Wpr101's year end December 2025 portfolio review

Investment Analysis Clubs Saul’s Investing Discussions
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Hey all, it was another solid year for growth investing and I am pleased with the results. I had started this year beginning work on my book about growth investing. In February I started posting some of the content on my Youtube channel Growth Investing Mastery. I’ve discovered the main audience is essentially Saul’s board. There has been great feedback on the channel and this board, which has helped make the content even better. I’m also a big believer that Saul style investing is a positive sum game, meaning everyone can benefit by contributing.

This month we had a record number of names under the “Promising New Ideas” segment. The past two earnings cycles I have been looking to research more names after they report earnings to see what companies are doing well. This process includes checking the screeners I use to see if any new names come up, before examining their finances to see if I want to investigate more.

Results at year end are,

  • 2024: +146%
  • 2025: +112%
  • Cumulative return: +422%

Allocations at the end of the year were,

  • Astera Labs ALAB - 19.1%
  • AppLovin APP - 18.4%
  • Iren IREN - 13.9%
  • Electrovaya ELVA - 12.8%
  • Hive Digital Technologies HIVE - 7.1%
  • Figure Technology FIGR - 6.7%
  • Reddit RDDT - 4.4%
  • Dave Inc DAVE - 4.1%
  • Paymentus PAY - 3.1%
  • Duos Technologies DUOT - 2.9%
  • Credo CRDO - 1.6%
  • SkyWater Technologies SKYT - 1.5%
  • BioHarvest Sciences BHST - 1.3%
  • Pattern Group PTRN - 1.1%
  • Shoals Technologies SHLS - 0.9%
  • Organigram OGI - 0.9%

Promising new ideas on the month include,

  • Intellicheck IDN - SaaS based identity verification platform
  • Flywire Corporation FLYW - SaaS payment solution that started in education
  • Etoro Group ETOR - Multi-asset social brokerage platform
  • Turning Point Brands TPB - Growing brand for rolling papers and chewing tobacco
  • Life360 LIF - Subscription platform for location sharing
  • Klaviyo KVYO - Customer engagement platform using email and SMS
  • Via Transportation VIA - Transit operating platform for schools + government
  • Shift4 Payments FOUR - Payments platform with attractive valuation
  • Prenetics Global PRE - Fast growing supplements company
  • Genasys GNSS - Emergency communication platform with SaaS offering
  • Rekor Systems REKR - AI powered roadway intelligence platform
  • The Oncology Institute OGI - Oncology care platform
  • Talkspace TALK - B2B platform for finding mental health resources
  • Caris Life Sciences CAI - Recent IPO for molecular testing of cancer patients
  • Hinge Health HNGE - Healthcare platform for treating shoulder and knee issues
  • BitFuFu FUFU - Singapore based Bitcoin miner that looks undervalued
  • BrainsWay BWAY - Israeli based neuro-stimulation treatment
  • Waterdrop WDH - Chinese insurance and healthcare platform
  • Xunlei Limited XNET - Chinese subscription service for shared cloud and streaming

As always any feedback on the stock names mentioned here are welcome. Thanks again to the board for all the support given to the Growth Investing Mastery Youtube channel!

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And many thanks for sharing these videos. I always really enjoy watching them and I always learn something new.

Congrats on your 2025 results too.

Jonathan

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OMG! IDN! -

I owned stock in a tiny company in the late 1990s (the name of which I have forgotten) headquartered in Port Townsand, not too far from where I live. The company had some interesting and unique technology which involved wireless communication over water. At the time they were without competition. The CEO of the company was a retired Air Force officer (I think) with a bunch of technology credentials.

The service they provided was employed by the Washington State and British Columbia ferry systems, and as I recall, they also installed sensors and transmitters on many Puget Sound buoys that provided real time status of the conditions in the waterways for the benefit of shipping and the the submarine base at Bangor on the Kitsap peninsula. The company also had mobile phone licenses in various locals in a few Western states. Eventually, the company renamed itself as Mobilisa. They were taken private, but current shareholders were given the option of retaining their stock (with some limitation on quantity - my holdings were far below the limit). In that the cash I might have received was nominal, I decided to hold my illiquid position.

This was quite a while ago, so I may have made some mistakes about the evolution of this company, but the reason I bring it up is due to that fact the struggling Intellicheck company merged with flush Mobilisa company which provided the necessary financial footing to go public. Shortly after the merger, they sold off their communications technology in order to focus their resources on the identification technology.

