Wpr101's July 2025 portfolio review

Investment Analysis Clubs Saul’s Investing Discussions
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Hey all, it has been another strong month for results ending at +53% YTD and +276% since the start of 2024. I’m starting to place a bigger emphasis on results with my Youtube channel to stand out a bit more from other channels.

I’ve also started a Twitter account where I may announce new positions, if you are interested to follow here is my profile,

https://x.com/GIMastery

Taking some of the feedback from a few months ago, it seems like many people prefer the long form written style summaries on this board. I believe that style works really well still especially for stock introductions like Health in Tech HIT. I ended up putting a link to the HIT write up in my description on new video for this month.

I’ll also include the allocations for my portfolio here and which new names I’m looking at. I changed the section I previously called “Researched” to “Promising new ideas”. The newer names I am looking at have been filtered a bit to be companies I could see investing in at some point if a few things change about the business or they keep accelerating.

Allocations for this month ended at,

Astera Labs ALAB 19.6%
Reddit RDDT 16.2%
AppLovin APP 16.0%
Sezzle SEZL 13.3%
Hims & Hers Health HIMS 12.6%
Paymentus PAY 9.5%
Health in Tech HIT 2.9%
Paysign PAYS 2.3%
Cineverse CNVS 2.1%
Nova NVMI 2.0%
Dave DAVE 1.4%
Powerfleet AIOT 0.9%
Credo CRDO 0.9%
CASH 0.3%

The new companies I was checking out are,

GeneDX WGS - genome diagnostic testing company that had an impressive earnings
Elolv Technologies EVLV - AI based metal detectors with subscription revenue
IREN Limited IREN - Bitcoin miner switching to HPC to compete with Nebius and CoreWeave
Jefferson Capital JCAP - debt collector service with incredible growth and profitability
Innoviz INVZ - LIDAR company out of Israel with a ton of design wins in Auto

Feel free to leave me any feedback here or on the Youtube channel. Was thinking to have my next video be the Top three earnings report from the season since eight of my companies are reporting next week. I’m expecting some big results next week, so let’s see how the companies perform.

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Hey wpr,

Thanks for the very interesting portfolio review. You definitely do a super job in finding new companies to invest in. I recently subscribed to your YouTube channel and watched your video explaining your process to review a company - it’s fantastic!

I was curious to know why you do not consider the decrease in the growth rate of DAUs and WAUs for RDDT to be a big concern. There has been a steady decrease in the growth rate of DAU (51%->47.3%->39.1%->30.7%) and WAU (56.9%->52.8%->41.8%->31.1%) over the past 4 quaters (but the number of DAU and WAU id still increasing). You mention it briefly in your video and your concern is offset by the increase in revenue per user - which is fair enough in the short term. The vast majority of RDDT’s revenue comes from advertising, presumably its the number of DAU which attract these companies to spend ad budgets with RDDT. I’m concerned that the decreasing growth of WAUs and DAUs may impact revenue over the long term.

Also what are you thought on RDDT’s dependence on GOOGLE?

Thanks.

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I’m not @wpr101, but I can chime in on the DAU’s. Part of the reason RDDT jumped and then fell back after Q2 was because the headlines were great but the CEO mentioned “high teens” growth for DAU’s this quarter, implying flat sequentially. The market took that as a slowdown since DAU’s increased from Q2-Q3 last year. However, if you look at their history, DAU’s had traditionally been flat during this time period. The 2024 jump was the outlier. Given how strong the guide was even with that expected “slowdown” in growth, I felt the reaction was overblown. This Q’s numbers seem to indicate that’s indeed the case.

Will AI answers at the top of searches affect traffic to RDDT? Possibly. However, we aren’t seeing it yet. And given the ARPU gains, RDDT continues to effectively monetize its visitors.

DAU and ARPU history below:

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Screenshot 2025-08-02 at 9.36.27 AM
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Hi Stocknovice,

Thank you for your input - I always appreciate your views very much.

I do recall the CEO mentioned “high teens” growth in the previous earnings report - there was quite a bit of discussion on this board about that. I was more referring to the general trend in DAU growth - looking at the history of DAU growth rates, it’s a perfect bell curve - the growth rate increased from Q1 2023 to Q2 2024 and has decreased every quarter since Q2 2024. Is this not a concern to you? Are you expecting DAU growth rates to level off at a certain level?

