by Travis Johnson, Stock Gumshoe | December 6, 2019 5:37 pm
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Source URL: https://www.stockgumshoe.com/2019/12/friday-file-preparing-for-recession-plus-docusign-ulta-and-okta-report-and-i-make-a-few-buys-and-do-some-tax-loss-harvesting/
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Re: The Trade Desk/TTD
Long term investors will appreciate this recent and self-explanatory news item…
Safe link:
https://www.adexchanger.com/online-advertising/ad-buyers-starting-to-use-the-trade-desk-dsp-over-google-according-to-advertiser-perceptions-report/
Appreciate the updates as I too own many of the stocks you mentioned, including Okta, TTD, Docu, WRTC, and lamentably Largo. I’m going to hold largo longer as it’s in an IRA so no tax advantage to selling it. Was hoping for an Ulta pullback to get in nearer to $200. Oh well, there’s always another. I’m short EL so I’ll have to see how that works out. (<1% position). Keep the ideas coming chief....
Thanks Travis for writing this:
“Maybe if I write about this enough, I’ll even talk myself out of doing something stupid.”
ha ha ha . Me too!– just when I’m convinced I know something, the rest of the world will prove me wrong. I quickly learned to resist making quick changes. – but I still fall for the emotional traps of investing. Long-term buy-and-hold has worked for almost all of the greatest investors- and for me as well.
Excited as this is my first day/hour among the Irregulars! Finally upgraded.
I got lucky with my LGORF (one of the extremely rare times I had good timing.) I sold mine at $1.30 for more than 30% gain, after which it plummeted to $.62. I’ve been kind of kicking myself for not buying back at $.62 because it’s recovered a little bit each day since then and is now at $.76. It’s a speculative play that I’d like to have a few of.
SHOP is hard for me because no matter what future growth is forecast it always seems so richly valued already and I have trouble bringing myself to buy. Interesting to hear, though. I’m sure it’s a mistake not buying.
I’ve made money on calls of DOCU and OKTA, but I somehow convinced myself to buy DDOG after the IPO and ended up selling at break even. I am leaning towards buying some DOCU for long term – your analysis helped a lot with that. Also, I use DocuSign at work on a daily basis. I like the idea of buying where I live.
It’s hard to buy richly-valued stocks, and sometimes they’re disasters… my general strategy, with these kinds of names, is to judge them on operational strength, growth, and scalability rather than current earnings, buy only the ones that I understand the best, and keep position sizes small. Sometimes even just buying a single share will help inspire you to follow the stock more closely and build a better understanding of the potential, and most of these stocks also have big dips on occasion to give you a chance to buy more if you’ve already built up your comfort level with the company’s long-term prospects.
Trade Note:
Today I continued the process of gradually selling down my Office Properties Income Trust (OPI) position. This is not a surprise, I’ve just mostly been looking for mid-$30s opportunities to take profits in a company that I don’t have any interest in holding long term. Here’s what I noted about it when I started selling about six weeks ago, in case you missed that comment, my thinking has not changed at all:
And I put a little bit of that cash to work in increasing my Modern Times Group (MTG-B in Sweden) position by about 20%. No big news on them this week, but here’s my updated thinking:
eSports company Modern Times Group is moving ahead with some more restructuring, last time they filed they were talking about reviewing their game publishing arm, this time it’s the core eSports business that is being impacted… though it’s fairly minor, it sounds like they’re essentially just centralizing their event production staff (for ESL and Dreamhack, I guess, their primary brand names) in Germany and Poland and cutting some production teams in France, Spain and maybe the UK. They’re not dropping events or local brands, just trying to become more efficient. Seems reasonable to me, though eSports is a pretty tight community so they’ll have to communicate their plans clearly and not risk turning people away from their market-leading brands in Europe.
The real potential here is still more international expansion and added events under their umbrella, helped a bit by the strategic investment by Chinese streaming company Huya as they work to integrate the Chinese eSports world into the ESL schedule and events. I do expect MTG to look into a US listing as part of their restructuring (they’ve said as much), and that ought to help with visibility… so although there’s not really any urgency, and this restructuring will take time and there may not be news for a while, as some more cash piled up in the account this week I took the opportunity to increase my MTG position. If you’re new to the stock, this one does not trade in the US, not even over the counter, so it has to be bought on the Stockholm exchange if you’re interested (I use Interactive Brokers for trading on non-US markets, but most major brokers can trade in major overseas markets — sometimes with a higher commission or a phone call)… and for what it’s worth, I still also like both EA and ATVI as long-term plays on both eSports and the next console upgrade wave next year and I do still nibble on both of those stocks from time to time .
According to this inflation-adjusted chart (admittedly it’s only the Dow Jones), if you’d invested in the overall market in 1976, you’d have been down until 1988 – https://www.macrotrends.net/1319/dow-jones-100-year-historical-chart. My concern is that today may be more similar to the late 1920s, when investing in the overall market would have meant being down for 30 years – tough to just stay the course for that long!
Of course, there could also be a lot of upside from here, but I hope it excuses a certain amount of caution and staying on the sidelines. Thank you for all the great content, it helps me to be selective in my investments and balance the risk of being in the market with the risk of not being in the market.
That’s true, there have been a few such times in history when 10 years was not enough to recoup losses… but only a few. I do think that future earnings expectations should be well below 10% a year from stocks from this point, given the current valuation, near-peak profit margins, and currently low interest rates… but people were also talking about 2008 being the historic high that would never be breached, and 2011 being the beginning of the end of the stock market and the beginning of a collapse into anarchy and apocalypse, so do try to be careful about getting sucked into a narrative that makes the future seem clear because of how the market “feels” at any given time — it’s really easy to do, because it makes sense to our story-loving brains.
Speaking of the stock market and the economy in general, where would we be without these trillion dollar deficits and how long can this go on? How can we use past performance to predict anything in the future when so much debt is needed to maintain economic growth?
Tried seling a portion of my Fairfax India (FFXDF) shares but was blocked with a 144A restriction by Fidelity. No issues purchasing in 2017/18. Has anyone got around?