They had negotiated with some NGO agency that held license information of every DMV in the country. They also negotiated a similar contractual relationship which provided access to DoD personnel ID records. The nature of their contract provided that Intellichek could gain exclusive, real time access to these identification information databases. These data provided Intellichek the ability to create an ID verification system which was virtually impossible to defeat with a fake ID.

The benefit of merging with Mobilisa not only enbled the company to go public. It also brought the Mobilisa CEO into the Intellichek C-suite. He had deep connections within folks at the Pentagon which greatly helped Intellichek secure the ID check for military folks entering US bases. Gaining this contract with the DoD enabled Intellichek to market their ID verification system across the country to businesses that required age thresholds to be met when selling alcohol and tobacco products or allowing access to the premises such as casinos and other businesses that were required to comply with age related regulations.

As I remember it, they also tried to find a market for businesses such as banks and insurance companies that required customers to fill out forms requiring address, phone number and so forth on forms such as credit card and other applications. Intellichek could automate that process to a large extent which saved time and eliminated common data entry errors.

Despite the promise of their technology, the stock went no where. I finally sold my position (at a loss) several many years ago. It’s quite a surprise to see this company suggested as a potential high growth investment opportunity, which was my motivation for buying stock in the company in the 1990s.

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I love these reviews, Wpr. Thank you for providing them.

I wonder why you prefer ALAB so much more than CRDO. I’ve evened up my positions given the recent price divergence between the two. CRDO growing 273% to ALAB 104% YOY and CRDO’s guidance is much stronger. CRDO operating margin improving faster, too. It’s almost equal to ALAB’s. I love both companies and think they are both attractive investments, but CRDO seems to have the most upside right now.

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Wpr101,

Thank you for the consistant look into your investing process and portfolio. I reference your video’s frequently.

One request: Would you feel comfortable sharing your monthly buys and sells as well? For example, you highlight when you added a new stock to your portfolio, as well as when you drop a stock altoghether. Saul shared his buys/sells each month and I found it a critical piece of his thinking, I was continuously learning from him how he analyzes companies and situations. Of course, many people will just follow you and your moves if you were to share your monthly trasactions, but that is not the reason for my request.

Thanks,

Buffjan2

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@wpr101 I’m curious how you achieved a 112% return when most of your major holdings didn’t even achieve that ytd? Are you day trading or using leverage?

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@brittlerock Wow, thank you for that detailed background on Intellicheck! My data provider only gives financial data back to 2006 when they had less than 1M of revenue. I did see their peak price in the early 2000s was over $100 per share, so there must have been some prior enthusiasm for the company from the market.

I mentioned in my video that 6M was a record revenue but that only included data going back to 2006. I’m guessing it was much higher back in early 2000s. My other take away from management was they sounded very optimistic, but it did just not line up with only getting 6M of revenue.

This discussion also makes me think about how rare it is for a company to be growing over 40% yoy in revenue. It seems like IDN is a company that has struggled to find the right product for the market, or that their solution is not landing for some reason. Maybe the time is finally right for them, but I’ll want to see more growth in revenue before re-evaluating again.

@FallingWallenda Not sure if you caught that podcast that Bear shared in a thread a week ago, but I talked about Credo being the company that most surprised me in 2025. The specific part in the podcast discussing CRDO and ALAB starts at 15:40,

The main reasons for preferring Astera, come down to Astera having a bigger vision and they have a management team I trust much more. Credo still has a bunch of yellow flags for me including the HQ in the Cayman Islands, and the incredible number of missteps from Credo’s management. These include not warning about customer concentration and analyst’s having to pull the information out of them all the time. Also the CEO has not done a great job explaining their software platform or vision. In this latest call they then mentioned growth heading towards single digits, and there seems to be no reason they should have mentioned this, at least not yet.

Astera on the other hand has never missed a step in earnings or communication from management. They are more AI native than Credo as Credo did a bigger pivot. Astera has a more software defined architecture and a bigger vision they can explain clearly. Astera is also higher margin by being more software based. It’s definitely a fair point though that Credo is guiding to higher revenue than Astera next quarter.

