I don’t know what will happen in the world, but I just looked over my regularly updated Annual Review spreadsheet… and it looks like about a dozen of the stocks I owned as of last February are in my “buy” range right now. Those are in many cases contextual, otherwise we wouldn’t be able to buy much of anything these days, but we have to make our choices in the world in which we live (for example, Avalara (AVLR) is an attractive buy… but only because the market has generally been willing to pay a high premium of nearly 20X sales in recent years for cloud software companies with high and steady growth.) So I’m going to start today with a little optimism… but don’t worry, we’ll give the pessimistic take a good airing at the end, too.

The dream of the growth stock investor is to get into a position where a stock you can build a position in for a few years (or better yet, buy and then ignore)turns into a massively compounding growth story. The funnest part of that happens when you hit on one of those stocks that David Gardner at the Motley Fool dubbed “spiffy pops” — a stock that grows so substantially over a period of time that a single day’s “pop” in the share price can be larger than your initial purchase price.

We get that in the Real Money Portfolio companies from time to time, though I am not quite as committed to (almost) never selling as the Motley Fool boys are, and this latest bull surge in the markets (or “bubble,” if you prefer to be a downer) has brought several “spiffy pops” — the most obvious one is Alphabet (GOOG), just because I bought it so long ago (my first buy in 2005 was below $100, so every time that stock rises by 3% it’s a “spiffy pop”), but some others are getting there as well… my first buy of The Trade Desk (TTD) shares, for example, was at a split-adjusted $6.37, and the stock often jumps more than $6 in a day… and Shopify (SHOP) is quite similar now, since my original purchase at $70 was I guess double spiffy-popped when the shares jumped by $180 or so last Friday.

And you can kind of see some others maybe coming around the bend… ...