It was another challenging month for my stocks, although the last day in the month saw a big bounce back. I’ve been looking to consolidate down to a lower number of holdings and currently have 12 stocks.
I decided to start adding the YTD point in time returns for each month, rather than show a graph in my videos. This is more accurate, and the graph was for my main brokerage account. I balanced out between brokerages more now, and that of course distorts the graph.
Results,
2024: +146%
2025: +112%
2026: -20% YTD
Cumulative: +317%
YTD point in time results,
JAN +4% YTD
FEB -16% YTD
MAR -20% YTD
Allocations,
AppLovin APP - 16.2%
Astera Labs ALAB - 13.8%
Iren IREN - 11.9%
Figure Technology FIGR - 11.4%
Credo CRDO - 11.1%
Reddit RDDT - 8.5%
XTI Aerospace XTIA - 6.1%
Micron MU - 5.5%
Pattern Group PTRN - 4.9%
Electrovaya ELVA - 4.2%
Ethos Technologies LIFE - 4.0%
Nebius NBIS - 2.5%
Companies bought and sold in the month,
QTI Imaging QTI
Figs Inc FIGS - Medical apparel retailer
Sandisk SNDK
Applied Optoelectronics AAOI
Companies sold this month,
Dave Inc DAVE
BioHarvest Sciences BHST
Accelerant Holdings ARX
Promising new ideas included,
Omada Health OMDA - virtual health platform for weight loss
Bloom Energy BE - fuel cells for power generation of data centers
Ciena CIEN - optical and routing platform with software solutions
Fabrinet FN - contract manufacturer in electronics and optics
Dell Technologies DELL - compute manufacturer with growing AI share
nLIGHT LASR - fiber lasers and beams for defense and aerospace
Plant Labs PL - satellite and imagery provider
Any feedback or questions are welcome here or over on Youtube.
I’m getting started on my mid-season earnings review for my companies now. I’m fairly optimistic about the individual companies I have despite the share price declines.
I had a small position in BHST which I exited several weeks ago. My wife and I both used one of their products (Vinea, I think) for over three months and realized none of the advertized benefits. Granted, the effects of supplements/pharmaceuticals may be statistically validated, but that doesn’t mean that any one particular individual will have that experience. Nevertheless, I decided that even though it was purely anecdotal, it was enough for me to exit what was already a low confidence position. Ironically, I have been regularly receiving YouTube advertisements for this product. In other words, could be that this company is just now ramping their product promotion efforts - so it’s worth keeping an eye on it.
Separately, I too am interested in why you decided to exit DAVE. I still hold a position in this company. It, along with just about everything else has taken a beating, but I am unaware of any fundamental change that would cause me to sell. Was it just a matter of needing money to deploy elsewhere so DAVE became the source of funds? Not that it suddenly looked bad, just not quite as promising as other opportunities?
It mostly came down to looking to consolidate my holdings down to a smaller number of companies. I find myself looking to lower my overall holdings during market downturns. It primarily came down to having a lot of other high confidence picks also getting beat up in share price. On the flip side, I think when the market is generally rising and stocks are hitting new highs I’m more likely to trim positions and be willing to try out positions in newer companies. I don’t think it’s a part of my strategy I have really detailed in a video on my channel before, so maybe worth thinking through the why on this part of my strategy. Basically DAVE would be my 13th stock, but there’s a lot of other names I wanted to add too without having other companies to trim from.
By the way for every sell I make, I also put details of those in the monthly video. The section on DAVE starts at the timestamp 49:55. Other than consolidating my number of holdings down, the main reason was competition. I thought DAVE was primarily competing with Buy Now Pay Later solutions, with their main competitors being Sezzle, Klarna, Affirm, and a couple others. I was surprised to learn in this Wolfe Fintech conference they called out Cash App and Chime as their main competition.
Cash App and Chime are growing slower than Dave in terms of revenue but are also much larger on the amount of revenue. Chime is also GAAP unprofitable still, so I see DAVE as having vastly better unit economics. It could also be Dave’s AI model, or business model more generally is superior. My concern is these larger players like Cash App, Chime, Affirm, and Klarna have a lot of money to throw around gaining customers without needing to be profitable in the near term.
I mentioned in the video it was a tough decision though because there has not been a deterioration in the financials for DAVE. I’m rarely selling a stock before a deterioration in financials happens. Additionally, the P/E ratio has gotten so low it is already making me question if I made the right call, and there is value to be had here.
