one of my all-time favorite authors is Nassim Nicholas taleb who's written a
number of bestsellers one of them called skin in the game and one of the best lines from
it is "don't tell me what you think just show me your portfolio" and this applies
in many different areas i don't want to know what a doctor thinks about a diagnosis i want to know
what he or she would do in my shoes in that line of thinking i'm here today to talk about where
my portfolio is at the end of the first quarter of 2022. my name is Brian Stoffel
now i'm not going to lie to you if we look at how my portfolio in real life has done
over recent past it's not pretty year to date at the end of the first quarter which was march 31st
my portfolio was down 18% while the overall market was down 5% that hurts and even if
we back up for a full year my portfolio was down 3% while the market was up 15%
what does that actually mean well it means that a $10 000 investment that i made is down to $8 200
and if it was a year it's down to $9 700 while the market is actually up however we focus on
long-term investing and so it is very important to look over a much longer time frame to get a sense
if what we're doing is working and in that respect i believe that it is over the past three years my
portfolio has more than doubled and it's beaten the market and over the past five years it's
more than quadrupled while the market is up 91% based on a ten thousand dollar investment
here's what those results look like as you can see over five years i'm left with more than twice as
much as if i had invested in the stock market but what if we back it up to a full 10 years
based on the data that i have available it is more than doubling the market's return 10 000
growing at that rate over 10 years would be worth over 56 000 today versus the markets 32 000. so
what did i do during the first quarter well i made a couple of major moves when it comes to stocks
that i bought there were a couple of big ones airbnb cloudflare snowflake hubspot and pubmatic
were all major buys and we made videos on these as well but i also made some cells one was the
grayscale ethereum trust which was like owning a little bit of a cryptocurrency which i got rid of
riskify and docusign are two stocks that are actually still in my portfolio at the end of the
quarter i'm just waiting for permission to get to sell them they will be leaving my portfolio very
soon so where exactly is my money right now well let's go through the top 10 holdings that i had
as of march 31st 2022 coming in at number 10 was alphabet better known as google it's about
five percent of my portfolio and i've owned it for over a decade it has absolutely crushed the
market returning over 700 that's plus 500 over the market now everybody is probably familiar
with google but alphabet also has a bunch of other areas like nest and calico and verily
these other bets haven't really worked out yet but if you buy shares of the company you get that
optionality almost for free as you can see the company also scored very well on both brian for
all these qualities checklist and my anti-fragile framework coming in at number nine is atlassian
ticker symbol t-e-a-m or team it's returned about 150 i've owned it for the last three or four years
and for those who are unfamiliar atlassian builds tools that helps teams collaborate
jira is very popular with coding professionals but it has other things like confluence and trello
that help teams collaborate on work projects that aren't necessarily technically inclined
i only know that because i'm not technically inclined and i use trello and as you can see
atlassian has the dynamics that we love to look for in software as a service company where the
amount of money that each cohort pays to atlassian every year is growing that's how it got a score of
88 on brian's checklist and a score of 13 on mine both very high scores coming in at number
eight is axon enterprises this is five percent of my portfolio it has increased five times over
in value in my portfolio and it has crushed the market for those that might be unfamiliar this
started out as taser international but it has gone through a change as it focuses on acts on body
cameras primarily for police departments but it's the software solutions that acts on this building
that really got me interested evidence.com axon records and dispatch are all very interesting
ways to use this technology to help outcomes for everyone involved police and citizens
and it scores above the top threshold for both brian froley and myself now coming in at number
seven is airbnb a stock which has moved up because i've purchased more of it in fact it
is six percent of my portfolio now and this is the short-term holding it hasn't gotten much in terms
of returns at all but it also hasn't had time to do that why did it score so well well i think that
this is first of all a mission-driven company i also think that it's impressive how they have used
optionality their mission is to help people belong anywhere and that has gotten them to expand beyond
just short-term stays into long-term stays but also experiences in person and digital experiences
the company was free cash flow negative losing huge amounts of money as the pandemic started but
it has already recovered and has turned out over two billion dollars in free cash flow even though
we still haven't gotten a full recovery in travel that makes me a very optimistic shareholder coming
in at number six is one of my oldest holdings and that is amazon.com it is six percent of my
portfolio it has increased 17 times in value which no surprise it's absolutely crushing the market
the interesting thing to note about amazon is everyone knows it as the everything store but it's
all the tools that are built for the everything store that really make this a money maker
aws or amazon web services is the primary example but fulfillment and advertising are all examples
of things that were built for the everything store that are letting other people use it and
that's where all the money is made it gets a sky high score on my anti-fragile framework as well
number five is data dog which is another software-as-a-service company that focuses on
analyzing and observing a company's digital operations it is six percent of my portfolio i've
owned it for about three years it is quadrupled in value and is also thrashing the market one thing
that i love about datadog is its optionality it started off with just one or two tools that
customers could use but within the last five years the number of those tools has increased markedly
and importantly customers are adopting those tools quickly number four on my list is mongodb which
admittedly has a technology i'm not super familiar with which is no sql databases in layman's terms
this is a database as a service project in other words it helps companies organize all of their
data as you can see in the short time that i've owned it it has been a huge winner increasing in
value six times over and now accounts for eight percent of my portfolio now you might also notice
that it gets an anti-fragile score of a 10 which is kind of low but part of that is because is is
not a founder-led company with a lot of insider ownership coming in at number three is cyber
security software as a service company crowdstrike i've only owned it for two or three years but it
is quadrupled in value and now accounts for eight percent of my portfolio now much like datadog one
of the things that i love about this company is that when it came public it had about 11 tools for
customers to use but the number of those tools has increased dramatically in just a few years time
and just like datadog customers are actually adopting those tools which is a strong sign
of optionality number two on my list is mercado libre which is a leading e-commerce and payment
company for south america and central america mercado libre has been in my portfolio for a long
time but i've added as time has gone on and in general it has increased eight times over in value
and accounts for eight percent of my portfolio like many of the other players mercado libre
also has a lot of optionality mercado libre's core marketplace is still the engine driver but mercado
pogo the payment solution has become much more important over time and they're not done expanding
mercado envios is a fulfillment system and mercado credito is offering credit to users of mercado
pago it also scores very high on the anti-fragile framework and coming in at number one in my
portfolio is shopify this is despite the fact that the stock is down markedly since november of 2021
and yet it is still 10 percent of my portfolio for those who might not be familiar shopify makes it
possible to set up an e-commerce store for anyone and grow along with those customers over time
it gets an anti-fragile score of 14 and it also scores very well on brian for old lee's quality
checklist of course that's not all that's in my portfolio while i run a relatively concentrated
portfolio there are other stocks that were worth mentioning as well those accounting for about four
percent of my portfolio include viva systems and also unity software i have a number of positions
which are about three percent of my portfolio that includes cloud flare c limited snowflake
and intuitive surgical i also have around two percent positions in pubmatic as well as tesla
i have a one percent ish position in zoom and uipath so that's where my portfolio is it has
not performed well recently but i'm not letting that bother me and now you know where all of my
large positions are do you like learning this let us know in the comments section below brian out