WillO2006 June Investing Decisions

These last two months had me searching for a way to communicate why I’d been trading in and out of the companies that make up my portfolio and why that’s not Day Trading or Momentum Investing. And I didn’t want to get into Portfolio Allocation- that’s not what we do here. Doing this has clarified my thinking and I hope it’s helpful for others.

Referencing my permanent files, I really appreciate the value of this board and the immense amount of work others have made over the years. I chose this one by Stocknovice in May 2019 to help me explain my reasoning. Stocknovice’s summary best describes my reasoning for all my purchase and sell decisions, not just the last couple months, and why it appears to be timing the market and what it actually is.

Stocknovice-
Denny’s hammered the S-curve untold times and rightfully so (his latest missive here: https://discussion.fool.com/denny-are-you-calculating-where-comp…). I have personally come to view the S-curve as the sweet spot of what I am trying to do. We might not always get it right, but I believe most growth investing is ideally trying to buy companies just as the curve starts upward and sell just before it flattens out. Every press release or earnings report is a chance to reassess where you believe a company resides on that curve and then buy, hold or sell accordingly. Call me crazy – don’t worry, I’ve been called worse – but I don’t view that as momentum investing at all. I view it as a very specific strategy for trying to own great businesses during their period of greatest growth (and hopefully by extension their greatest returns). That’s admittedly MUCH more difficult than buying an index fund and going to sleep.

Denny then wrapped up the entire conversation and put a pretty little bow on it by stating “… there is no reason to have a fixed five year outlook on a growth stock, just watch it develop and act accordingly.”

And…one more quote from another poster on this board. This one from 2018:

You do not beat the market by thinking you are “smarter” than the market. You beat it by understanding what the market never understands as it always either overreacts to FUD or underreacts to those few extreme world changing businesses.
-Tinker

Then I re-read the Gorilla Game, from which the concepts in these quotes originated to my understanding. I was struck by how well this book has held up over the years and also by how much more today’s companies are doing to reap the benefits from their servicing more and more of the value chain. I was amazed by how the companies we follow are accomplishing what they are, faster and faster (compression of the adoption curve).

My attempt to put these ideas together and why I’ve done what I did these last two months:
I’m trying to get my portfolio to reflect my understanding, of where these Cloud Category Crushing Companies are in their growth story. I’m judging/mis-judging (not mis-calculating for this is not just a numbers game) where they are in their adoption curve and giving those I have the most confidence, to those that are actually in the tornado of adoption, the highest allocation (tempered with my imperfect understanding of how to measure this).

If you haven’t read The Gorilla Game that may be clear as mud? There is a book summary by the authors that is 33 pages that I recommend. Any comments on why this doesn’t sound reasonable please send directly to my email, thanks.

When reading the following keep in mind that although this portfolio has now grown to be more than 95% of what we will live on in retirement, this portfolio is what is in our non-taxable Roth and Rollover IRAs only. We have not added any money to these accounts for many years. To buy something I’ve sold something else. I don’t trade options or use any leverage. I stay fully invested at all times and keep less than 1% in cash.

January Porfolio Summary here: https://discussion.fool.com/jason8217s-jan-port-summary-34738748…
February Portfolio Summary here: https://discussion.fool.com/jason8217s-feb-portfolio-summary-347…
March Portfolio Summary here: https://discussion.fool.com/jason8217s-march-portfolio-review-34…
April Portfolio Summary here: https://discussion.fool.com/jason8217s-april-portolio-review-348…
May Portfolio Summary here: https://discussion.fool.com/jason8217s-may-investing-decisions-3…

June 30, 2021 Total Portfolio +15.2%% Month of May; +23%Year to date

Current Portfolio
June 30,2021
Crowdstrike 22.36%
Cloudflare 16.48%
Datadog 16.21%
Upstart 13.85%
Snowflake 12.10%
Docusign 10.88%
ZoomInfo 8.12%

What I did in June to get here and Why:

May 31,2021
Crowdstrike 24.19%
Cloudflare 18.92%
Datadog 16.63%
Snowflake 12.20%
Upstart 11.39%
ZoomInfo 10.50%
Docusign 6.46%

===============================================

6/3/21
CRWD and Docusign reported after hours.
After hours Docusign rose 5%. I sold 17% more Upstart (at $187) and added the proceeds to Docusign. This took Upstart down to a 11% position and sold a tiny bit of ZoomInfo to bring Docusign from a 6.3% position to just about 10% (what amounted to 40% more Docusign shares from the gift that keeps on giving, Upstart. I based this decision on Docusign reporting further acceleration in top line and also leverage improvement, shown in bottomline numbers. Crowdstrike just stayed amazing.
6/16/21
Sold a little Cloudflare taking it down 2% to a 19.8% position to add to Upstart after listening to a CEO interview here https://www.buzzsprout.com/1697077/8693359-investing-in-ai-e… Upstart share price had dropped over the last 12 days (from$190 to $117) from about a 12% to 7% position for me. This was purely associated with lockup expiration, IMO.