When I look at the competitive landscape for a few other companies I own its a lot more greenfield. For example, Figure Technology has a ~75% market share of the tokenized real world asset market. Pattern Group is the only brand accelerator that is willing to buy inventory off their customers. Ethos says they have no known competitors in the Direct market for life insurance, and the ones who tried prior failed. Reddit seems like a one of a kind social media platform. Then when I look at DAVE they are competing with lots of heavily funded VC backed platforms for the same customers. It’s always been kind of surprising to me that Buy Now Pay Later could get this type of margins or profit. I guess these newer AI models are able to determine better though who is actually going to pay back their small loan or not.
Interesting, I was also trying their different consumer products from the tea, the chewable, and the electrolyte mix. If I’m investing in a stock that has a fairly priced consumer product I will almost always try the product out.
There was a thread when I brought up BioHarvest initially about how scientific their claims are. I looked up one of their papers about the grape-based compound and found the scientific paper to look legitimate. I also thought it lined up with the mediterranean diet theory that either grapes or reasonable amounts of wine are providing some health benefit. I found the chewable to have a similar effect to a cup of black tea, but it could have just been a placebo effect; it was hard to say definitively.
These BioHarvest studies were also in contrast to when I looked up the scientific studies for Celsius when I was investing there. In that case, the studies Celsius produced seemed to be a pure marketing ploy. They compared their drink in the study with 3x caffeine to a can of Coke, and concluded the Celsius drink would make you lose more weight. Somehow it worked for them though to be able to gain a ton of marketshare in the energy drink market on this shaky foundation.
I was surprised to see the company growth hit a wall basically as they are now projecting flat revenue through the course of 2026. Just six months ago it sounded like the business was taking off dramatically. I guess their management team was just way overhyping the potential currently, or maybe their own marketing is not working for the consumer products.
I now see some of their statements as misleading. They had said they were the supply chain disruptor for a Nasdaq listed bio-tech but they couldn’t say the specific details just yet because of a NDA. I later got to thinking they never mentioned a market cap for the company they are talking about, and there are plenty of tiny market cap NASDAQ listed biotechs. Basically they never gave us any concrete numbers on their manufacturing business, and now say it’s 4-6M of CDMO specific manufacturing revenue for all of 2026. I also thought it was a huge screw up by their investor relations to pre-announce earnings as the very bottom of the press release of their deal with that Saffron Tech company. At a minimum this should have been two separate press releases, and my trust in the management team went way down after that.
I read through it a little bit. They mentioned Nerd Drone make $100M in 2024 so I’m wondering how they managed to acquire the company cheaper than what Nerd Drone can make a year earlier.
Also, the company is growing through acquisitions rather than organic growth. What’s your thoughts on this aspect? I’d like to here your opinion on this. Thank you!
On FIGR, I’m quite surprised that YLDS price fluctuates, I thought it supposed to be like a stable coin, tied to USD 1:1 ?
I was also wondering on that point of XTIA acquiring Drone Nerds for 40M when they are doing 100M of revenue and growing. From what I have been able to gather there are two main reasons,
Drone Nerds is a distributor and service provider of Drones. Typically these types of businesses carry lower margins. However, the recent filing showed gross margins of 23% which is quite strong for this type of business, along strong net income margin for this type of business.
The regulatory environment looked to be shifting against Drone Nerds so they may have been looking for an exit. It turned out the recent regulations actually benefit them though and accelerate demand, as the government prioritized off the shelf drones rather than R&D funded projects.
Overall, this is by far the most speculative stock in my portfolio. The acquisition is fully closed now so I don’t believe there is any realistic way the deal could go sour from seller’s remorse. With any acquisition, it needs to be weighed against the price paid, and the synergies of the resulting business. I believe this combination of businesses makes sense where they have a distributor in Drone Nerds for off the shelf drones, and a more R&D based business for future electric aircraft.
This townhall presentation the company posted did a good job explaining the deal and the two businesses,
The price of YLDS is not fluctuating as it stays 1:1 with USD and paying a ~4% interest rate. It is the number of YLDS in circulation which is changing though and can potentially go down. This is because the YLDS token is used as a payment rail in the system to fund loans, and when loans get funded the tokens may then be drained from the pool. Basically lenders are depositing YLDS to fund loan originations, but once the loans are funded the exit the pool. To be fair, I don’t understand how every aspect of these mechanisms work.