As you can see in your table the raw QoQ adds of DAU in Q2 was only 2.3 - that’s the worst quarterly adds since Q2 2023.

I do acknowledge that DAUs isn’t the only thing that attracts advertisers. It’s all about ad impressions and clicks, and time spent on a platform is just as important as the DAU metric, among other things - but DAU is the only data we have to go on.

Thanks and best regards.

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I appreciate the support! Glad to hear you liked the finding a new company video.

From my viewpoint the DAU and WAU are fairly low growth around 20%. However, management said something really interesting about their cohort of users. The users who joined Reddit longer ago actually spend more time on the platform than newer users. This is in contrast to other platforms like Facebook and Instagram where older users are dropping off more. What this means is that users expand their usage over time becoming more valuable as they age. I believe this factor can help compensate to keep the revenue growth rate high while the user growth is growing at a slower rate.

Another element to consider is the average revenue per user numbers which are growing and around $4.5 for Reddit right now. Currently Facebook and Instagram have an ARPU of around $25-30. If Reddit was on par with Meta for monetizing its users, this quarter would have been about 5x, or 2.5B of revenue with Meta’s ARPU numbers. Additionally, I am considering that Reddit may know more about the user’s interest than Meta and be able to target ads more effectively.

My real concern in the quarter was that “Other revenue” category growing slowly. When I first purchased Reddit that other revenue category was growing over 600%. They said that AI models need the latest information to learn off of, but now those deals seem to have slowed quite a bit. My original thesis was this other revenue or licensing of data could grow in tandem with ad revenue, but it seems the business is gravitating way more heavily to relying on ads as opposed to data licensing.

I’m not too concerned about this issue because the users coming from Google are the least monetizable. Often these are users searching incognito or anonymously, so this is a very low value user. The more valuable users are the people with the Reddit app on their phone, using it daily. In those cases Reddit has a lot of information to be able to target effectively and get good prices on the cost per impression.

What management said was Google is making changes to their algorithm all the time, and sometimes the changes have even helped them. This is just the standard tweaking and tuning Google does, and I think users who want to find results specifically from Reddit will find one way or another. This is also starting to include queries to LLMs, where people may prompt, “find me the Reddit threads on…”

My plan with the position is to hold this company until they reach a disappointing earnings result. Overall revenue grew 78% and they beat the top end of their guidance range by 16%. That is keeping in mind that costs for this business are barely growing with a gross margin over 90%. It is challenging to find a business growing like this and at their scale. I think the product is pretty compelling as well with lots of room for user growth as nearly every person can be a potential Reddit user.

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I’d be careful counting “design wins.” For instance, the much-touted inclusion of 9 sensors from Innoviz for the VW ID.Buzz (EV Microbus successor) is only for a small set of vehicles being modified for test trials in a couple of cities. VW is not installing lidar in VWs being sold for individual ownership. I don’t even think they have plans to do that, even.

And note that even in these trials, the autonomous software is being provided by Mobileye. It’s unclear how much of the “perception software” Innoviz talks about will be used in these trials. Mobileye is no stranger to using LiDAR, so they will probably use whatever device driver software Innoviz includes with the hardware, and use their own perception and self-driving stack.

And even if you believe in LiDAR in the future of autonomous vehicles, note there is significant competition. The biggest play in autonomous driving today, Waymo, uses its own in-house developed LiDAR hardware/software. For third parties like Innoviz, there is competition from companies like Luminar and Hesai, too. In my view, these are all highly speculative plays, requiring technical knowledge of the capabilities, pricing, and manufacturing prowess of the different LiDAR suppliers in order to differentiate between them and know which the OEMs will provide. For instance, Mercedes started development with Luminar, but switched to Hesai for production due to cost and manufacturing prowess.

Note that there are very few production cars that have LiDAR today. Mercedes offers Drive Pilot only in its top of the line S-Class models in California and Nevada, for instance - and those use LiDAR units from Valeo, yet another potential competitor. There may be a small Chinese OEM or two as well. But for the most part, companies are looking at robotaxi applications first, and those are low-volume for the foreseeable future, so not much revenue opportunity for a couple years at least.

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@Smorgasbord1 That is helpful context on the industry and competitive landscape for Innoviz! I held off starting a position because there were a lot of outstanding questions I had about competition, and their place in the auto industry.

