returns are,
2024: +146%
2025: +112%
2026: +4% YTD
Cumulative: +442%
Allocations are,
Iren IREN - 18.8%
Astera Labs ALAB - 16.1%
AppLovin APP - 14%
Electrovaya ELVA - 12.5%
Figure Technology FIGR - 9.2%
Paymentus PAY - 3.9%
Credo CRDO - 3.7%
Pattern Group PTRN - 3.5%
Reddit RDDT - 3.3%
Dave Inc DAVE - 3.3%
Shoals Technologies SHLS - 3.1%
Micron MU - 2.6%
T1 Energy TE - 1.9%
BioHarvest Sciences BHST - 1.4%
SuperMicro SMCI - 1.2%
Duos Technologies DUOT - 1%
Motorsport Games MSGM - 0.5%
Promising new ideas on the month,
Accelerant Holdings ARX - insurance and risk marketplace
Energy Vault Holdings NRGV - utility scale energy storage
Zedcor ZDC.V - AI enabled surveillance and 24/7 monitoring
Anaergia ANRG.TO - waste to energy platform
Blaize Holdings BZAI - AI chip maker for edge data centers
Figma FIG - SaaS for product management and design
Cloudflare NET - Security platform for protecting apps
Sandisk SNDK - Old school memory maker getting a boost from AI
SiTime SITM - timing devices for semiconductors
Nanya Technologies 2408.TW - DRAM maker gaining share in Taiwan
I am starting to get ready for the earnings season now with SuperMicro and Reddit reporting earning this week.
Best of luck to everyone with their portfolio this year!
Figma is mostly a UI design, app prototyping and deployment set of tools. I don’t know what actual product management tools they have. They agreed to be bought by Adobe a couple years ago, but the government nixed the deal since they felt Adobe would be too monopolizing in the design space.
I was looking at their numbers this morning. It isn’t growing at a super growth rate, but might be worth looking at as Adobe is also at a 4 year low today. If they are taking share, it could be a good investment. The issue is that I think everyone is expecting ai (like $GOOG’s Nano Banana) taking this market over. Numbers look decent though.
The last couple engineering jobs I had were both using Figma to as the main product development tool. At least what I saw is that it’s become the de-facto standard for building mobile apps from the product side. Typically if there was a new feature the designers or product will produce the screens and transitions in Figma and it stores all the underlying primitive objects that are needed for iOS or Android development. Once the designers have finished up, they will often look for feedback from engineers, demoing within Figma. There are all sorts of integrations as well such as attaching the design to engineering tickets in Atlassian’s JIRA.
I also saw how when there was a presentation to executives, what used to be done in a powerpoint is now done through screen-share and Figma. Since the whole app is designed through Figma is just makes sense to use the app natively like that rather than build a presentation. Overall, I see this as a product that is used across a business by a lot of different roles, whether it’s engineering, design, product, or management.
It seems like Figma is getting scooped up in the narrative that AI will completely disrupt their business. My take at least on Figma is that it will be fairly challenging to disrupt them now. Figma helps lock down a precise definition of how the app will work working with the tooling that iOS and Android have. Those tools like Nano Banana or ChatGPT can produce one off designs that are not really useful in the engineering sense yet. Of course this space is evolving fast though but I think it’s going to be hard for pure AI to replace Figma.
From the investing side, what I’m really interested to see with Figma is if they are reaching GAAP profitability on the next quarter. Their first posted quarter was 52M of GAAP net income, but the next quarter had all the IPO expenses jammed in there. Analysts are projecting a quarter that is heavily GAAP negative, but I’ll be kind of surprised by that outcome. This seems like a fairly light business model in terms of SaaS. I do not think this company needs a huge salesforce as their product is well known from the ground up.
I was referencing the Net Retention for customers over $10k being 131% and the fact that they guided up and have beat by 2-5% points typically. Thanks for your thoughts as well.
As a side point, are you looking at GAAP net income numbers specifically because of the market temperature? I think that was definitely one of the lessons from 2022 that some of us pulled forward. The companies that tended to be growing AND had a P/E obviously did better back then (as I think you know and might be applying).
Yes, my teams also used Figma at the previous 2 companies I was at. It was really great (probably still is), because you can use it not only for static “here’s what the app will look like” stills, but you can also make it live in demo/prototype form in minutes, and then when you’re ready for the real deal, what you did in Figma carries over as well to the final product.
I’m not sure what I see there makes a big difference, but I’m not that close to it anymore. I suspect it’s somewhat like graphic design - today if you’re just doing something internal, like for a presentation, AI can do the graphics for you probably better than you ever had. But, it’s still not really ready for an ad you’re going to place on bus canopy walls. I would think having AI produce Figma files might be the best of both - get started quickly, but then have human-tweakable and then production-ready assets as output.
Figma’s products have been great - if they’ve got a good handle on monetizing the business, it’s definitely worth a look.