Their is a recent press release from Figure with their latest operating data,
The YLDS in circulation going from February to March went from 588M to 598M, not a very big increase at all. However, on YLDS.com it shows the current balance up to 620M already meaning the pool is filling up again. The quarterly numbers look a bit stronger as well with Q4 2025 ending having YLDS in circulation as 328M, going to the Q1 2026 ending circulation number of 598M.
I have been on the verge of a speculative entry based on recent metrics bur remain on the sidelines considering.”XTI Aerospace (XTIA) has experienced extreme shareholder dilution, with shares outstanding increasing by over 13,900% in the past year. The company has heavily diluted shares by 669% in the past year to raise capital, alongside executing major reverse splits—1-for-100 in March 2024 and 1-for-250 in January 2025—to maintain Nasdaq compliance.” Another post suggested the total dilution of shares has totaled 800,000 to 1.
WPR, I became interested in XTIA from your very informative you tube video. Then started researching it, looking up its financial reports. They said earnings would be out 4/14 and the call would be tomorrow but I cannot find the report anywhere. Then I looked further and saw that a year ago they had a delayed filing and then (apparently) they were suspended from the exchange. This info raises yellow flags for me so I wonder what you think about these delays. Any thoughts?
I was also concerned about this yesterday evening and did a small amount of research and concluded it wasn’t a red flag yet. They had valid reasons for their prior delays with one happening right around their IPO and the other happened after two acquisitions. Understandably these could stretch a likely small accounting team and be a one time occurrence. They still haven’t released their numbers that were supposed to be out yesterday and it will be interesting if they get any questions on this on the call today. I’ll revisit my position after listening to the call.
Wow, the company really made me sweat there towards that earnings release they just posted. I saw their April 10 press release said they were supposed to announce results after market close on April 14, and nothing came out.
I noticed around April 7th or so, they had applied for a filing extension with an April 15 deadline. This made me nervous they were planning to file on the last day possible. Although the explanation made sense that they are integrating Drone Nerds. It will be interesting to see what they say on the call today.
The headline numbers for Q4 look good with 22.5M of revenue in Q4 when analysts had projected 14.5M of revenue. They reiterated their full year guidance range of 160M of revenue, confirming the acquisition and business is on track.
The prior history of the company with dilution, capital raises, and delisting is likely why many investors are skeptical and the market cap is so low. It’s my opinion the business has turned a corner with the acquisition. It is also worth noting the CEO has been at the business over 4 years with his pay package mostly in equity. The CFO has been at the business for over 2 years and since they went public, also paid mostly in equity.
I don’t really see XTIA as a Saul style stock currently, but I believe it has an extremely attractive risk/reward profile with the Drone Nerds occupying a growing niche in drones, along with strong profitability on the Drone Nerds side for this type of business.
They have filed four late filining notifications (NT forms) in roughly two years, each time blaming a transaction:
Q1 2024: Blamed the March 2024 XTI/Inpixon merger
Q1 2025: Blamed the same March 2024 XTI/Inpixon merger — a transaction that had closed over a year prior
Q3 2025: Blamed the Drone Nerds and Anzu Robotics acquisitions — notably transactions that closed after Q3 ended, meaning post-quarter events were used to justify inability to report on the prior quarter
FY2025 10-K: Blamed the same November 2025 acquisitions again, plus the February 2026 Inpixon divestiture
On the forms management invokes the the legal boilerplate from Rule 12b-25: that the filing could not be completed “without unreasonable effort or expense.” This language exists to protect companies facing geuniely unexpected compleixity. It is XTIA fall back excuse on every transaction.
Every deal produces the same result: a late filing, the same boilerplate language, the same promises to file within the extension period. It is how this management team operates. They fund acquisitions but won’t invest in the back-office infrastructure to account for them properly.
A management team that treats SEC reporting as a low priority is telling you something important about how they run the entire business. They barely got this newest report out after exhausting the full 90-day filing window plus their 15-day NT extension. This could be a high risk reward company but the management is not giving me confidence in their ability to do the basics right.
@drew1618t Great callout here on the very checkered past that XTIA has regarding filing deadlines. The merger to effectively IPO back in March 2024, and the acquisition of Drone Nerds delay explanations make sense to me. However, the Q1 2025 delay seems unusual why they would have needed extra time.