What got me interested in the first place was the huge step up in revenue last quarter, it went from 6M to 17.4M, and the previous year all the quarters were below 10M of revenue. Additionally, their gross margin got up to 40% in the last quarter. Although their profitability looks quite poor still with -12.6M of net income, so it’s a long way before they are even getting a break even run rate. They did a direct offering of shares back in February to go from 169M to 186M shares.

The company made some partnership with Fabrinet (symbol FN), to launch “mass production” of their InnovizTwo platform ahead of customer ramps.

Some notes from the conference call which seemed promising,

  • Shipping LiDARS earlier than planned
  • “Expanding collaboration and growing momentum with NVIDIA on the Hyperion platform”
  • Multiple OEMs evaluating Hyperion integration
  • “We expect our capacity to increase by an order of magnitude in 2025 and the production line to be fully ramped in 2026, enabling customer SOPs & volume ramps”
  • Partnerships with Holon (Germany) and Verne (Croatia) expected to start soon with Mobileye Drive
  • “Well positioned to support the product ramps that we expect over the next 2 years”
  • InnovizOne in BMW i7
  • InnovizTwo has significantly improved performance and cost
  • In discussions with several integrators interested in deploying LiDARs to customer applications

My biggest concern was with the guidance they gave though. Q1 already booked 17.4M of revenue and the 2025 full year is for 50-60M of revenue. However calculating the run-rate with 17.4M would be 70M for the full year so they are projecting sequential declines in revenue. It sounds like it may be a layup to beat their guidance, but I’m not confident with the growth. They are reporting again on August 13 pre-market. To be interested further I’d want to see them get above 17.4M or grow sequentially, but I’m doubtful that will happen.

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Note that Hyperion is an Nvidia product, not a Innoviz product. It’s good that Innoviz lidars work with Hyperion, but so do Luminar’s. In general, while some small OEMs may eventually decide to put Hyperion into their production vehicles, the history of Nvidia’s automotive platforms (Nvidia Drive) is that these are just reference platforms used for proof of concept and maybe development efforts, but more custom solutions with third parties are the most likely production outcome.

If the BMW i7 the only production vehicle with Innoviz hardware? BMW charges $6500 for that autonomous package (including software and apparently a purchase, not a license like Mercedes).

Again, my hesitancy here is that I don’t know how we can know which lidar company will win which OEM business. Mercedes is reported as recently switching from Valeo to Hesai, for instance. Given the large software efforts involved in autonomy, what drives the final hardware decisions? Would it be the OEM (automotive company), or the autonomy services provider (Mobileye, Moia, etc.)? These decisions at automotive companies are complex and things beyond price and performance, like internal politics, previous relationships, customization requirements, etc. often drive automotive OEM decisions.

I just can’t see how to predict which lidar company/companies will thrive, if any. Even “design wins” aren’t guarantees of orders for production - production plans change all the time and delays and volume reductions can have a big impact on suppliers.

Do you have a breakdown from Innoviz as to where their current revenue comes from? How much from vehicles intended for individual ownership versus lower volume robotaxis? How much from production versus trials? Production plans are often treated as company confidential trade secrets by OEMs, so Innoviz may not be able to state publicly until the vehicle is unveiled.

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Hi @wpr101 - thank you and others on the board who report with their thoughts.

I miss the earnings reports we had on top common holding, so I wanted to ask you about your take on the HIMS earnings?

For my POV, there is a lot less to be excitged about, and i reduce my position by abount 40% already. However, I have sold too fast in the past, and so I am wary to exit completly; however I do not see much upside in the next few months.

Would be super beneficial to have your take, as well as others!

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@Ysdrasill You asked for others to provide their take on HIMS. For me, this stock has been a wild ride - maybe the most volatile stock in my portfolio - I’m not sure, about that, but it seems like it.

Anyway, after this last dive in stock price, I didn’t give it a lot of thoughtful analysis. I just sold my entire position with the thought that there must be a better investment than this one.

As it turned out, I had been pondering what to sell in order to buy more ALAB, so that’s where I put most of funds that became available from the sale of HIMS. My timing was incredibly fortunate. I beefed up my ALAB position one day ahead of the ~30% pop. My past experience has been exactly the opposite. Whether I buy or sell, the stock price has consistently moved in a less profitable direction shortly after my transaction. Not this time. So, I have no regrets for having exited HIMS.