I do want to own both companies right now though. Something I was thinking about since the video was posted was that both of these companies have a new product that is supposed to take over in percentage of revenue from their original product lines which are still selling well. For example, Astera’s Scorpio is projected to surpass Aries revenue in 2026. Credo on their last call said the TAM for their new ALC cables is twice that of their main revenue stream right now with AEC cables.

@Buffjan2 Thanks for that feedback and support of the videos! It is easy enough to add back in the buys and sells to the Allocation details. I used to include it there but then thought it made more sense to detail that in the discussion of individual names. I’ll mention more next time what the changes on the month are, rather than just purely the allocations.

@FoolishJeff I’m doing 100% long only investing and there is no leverage in my strategy. I also only do Saul style investing and there is no day trading.

What is missing from that table is that it does not include my two biggest winners on the year which were Sezzle and Iren. A couple purchases with Sezzle were over a 400% gain in ~6 months, that’s a 2400% CAGR return. Granted a huge bulk of shares also got sold around $100 when they had a bad quarter and those were closer to 100-150% gains.

IREN going from $20 to $70 in 3 months also played a big role in the overall results. The CAGR return for that is 40,800% just to demonstrate the point. Again not all purchases and sales were timed well though, and the stock price going down recently brought my overall results way down as well.

HIMS starting the year at $25 and ending at $32 does not accurately reflect what happened in my portfolio. I sold my shares of HIMS around $50 and $60 back in August after a bad report. The majority of my shares were purchases below $20, helping to drive results for both 2024 and 2025.

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@wpr101 Thanks for the feedback. Yes, I noticed you were early to IREN and Sezzle had a monster run there. I enjoyed the Podcast with Drowsy and Bear - good points about “whiplash” from the pace of AI infrastructure innovation. Do you subscribe to Foliotrail? It’s become my Jonah Lupton replacement, and I’m impressed so far and solid discussion in the chats, etc. We have a mutual friend, Markus, who is part of that community as well.

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I’m glad you found the background I provided on IDN informative. I was hesitant about posting it as it was pretty much OT, nevertheless, I thought some people might find it interesting. I have no recollection as to how I became aware of the company. Maybe I heard an interview with the CEO on one of the local PBS stations. I think they had all of 35 employees at the time I bought the stock. My broker at the time was probably Scott Trade (no longer in business), one of the early low cost traiding platforms. I don’t recollect if they traded on the pink sheets or the Nasdaq.

At the time I had no real investment strategy. I was (and to some extent, still am) a technology junky. They had a monopoly on a niche technology which was sufficient to convince me that their TAM was enormous and it was only a matter of time for IDN to rule the world (or at least their corner of it). I would be rich beyond my wildest dreams and retire at an early age - it didn’t quite work out that way.

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WPR,

Great year and congratulations. I have a few question about FIGR.

Did you compare FIGR to UPST? They are both in the loan origination business. UPST is growing at 65% YoY and FIGR is growing at 55% YoY. Most recent quarter of revenue is 285.9M to 156.4M UPST to FIGR. Now market CAP is 4.83B to 10.63B UPST to FIGR. FIGR trades at 17x sales vs UPST 4.2x sales despite growing slower. So I dove in why it was trading at such a high premium.

They are solving different problems in the same market place. FIGR is focused on making selling the loans easier via securitizing it (Bonds). UPST is focused on generating higher quality of loans via lower defaults. But they are still competing for the same credit and customers seeking loans. I know I’m simplifying FIGR approach but they are basically taking loans and batching them together and generating bonds and then sell the bonds via a token representing it on their own private ledger that they built.

FIGR claims they have a sub 1% default rate on prime HELOCs. Which is same as the industry average of .5% default on prime HELOCs, because its tied to the house of people with good credit. Its main selling point is in its efficiency at distribution/securitization.

FIGR has a take rate lower than UPST. FIGR had 2.47 B loans vs UPST 2.85B. UPST grew its originations by 80% YoY vs FIGR at 70%. FIGR has a higher Adjusted EBITDA at 86M to UPST 71M.

Beyond the blockchain narrative, what fundamental business advantages does FIGR have that justify 4x the revenue multiple? Is this a case where the market is pricing in a paradigm shift that hasn’t materialized yet, or am I missing key strategic value?

Drew

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Love the podcast and hearing the voices of other notables on the board.