I realize there may be some board members wondering what I am doing in this company that has lots of previous filing delays and two reverse splits in recent years. One aspect of my strategy that I believe sometimes gets misunderstood is that I am looking to evaluate a company in its unique entirety.
This is essentially a concept I borrowed from Mark Douglas who created modern trading psychology in the 1990s. Through coaching thousands of traders, one of the most common issues he saw was traders who wanted to immediately classify an opportunity as a scenario they’ve seen before. He was constantly working with traders to help them redefine their mindset to look at the unique opportunity. I believe this mindset of looking at the entire whole of the company and the unique opportunity is helpful in investing. While many investors want to jump the gun to immediately classify a stock as something they’ve seen before like “the Amazon of”, or “the Chipotle of”.
Another aspect of my strategy is to fully evaluate both the upside and the downside of a company. There’s many growth investors who primarily focus on the risk/downside and want a sure bet. I think this board understands this concept well, but sometimes you’ll see growth investors who do not want a single blemish on a company. Many times these sure bet stocks may have their upside capped because nearly every other investor recognizes it as a sure bet as well. In essence there’s no new investors who can re-evaluate the company because everyone has a good opinion of it. In many cases I’m finding some of the most compelling opportunities to be in names nobody recognizes as a good name. In this case, there is the potential for nearly every investor to re-evaluate the company, or the market as whole to re-rate them.
When I look back at some of my biggest winners over the past couple years, many of these names had issues that made them far from a sure bet. Some examples,
SuperMicro - had previous export control and accounting issues prior to 2023, I thought these had been resolved but it later came up again - 12x’d in 9 months (before crashing)
Sezzle - the 5th biggest Buy Now Pay Later solution in a crowded field, they had changed how they track user growth, a red flag typically for myself - 4x’d in 6 months
Hims & Hers Health - created a generic GLP from their FDA approved pharmacy, general perception they might be in a gray area, many skeptical of tele-health in general - 4x’d in one year
Iren - 95% of revenue coming from Bitcoin with plans to switch data centers to High Performance Compute, many skeptical of investing in a crypto company - 3x’d in 3 months
Currently I have a couple companies which I believe fall into this similar type of sentiment where the general market is highly skeptical,
Pattern Group - viewed as a reseller of Amazon goods, classified as “Broad Line Retail” in data providers - potential to be re-rated as a technology platform for brands as their SaaS services catch on
Ethos Technologies - classified as insurance in the most capitally intensive sub segment of life insurance, doesn’t sound like an exciting field at all - also has potential to be re-rated as a technology platform or more as a software provider
Getting back to XTI Aerospace, their market cap is 85M currently and they are guiding for 160M of revenue for 2026. Assuming similar margins to the Drone Nerds business before the acquisition, they may get about 20M of GAAP net income over that period. The management detailed on this last call they are putting the legacy business on complete hold now, and re-orienting roles to expanding the reach of Drone Nerds.
It is a business that I see in the right place at the right time. Drones were already a somewhat hot field prior to the recent conflict. However, the further tailwind is the US government’s shift to looking to buy off the shelf COTS drones, rather than expensive R&D funded projects. Currently Drone Nerds is selling more heavily in the commercial space with a impressive set of customers like John Deere, Target, Sam’s Club, Booz Allen, and General Dynamics. A lot of the government or military side of sales present additional upside.
On the risk side, there is a hugely elevated risk they have some filing issue again. I also thought it was a screw up to say results will be posted on April 14 after market close and then only post them the next morning. If they are going to delay another filing after this point in time, I will be taking that into account that their risk profile went up even further.
However, on the upside I can easily imagine this company having a 500M or a 1B market cap a year from now, if they are able to deliver on their 2026 guidance. If they do get 160M of revenue and a market cap of 1B the company would have a price/sales of 6, which wouldn’t be crazy for a drone business that is growing both the top and bottom line of the business.
Thx WPR for your thoughts. IMO and as you say, XTIA is definitely high risk, and yet hopefully will bring a high return for investors.
