To some degree, my personal preferences about the industries that I find understandable and attractive are coloring the $100K Lock Box Portfolio — yes, my intention is for this to be a portfolio that is as diversified as possible, within the restrictions I’ve set up (high growth, relatively small size, justifiable valuation, potential for business to grow into something almost unrecognizably different and larger over time, etc.), but there’s also a lot of qualitative judgement that goes into choosing these stocks… so it’s no surprise that some companies which are already favorites of mine are also in this newer portfolio, or that we’ve got some “overweights” in areas you might not expect, like our three different stocks in the Lock Box that are all somehow affiliated with the insurance industry.

And as of today, we’ve also got two stocks that are riding on the back of the advertising industry, and both are generally lumped into the “ad tech” category. And we are inching closer to filling this portfolio, though it has taken much longer than I expected — so this is our 18th pick in the $100K Lock Box Portfolio, but only the third pick that has been added within the past year (and all three of the picks I made in this portfolio in the 2023 calendar year, unlike this new one, were stocks I already owned in the Real Money Portfolio). Sometimes you can only find what you can find, and you have to accept that waiting for an attractive idea is part of investing.

So what’s the buy today? Today we add DoubleVerify (DV) to the $100K Lock Box. It goes in with a $5,000 position, like all our other holdings in this portfolio, and will be “locked in” for at least five years, which means I can’t sell this position until at least 2029. Even if something terrible happens and they slip into bankruptcy next year. That’s the discipline: We buy growth companies that have a good trajectory to their business and some optionality that might let them grow for a long time, we resolve to not change our minds, and we hope that a few major winners emerge. That’s hardfor most people, waiting for growth companies to gyrate through big moves and hopefully do well in the end, resisting the urge to take profits or sell stocks that look like losers, so we make it ...