Jensen Huang, NVIDIA CEO
Hello to everyone who's been a part of this journey!
It's hard to believe how time flies when you're having fun. I planned to regularly write about my investing strategies but soon joined an amazing rocketship start-up called Deel as their Head of Partnerships which was all consuming in a good way. At the same time I also saw my own startup, Partnership Leaders takeoff - which I am now joining full time as Co-Founder and COO.
Needless to say, I haven’t had much time for blogging! But I didn’t want to have these things pulling me away forever from sharing something many of you have shown interest in – my stock portfolio.
So, let's dive in!
Portfolio overall in the last 12 months = +26.75%
(S&P 500 = 18.51%)
Top Performers in the last 12 months:
NVIDIA: +227.84%. I started buying NVIDIA when ChatGPT launched as an overnight success, until that moment I could be considered dismissive of the progress being made in AI but seeing the massive user adoption of ChatGPT demonstrated the appetite everyday consumers have for these tools. AI requires a bunch of GPUs and NVIDIA builds them, this was a picks and shovels in the gold rush decision.
Microsoft: +37.31%. Not much to say here except they slowly chipping away at AWS’ lead in cloud computing, are partner first (which I love), and have the best B2B distribution on the planet.
Google: +36.63%. Printing money in ads, still a value play. I think Google has a lot of catch up to do on AI etc. but the ads business with search and Youtube is a money machine.
Amazon: +24.46%. I use Amazon several times a day - groceries, products, TV. I can’t live without it. The Cloud business is amazing and the ads business is growing.
Apple: +21.84%. The new M1 chip macbooks are amazing, I just ordered an Iphone 15 Max and I love Tim Cook’s strategy on chip manufacturing and relationships with India.
Datadog: +21.46%. The metrics are just so good for this business, both Net Retention and Growth are great. Everyone uses them and I don’t hear many complaints!
The other guys:
The below are the rest of my portfolio, which I plan to weed out as the above is already way too many stocks to stay really close to. Despite some of their numbers seeing positive, the S&P 500 returned 18.51% in the last 12 months so they are underperformers.
Cloudflare: +16.88%. I can’t say bad things about this great company, I’m just not close enough to the industry anymore.
Nike: +8.25%. I love Nike as a brand but rarely buy their clothes anymore so am out of touch with their products.
Gitlab: +6.85%. Between competition with GitHub, Tech layoffs, and the massive emergence of AI-enhanced engineering Gitlab has less upside than the other companies in my list.
Disney: -19.87%. I love the Disney brand but they’re going through a tough time with leadership and fighting political battles. I’m taking my kid to Disneyland next month so maybe the magic will come back and I’ll keep holding.
Other new moves:
Tesla: After buying the Model Y and experiencing what a phenomenal car it is firsthand, I decided to buy a small chunk of Tesla to track along with the journey. I’m extremely late to the party but if they keep building cars like this, reducing the price, and winning the infrastructure battle there is a lot more value creation to happen.
Facebook: I sold my position because of a personal disconnect with their VR direction and that I didn’t have a close proximity to their products any more. This was a losing decision as the stock has ripped.
Summary:
The Long Game: I've always believed in buying and holding wherever possible!
Streamlining: I was punished by exiting my Facebook position and might be for the others I mentioned too but it is too many stocks to manage properly. My portfolio will see exits from Disney, Nike, Cloudflare, and Gitlab.