That’s probably not very helpful as I don’t have any analysis to offer. I just followed a gut feelings. If anything is to be gained from my actions it would be to pay attention to those visceral feelings. I’m not for a moment suggesting that you make all your investment decisions based on intuition. I’m simply suggesting that you shouldn’t completely ignore your gut if a position has been making you feel uncomfortable.

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@Ysdrasill I thought the HIMS report was a disaster and I sold most of my shares. The shares I do have left are because they lap long term capital gains next week.

I’m looking to release a video Friday morning discussing my top three earnings reports for the season. I’ll include a portfolio run down at the end of my allocations. I’ve had eight companies reporting this week so I’m going to have a lot of portfolio updates soon! I sold Paymentus PAY and Paysign PAYS as well.

Regarding HIMS, I realized there wasn’t a single statistic in the entire report which is impressive. The 73k customer adds is against quarters where they were adding 160k or 180k typically. They said they saw “volatility in market efficiency” which basically equates to the marketing they did was ineffective.

On top of that they said they are going to expand to the UK, Canada, EU, Asia, and Latin America. I believe they are making a huge business mistake by not tackling insurance instead and gaining more legitimacy in the US. They’ve said time and time again insurance is too complex to handle, but now they think they can expand to every part of the world with different languages, insurance systems, and regulations?

That’s with analysts saying the following on the call,

  • “Maybe just a follow up on inventory, pretty steep increase quarter over quarter”
  • “It seems to me like you’re guiding to $100M of GLP-1 revenue in Q3 and $100M in which should be a significant decline, maybe I’m sort of overly conservative with my view there?”

One last quote from management was, “entering an investment period for at least the next year”. It sounds like they are going to be flat for the next year maybe producing 500M - 650M per quarter, but I seriously doubt they can grow right now especially if customer count is not growing when it should be scaling up.

That’s probably not very helpful as I don’t have any analysis to offer. I just followed a gut feelings. If anything is to be gained from my actions it would be to pay attention to those visceral feelings. I’m not for a moment suggesting that you make all your investment decisions based on intuition. I’m simply suggesting that you shouldn’t completely ignore your gut if a position has been making you feel uncomfortable.

@brittlerock I’m a big fan of Jared Tendler’s work with the mental game. He works mostly with traders but I’ve done some coaching sessions with him to adapt the advice for investing. He is a big proponent of emotion in investing/trading equals a signal or something to investigate. It’s not meant to be repressed, and sometimes that gut feeling is indicating that action must be taken. It can be as simple as frustration with the HIMS results, and a sense of optimism around ALAB. It sounds like you made a decisive move and got it right this time!

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Thank you both, that’s very helpful - I will exit my position and book the large % gain and move on.

To be honest, im generally very thankful right now; after starting to invest in 2021, having most of my ‘gambling’ (i also invest in indexes elsewhere for security) money wiped away in 2022, seeing that ive now lapped thoses losses and i am in the green overall again is pretty amazing, in less than 3 years.

It’s due to the expertise you all provide, so thank you!

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@wpr101 Thanks for the comment. I appreciate the validation. I was reluctant to even post what I did and why I did it because it was pretty much contrary to the way we on this board usually make our investment decisions. The expectation is that every buy and sell is the result of thoughtful and careful analysis. I didn’t even look at the numbers they reported. I didn’t read a transcript of the conference call. I just observed the stock price cratering and bailed out.

OTOH, the purchase decision for ALAB was more reasoned. I had previously decided I needed to acquire more shares, but was undecided about where the money was going to come from. Selling HIMS was all I needed, the funds were now available and I didn’t hesitate to buy ALAB. I just got lucky on the timing.

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Hey all, I’ve got a video covering the earnings of ALAB, APP, and DAVE. Found these to be the best reports from my group of companies. Also have a portfolio allocation update at the end!

Curious how this format works to cover three companies at once, or if more in depth dives on individual companies is preferred? Thanks for the support!

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Hi Wpr,

as always thank you vm for the detailed videos. On SEZL, I am curious what made you sell out so rapidly?

I am not saying I don’t agree, I am considering selling today as well; but because its a BPNL stock and they aren’t my favorite, and because I dislike how the management handled their growth (reminded me of UPST); however it seems they are still growing quite well with decent-ish take rate?

