Weekly portfolio update: + 1.32% ($6.9k) and what I'm working on

Hey Investors,

Hope you had an incredible week. If you didn’t I hope next week is better than this one.

I was in NYC this week for a work off(on)-site (for my real job). We’re a fully remote team and we interact daily over Zoom and Slack but we also try to get together in person a couple times a year for planning, retrospectives, and staying up way too late wandering around (how strong teams are truly formed).

I’ll keep this update quick:

1. Portfolio update

2. What I’m working on for the newsletter

3. Links n Stuff

1. Portfolio Update

As always, I am not a Financial Advisor. None of this should be taken as financial advice. I am providing this for informational purposes and I am not responsible for any decisions you make about your finances or investing.

Transactions this week: 0 7-Day performance: +1.32% (+ $6,963)Year-to-date performance: +59.63% (+ $203,972)

Current Position Sizes:

Alteryx (AYX): 16.72%MongoDB (MDB): 14.57%Okta (OKTA): 7.37%Pager Duty (PD): 6.32%Anaplan (PLAN): 6.05%Roku (ROKU): 3.59%The Trade Desk (TTD): 18.14%Twilio (TWLO): 16.52%Zoom (ZM): 2.71%Zscaler (ZS): 7.35%Cash: 0.44%*You’ll see NKTR and NTNX option positions which are basically worth $0 so I didn’t add them above.

Watch List:

Elasticsearch (ESTC)Slack (WORK)CrowdStrike (CRWD)

I intentionally keep a very short watchlist to stay focused. I owned ESTC for a while and it stayed stagnant. I thought their last earnings report was strong, but decided I may not have understood the business well enough and liked Zoom, Anaplan, and Roku better. If I add a new position, I would likely begin building it very slowly with new monthly contributions because I don’t see a reason to sell or trim any positions right now. That can always change.

2. What I’m working on

Notion.so for investing research and sharing

I’m working on transitioning my note taking and investing research to Notion.so. Notion is a super flexible workspace that’s basically Evernote on steroids. Notion will let me share everything I can create which will make it cool as an investment hub for our readers. I’d love to figure out how to create a collaborative spot where our community can interact and share our own ideas/research. More to come on that…

Here is a link to a database I’m building of all the investing resources and links I come across. I can then create database views specific to each company and have those sit inside a company research page where I plan to track all of my research for each company in one spot.

Here is a quick screenshot of the master database which makes it super easy to tag/filter into different views for specific topics, stocks, dates, etc.

If you want to learn more about notion check out their Guides and FAQ here and their community page here if you’re a super-nerd (don’t worry, I am too).

Adding more value to the newsletter using Ycharts

In a previous email, I mentioned that I’ve used the money from our ~25 paying subscribers to subscribe to Ycharts. My goal is to provide better information to our community with Ycharts features.

I’m still learning the platform, but here’s a screen shot of what’s called a Comparison Table that compares companies using things like Revenue Growth, Gross Margins, Sales and Marketing Expenses as a % of Revenue, Market Cap, Forward Price to Sales Ratios, etc

If you look to the far right column, you’ll see a “Score Test”. I’ve set it to compare all of these companies against each other using the metrics listed in the columns. The tool allows you to set a scoring weight for each column.

I weighted Revenue Growth and Gross Margin most heavily. Here are the weights.

I’m still not 100% sure how I’ll use these tools in my investing workflow. My goal is to create a “checklist” with different inputs. This will likely be one of them, but I won’t just blindly follow these scores.

*Ignore the companies on that list that aren’t in my portfolio. They were mostly just in there for testing.

3. Links n Stuff

These are also all located in the new notion resource database which I’ll keep updated here. (let me know if you like this!)

Anaplan: Four keys to help financial teams build a better strategic planning process

• I love reading from company blogs because it’s a great way to get to know our companies, their products, and technology in general.

Zoom: The rise of cloud videoconferencing in financial services

Ben Carlson: Lessons from the 10 best years in stock market history

Seth Godin: Compromise: how to make breakfast

• Seth is fantastic. This article is 13 years old and it’s a great one on compromise and quality vs quantity. It applies widely in life (and investing).

Thank you

That’s all for today. Thank you so much for your time and attention.

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