In case anyone is wondering why CRDO has been so weak lately:

Based on today’s news, Mizuho analyst Vijay Rakesh issued a report defending Credo and recommending investors “buy the weakness” following the stock’s significant recent decline. The selloff was primarily driven by fears of share loss at Amazon to Marvell Technology and concerns about faster-than-expected transitions away from copper-based interconnect technology. Investing.com

The key points from Mizuho’s defense:

A major catalyst for the selloff was investors spotting orange and blue cables replacing Credo’s purple Active Electrical Cables (AEC) in Amazon data centers, creating panic about potential market share loss. However, Mizuho clarified that Amazon had simply requested Credo change its cable colors from purple to orange and blue for internal logistics purposes, resulting in “zero share loss.” Investing.com

Additionally, Mizuho maintains that copper-based interconnect will remain the primary technology in data centers for over three years as speeds increase from current 1.6T per second data rates to faster 3.2T per second. The firm estimates Credo’s long-term total addressable market at $10 billion, three times larger than 18 months ago. Investing.com

Mizuho expects Credo’s AEC product ramp to remain intact at key customers including Amazon, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Meta, and Microsoft, driving over 60% revenue growth for Credo in fiscal year 2027 (ending April 2027), significantly above consensus estimates of 44% growth. The firm maintains a $225 price target on Credo stock. Investing.com

So essentially, Mizuho’s defense was debunking the cable-color scare as a non-issue and reaffirming their confidence in Credo’s market position and growth prospects.

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Any Credo holders have a view on what the soaring price of copper is likely to do by way of impact on pricing, margin and demand for Credo’s products?

Whilst NAND and DRAM pricing doesn’t leave data storage customers with much by way of alternatives now we are through with the spinning disk era, Credo does have non-copper solution competition. It can pass this price pressure all on and maintain margin, it could eat the cost inflation and see margin compress as a result or it could result in non-copper alternatives as/where they exist.

Usually the price of copper is a very strong indicator of GDP growth but from what I can tell, the price action seems to be more driven by supply side factors rather than demand.

Cheers
Ant

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Ant,

I thought copper price is negligible on their products. From my research their cables are mostly 7m or shorter. 200g 8 lane 7m cable with heavy shielding can get up to 1/3 of a pound of copper. 1lb of copper is 6 dollars, so we are looking at 2 dollars of copper per cable that they sell for hundreds. Copper is up 50% in the last year so they have to pay 2 dollars now instead of 1.33 a year ago.

Or was it a different component that your looking at?

Drew

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@drew1618t I view Upstart and Figure as fundamentally different businesses and I’m actually quite bearish on Upstart. I see Upstart more as a financial company that is technology enabled, whereas Figure is more of a technology company whose field is finance. I also think Figure has the potential to completely disrupt Upstart but not visa-versa.

Figure is able to automate a number of different parts of the loan process which are expensive with intermediaries and middlemen taking a cut. Whereas I see Upstart as a traditional loan company. My concerns with Upstart fall into two main categories: financials that they posted with their guidance, and their management team does not understand why their model underperformed versus competitors.

Concerns for Upstart on financials,

  • Guided Q3 revenue for 280M, landed at 277M
  • Q4 guide is for 288M (not up much sequentially)
  • Adj EBITDA for Q4 is guided for 63M (down from the current quarter)
  • “Transaction volume on our platform was less than we anticipated”
  • They raised 600M in capital in August 2025 for convertible notes to “Pay the cost of capped call transactions” on their previous convertible notes
  • They still need to raise more capital though, “Continued to make progress securing 3rd party funding to support newer products”
  • “In fact Q3 GAAP net income grew by a factor of 6 over the prior quarter” (Q3 net income was 32M, but they guided to 17M next quarter. The same statement next quarter would be “GAAP net income halved versus the prior quarter”)

