This week we got a wild mix of news from our Real Money Portfolio companies, with one of our most “boring” stocks announcing some pretty exceptional results… and the “exciting stocks” much more of a mixed bag, about half great and half disappointing. Anything to change our opinion or cause me to update my “max buy” or “preferred buy” prices for any of these stocks? Let’s see what the week taught us…

The biggest “really expensive growth” story stocks I own are probably The Trade Desk (TTD), Shopify (SHOP) and Roku (ROKU), and all of those reported this week, as did fellow growth story Toast (TOST). The short summary is that TTD and ROKU talked optimistically about the future and their shares popped higher (remarkably higher for TTD), and SHOP and TOST were more cautious and their share prices dropped. Seems like an overreaction on all fronts, frankly, these news releases wouldn’t have led to 15-20%+ stock moves in a “normal” market, but, well, Wall Street is nothing if not an overreaction machine. Let’s go through them one at a time…

The Trade Desk (TTD) is one of those few ad-driven bellwethers of tech that has kept a premium valuation over the past year… though the premium has certainly come down as fears about advertising declines percolate.   And as is typical, they reported higher earnings than the analysts expected, and also offered guidance for next quarter’s revenue that was higher than expected… though in both cases, the “beat” was tiny.   They had offered guidance to investors last quarter for at least $490 million in revenue in the fourth quarter (which was $20 million less than the analysts had been forecasting), and they usually are seen as conservative and beat their guidance handily, but ended up with revenue of only $490.8 million… not a huge “beat,” but still 24% growth from a year earlier, which stood out pretty dramatically among other advertising players.  That was probably the biggest positive of the past half-year or so: Digital advertising companies struggled, but The Trade Desk did not, it kept growing much faster than the overall ad market, and kept taking market share.

The profit side was both better and worse, they posted 38 cents per share in earnings (vs. 36 cents expected), so that was a “beat” of the expectations… but it means they also earned a LOT less ...