After hours I sold some more Cloudflare@$97 tobringing it to an 18% position adding it to Upstart @$120. This raised Upstart to a now 10% position again. Per Bert’s timely write up…After an internal review by member CEOs, the National Association of Credit Unions has made Upstart a key partner in modernizing their lending practices. I’d likely have done this trade in the morning without this press release; but with it, I just had to add here, and looking to add more.

6/21/21
I sold 20% of my ZI @$51 to buy more Upstart @$120., this took upstart up to an 11.5% position. I did this due mostly to Upstarts greater revenue growth. The new information about expanding thier promotional partner base, having been added as a Partner to the National Association of Credit Unions, and after my further consideration of the benefits and costs of Upstart as being a purely Usage based offering compared to ZI.
6/22/21
Sold more NET to make Upstart a 13% position. Taking another day to think about my conviction level for Upstart vs Cloudflare. It’s not that I don’t have a ton a conviction for Cloudflare. It’s just that I do now see more clearly than ever how Upstart CEO will be keeping this company a Cloud Category Crusher nearly as sustainably as I see Cloudflare doing the same. If you’re thinking of investing in Upstart, I recommend watching this wecbcast Interview done on 6/9/21 at a Bank of America Investor Day https://ir.upstart.com/events/event-details/bank-america-glo…… . I believe it’s as good or better than the Podcast linked above

Crowdstrike 24.28%
Datadog 16.48%
Cloudflare 16%
Upstart 13.07%
Snowflake 11.16%
Docusign 10.83%
ZoomInfo 8.18%

6/25/21
I trimmed Crowdstrike and added to Snowflake. I did finally get around to watching Investor Day at Snowflake’s first annual Summit. I’ve followed the conference calls; but until now, I’ve been enjoying Muji explaining everything to me through his fantastic new Premium Service at HHHypergrowth.com. What I’ve gathered from all f this is that the Snowflake business is just beginning to scale. Does that mean acceleration in revenue growth? I believe Slootman and company have enough levers to make happen just about anything. I recommend both Muji’s HHHypergrowth.com Premium Service and watching at least Investor Day at Snowflakes Summit to anyone invested in or looking seriously at Snowflake. I agree with Muji, The CEO interview by the Head of IR, Jimmy Sexton, was my favorite part, and I highly recommend a watch (@ 58:42 mark). I’m going to start calling this one Snowball instead of Snowflake.

Overall I’m very happy owning shares in these amazing companies. Heartfelt thanks to every one on Saul’s Investing Discussions for following the rules of this great Board! I think it’s clear, when a group of individuals come together with a common goal success is inevitable!

Special thanks to Saul for insisting on these rules and his tireless efforts in making this, without a doubt, the Best place to discuss Hyper-growth Companies.

Best,

Jason

87 Likes

Jason, thanks for the shout outs to my “S” curve posts. Unfortunately the link you posted does not work because TMF truncates the URL in the post so copy-paste does not work. Here are links to two of the posts (see the dots at the end of the links? That’s where TMF truncated them):

https://discussion.fool.com/in-looking-at-my-calculations-do-you…
https://discussion.fool.com/denny-are-you-calculating-where-comp…

Trading is not investing but one cannot invest without trading. For a long time I tried to understand what “long term buy and hold” really means. It’s a strategy that aims to find good companies that one can hold for a long time but the execution of that strategy is not just buying and forgetting. It’s John Boyd’s OODA Loop, it’s what Saul continuously does with his portfolio:

Observe–Orient–Decide–Act (rinse repeat)

https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q…

Happy Investing!

Denny Schlesinger

47 Likes

Denny

I remembered the posts and the thread that appeared in 2019 and at that time it all made sense. These recent posts motivated me to go back to 2019 and reread the posts.
It dawned on me that I had missed a very important detail encapsulated in the quote referenced below.

The "S curve applies to the growth of technologies, not to individual companies selling them. But because they are selling them they go along for the ride if they don’t otherwise mess up. If you look at Apple’s chart you are likely to detect several “S” formations that correspond to the various iProducts. The same applied to the several generations of disk drives.

I see now how easy it is to attempt to track whether a company is (or isn’t ) in its growth phase thereby losing perspective on the essential issue. What is the technology and how is it developing? Are there new products etc which alter the TAM and or immediate or future growth prospects,? And so on…

From my viewpoint it explains alot about decision making and helps to better understand decisions made by others…

Thank you for the refresher.

cheers

draj

10 Likes

Hi draj,

I know you were replying to Denny; but, I do want to add emphasis to your point when you said I see now how easy it is to attempt to track whether a company is (or isn’t ) in its growth phase thereby losing perspective on the essential issue. What is the technology and how is it developing?

This is what I’m struggling with when I’m evaluating the companies in my portfolio. Yes, the Cloud in general is a technology with its own adoption curve. I believe each of the companies I’m investing into are Cloud CategoryLeaders. What I’m hoping, my standard I’m trying to attain, is to choose the Cloud Category Crushers.

There may not be Cloud Category Crushers in the categories my investments are working to dominate. Few develop any kind of moat where, in the categories in which they operate, a winner can take all. However, every earnings report, conference, new piece of information I get that’s what I’m attempting to get a better measure of.

I’ve been excited about how AI inherently sets up a virtuous cycle of dominance within a market. First mover here is a really big deal, IMO.

Best,

Jason

4 Likes