Management on their model,

  • Proprietary techniques that respond to macro conditions
  • “That model behavior partially reflects irreducible volatility in the outside world, but is also a function of our model design and sampling variance, both of which continue to improve” (This sounds like gibberish to me)
  • “We continue to innovate on our model calibration techniques” (Why do they need to calibrate if the model is working? This leads me to believe this is not real AI but more tweaking and tuning a traditional algorithm)
  • “Delivering on target credit performance”
  • “We reduced end-to-end latency by as much as 30% and we are now rolling it out platform wide” (Why do they have “latency” in the first place?)
  • “Next, we launched a true machine learning model to optimize take rates”
  • “We’ve made rapid progress automating the process of getting a HELOC”, “We’re on a path to an industry-leading home equity product” (I don’t see any way this could be more efficient than what Figure has especially playing catch up)
  • “Our model took a step towards conservatism during the third quarter, just based on seeing macro factors”, “It’s since reverted”, “I think maybe overreacting” (Seems management has no idea what their model is doing, not reassuring at all for them to say they think it maybe over-reacted)
  • “I think that’s a very healthy statement for the business, even if it didn’t in Q3 transfer as much volume as we expected” (Again the model did not get the volume they want, but somehow they think this is good because it reacted to macro)
  • “We’re very proud of the sort of system we’ve designed and built. But one of the side effects of that system is that it can be a little overly responsive to the latest changes” (The model isn’t working the way they want but still saying how great it is)
  • “There’s always some kind of sampling and measurement error” (Openly admitted the model is sampling incorrectly and making errors)
  • “We are still doing a lot of work this quarter on understanding how much natural error there is in the match between the sample and the actual levels of calibration” (Again why are they calibrating the model themselves if it’s supposed to work on its own?)
  • Analyst asking about LendingClub and SoFi which has strong origination numbers, “Those 2 companies had very strong origination trends this last quarter. And I’m trying to understand if there was a share shift, if you guys were fighting with one hand, tied behind your back because of your model” (Analyst observes Upstart is losing market share because their model is not working)
  • “In our view, the model is always right. The model is going to tell us what’s proven at what price, and we don’t overrule the model” (The model is underperforming yet they say they model is “always right”. This also contradicts early statements of calibrating the model)
  • “Macro change that the model was responding to. I think with the benefit of hindsight, you could call that a bit of a false negative, I suppose. But of course, I think in the moment, there is a correctness to reacting to the signals you’re seeing”
  • “I did say that some of that reaction, we think, was due to certain natural noise in what I call sampling or measurement error” (The model made the wrong reaction, yet earlier they said the model is “always right”)
  • “And it’s really important from our perspective to say that the model taking a bit of a conservative breather is a feature, not a bug” (This does sound like a fault of the model to take a “breather”)
  • “We think our models are getting better” (What confidence do they have to say this?)
  • Analyst, “Does your engine not disclose to you what it’s seeing that’s causing the difference between it and the market”, “I mean, is there something you can point to so we get an understanding of what this black box is doing to some degree” (The analysts all seem to recognize the model is not working)
  • “We’ve intentionally built our system so that it can respond faster than traditional credit metrics would”

Overall there are way too many negative issues with their financials and their model for me to consider an investment in Upstart. I also think Upstart may gain some initial traction in HELOC just because they are still onboarding credit unions and adding customers. Longer term I do not think they have any chance to compete with Figure as it’s a traditional finance model going against a real innovation with Figure’s blockchain solution that dramatically lowers costs all around.

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@anthonyms Interesting question here. I’d also seen stories that there was concern of optical replacing copper in the near term. That whole story seems to have stemmed from a rumor that Amazon was replacing Credo’s cables. They apparently have a distinctive purple color which was replace by different colors. It’s hard to track down the origin of this story even but sounds like Amazon asked them to change the color.

On copper prices there seems to be an indirect effect to Credo’s business. Was pinging AI with some questions about this but it sounds like copper costs impact their suppliers a bit more and costs can generally be passed on, as the hyperscalers have to renegotiate contracts periodically. The AI was saying that “Credo’s cost of revenue is primarily semiconductor wafers, assembly, test, and outsourced manufacturing”.

The stories about optical being replaced in the near term seem like noise to me. Astera has indicated that is a long term case as systems get more complex and spread out, but the customers still demand copper over everything else at the current moment. From ALAB’s last earnings,

Various AI platform providers and hyperscalers have made is they prefer to stick with copper for as long as possible. And the reason for that is multifold. Clearly, copper is so far proven to be more reliable. It’s lower power. It offers better TCO.

Astera did acquire a small German optical company as they see that as an avenue down the road but probably not gaining much traction to 2028 and 2029.

Overall I tend to not focus too much on each headline for Credo and Astera as most of the doomsday predictions for these companies have been way off base. I’d rather wait until we see a slowdown show up in earning’s results. I also find this has the benefit of not getting stressed at headlines which can look scary when they imply a disruption to the AI networking space.

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