I probably err on the side of too much intuition in my decision making. I watched a little of the XTIAerospace earnings call this morning and determined that I didn’t like the CEO, so I did not invest in XTIA. I did however invest in another drone maker, Kracken Robotics, after listening to the KR call today. I really place a lot of importance on excellent leadership and sound management, and Kracken Robotics’ CEO seemed to meet those expectations, and the company appears to have a long runway and a history of innovation. It is Canadian, a micro cap, and an OTC here in the US, but expects to be listed here before too long. (KRKNF). I haven’t done much study on the company, but just the comparison of the two CEO’s imo was telling. It will be interesting to watch.
Have you looked at Red Cat? I got lucky and saw a small position 10x when I sold. It has since come down, but I check it occasionally. I’m on their mailing list. I’m tempted to get back in. But drones, especaiily small FPV drones don’t do much on their own. The war in Ukraine has demonstrated that training and strategy are vitally important as well.
Interesting, I would be curious to know what you heard on the call that you didn’t like. One part that bothered me was the comment about not doing the prepared remarks on the call because he didn’t want to waste people’s time. However he did mention multiple times they put the prepared remarks as a separate 8-K filing which was over 10 pages. I found the 8-K be a pretty good explanation of where the business is headed. I was also impressed the CEO was willing to put the TriFan 600 system on hold completely. It is a bit of an unusual arrangement where the entire business is Drone Nerds now.
I intentionally tend not place a lot of weight on CEO personality. There is quite a wide range for the role which is much wider than that of the other C-suite roles. Sometimes the CEO role ranges from a pure salesman or other times a heads down implementer. I’ve been fooled tons of times by a charismatic CEO with a stock. Another reason I look to avoid focusing on CEO personality is the main stream financial media tends to glamorize the more outspoken CEOs. This has the effect that the heads down implementer type who may be getting strong results doesn’t get media praise, while the CEO talking a big game gets a lot of attention.
In many ways, I view the earnings results of a company as a good way to determine if the CEO is successful in the role with the particular company. I guess this is similar to a “Moneyball approach” or determining if the CEO is getting results as opposed to trying to rate the individual on how they sound. The main personality warning sign I look out for is a CEO who is a one-man show, or wants to run the whole business themselves. This usually shows up by the CFO not being part of the prepared remarks and the CEO being the only one to answer questions on the Q&A.
Nice, it looks like they got a really good deal on this acquisition Covelya which has roughly 3x the revenue and profitability of the Kraken business. It’s another curious case similar to XTI/Drone Nerds, where you’d expect Covelya to be the one acquiring Kraken Robotics.
I’d looked at Kraken back in January but the market cap of 1.5B didn’t really make sense to me. Looking at their numbers for 2025 vs 2024, they had negative organic growth and lower profitability going one year to the next. The acquisition they made in April of 2025 was the primary way they got 102M in revenue vs 91M on the prior year. However, they are guiding now for about +70% organic revenue growth over the next year. Combined with this new acquisition it looks interesting, but I’d personally probably wait till the acquisition closes and see what they post next time around.
Usually companies that trade on the Canadian Venture TSXV exchange trade at discount to the main Toronto exchange, and a much bigger discount to Nasdaq/NYSE stocks. For example both HIVE and ELVA trade at maybe 1/5th the value of American counterparts with similar numbers, which is why I’m surprised Kraken is trading more like a Nasdaq priced stock.
Nice work catching that run up in the stock! Red Cat is a name where the drones they are making seem really interesting to me. However, I’m not sure the financials have caught up to stock price to have enough confidence from my perspective.
I saw this most recent quarter had 26.2M of revenue which is a big step up, but the quarter had gross margin of 4% and net income of -19.7M. Seems like they have a pretty decent balance sheet but based off the history of the cash balance it looks like it comes from a capital raise. I’m certainly open to re-evaluating on them as they scale up and hopefully the profitability and margins start to ramp up in turn.
Agreed about RCAT. I’ve not jumped back in because I don’t see the stock price taking off. They seem to be doing a lot of the right things, but it seems the market has caught up with this name. No really a strong buy at present.
A recent IPO AVEX just launched last week. It’s profitable and has a large contract with the EU/US for 4800 drones. Their “disrupter” drone is similar to those being used by both sides in the Ukraine War. 8B in the pipeline. The IPO will be used to pay down manageable debt, which is less than the cash they have on hand. Was valued about 3B as of Friday’s close. Faster growth than AVAV and a much better price point product wise. Cramer highlighted the stock on last Friday’s Mad Money.