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Hi @wpr101 , thanks for your response to me on Youtube. I just dropped another comment under your video, but mysteriously, it got deleted stealthily by Youtube (shame for Google). So I’ll continue with the discussion here.

For RDDT, I have a slightly different understanding from yours.

  • I have never expected that the data licensing business would be a considerable growth driver for Reddit. The reason is because there are only a limited number of companies in the world that have the ability to train pre-trained LLM (e.g. Google, OpenAI, X-AI, etc). Based on my understanding, only pre-trained LLM would need Reddit’s data. (Under the hood, LLMs are trained to predict the next token/word of a conversation. Reddit’s posts are considered relatively trustable data on the internet. )
  • On the other hand, I think the ads business itself can make Reddit to be a much much bigger company. There’s no limit on the TAM of advertising market, because ads generate net new income for advertisers. Reddit does not need to beat down Meta in order to succeed. As long as users’ time spent on Reddit, as well as the monetization efficiency, keeps growing, Reddit’s revenue will grow.

So I would not worry too much about the data licensing and would keep the focus on the monetization growth part.

Cheers,
Luffy

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I had thought Sezzle was a business and product with a massive amount of momentum. One of the main reasons was that Q4 going to Q1 was a sequential increase in revenue when Q4 is the peak holiday season and Q1 is typically light.

I like making a guess of where the company will land on revenue to get a barometer immediately upon reading the press release. My guess, or number I would be happy with was 112M. However, I was thinking it was possible they might get 120+. Coming in with 99M on revenue was way lighter than expected.

If the company had guided FY revenue higher, it could mean that Q2 had a one-time event. When they kept guidance flat I knew there was nothing in the conference call they could say to keep me in the stock. This also meant to me this business is way less predictable than I assumed. On the previous call they raised guidance from 25-30% to 60-65% which indicated to me they saw some incredible growth that broke their internal estimates. Now I am wondering if they really knew what they were doing raising the guide that much.

Sezzle was a really strong numbers stock from my perspective. But I wasn’t thrilled about the product as they are the 4th or 5th BNPL solution. It seemed like they had a different model though with a loyal fan base. The thing that was always in the back of my mind though was they have changed how they measure user metrics a couple times since being public.

One theory I have about this business and what happened to stop the sequential revenue growth was that the WebBank partnership provided a big one time boost to the company, but now that it is all setup the results are starting to flatten out.

@monkeydluffy In Q2 of 2024, they said this about Other Revenue, “Other revenue grew over 690% year-over-year to $28.1 million, primarily driven by data licensing agreements signed in the first half of the year.”

Then in Q3, they said “Other revenue was $33.2 million in Q3 driven by data licensing partnerships we signed earlier in the year. In Q3, we entered into a new partnership with Meltwater, a media and social intelligence company. Meltwater accesses Reddit’s content through our data API, which allows our customers to uncover brand insights, monitor industry trends and tap into the discussions happening on the platform.”

It sounded to me like there were signing agreements with a “social intelligence” platform. In one of their investor conferences they were talking about financial institutions also being interested in the data. I got the impression the data wasn’t being bought by just AI companies but also social media and financial companies.

When they were saying a year ago Other Revenue was growing 690% yoy and there is tons of interest from different companies, I wasn’t expecting a year later this segment would be flat with the AI companies questioning if they even need the data.

By the way, I’ll see if I can loosen the auto content moderation on Youtube. They had three settings: None, Basic, and Strict. The video had Basic on so I’m not sure why a comment would get removed. Just switched it to be no content moderation so it doesn’t interfere with any replies.

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Hi wpr

I also had a comment disappear from your youtube channel. I’m not clear where you’d like discussions to take place (here or there), or if it matters to you, but I’d like to avoid cross posting.

My question was about rddt vs app. You noted that rddt was aggressively staffing up sales & marketing, in an effort to monetize their content. This seems to me a very old school approach (a la ttd), and in stark contrast to app, which apparently has built an engine/system that they contend will basically sell itself better than they possibly could.

I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on that.

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Not to be too off-topic, but for the sake of this community I think it would be preferable to have the meaty conversations here rather than YouTube which is much harder to track over the course of countless videos and comment threads/subthreads.

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Not to mention that parts of this community won’t go “over there”.

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