The Way It Goes

The last two weeks were very, very good. My overall portfolio regained all of its lost ground, closing one day last week in a net gain for the first time in six months. That was a value swing of more than ten percent and...well it was a good deal of money to me. Multiple stocks are in substantial gain territory, Li Auto, a tracking fund stock, is up over 35%, and Target the same, both have netted me more than $1,000. Other Chinese auto stocks, which also figure on the fund roster, have given me solid gains, though my positions are smaller and so the real gains are smaller. AMD, the tech stock with a whiff of meme popularity (not AMC, the theater chain with full-on meme status) is up over 12.5% and Crispr has gone from hovering just below my buying price to up 10 or 15% as well.

Tesla and Volkswagen had come back from somewhat down to hover back near my buy price, too. And I say had because 'the way it goes' is that my portfolio gained more than 12% overall in just under two weeks. Now, in the three market days since, its given back more than 5% of that, including about 2.5% today ATM. This retreat is as broad as my gains, which makes it fine, everything's fine, why would you even ask me that...? Right, you didn't...

Awkward.

Anyways, its even slightly better than that, most of the gainers I mentioned at the start are not among the significant give-backers, though it is worth mentioning that my rosy position on Gamestop is fading, still in positive, but half of the best gain I've held it at. AirBNB continues to slip and Coinbase to hover disappointingly below my buy-in and Carnival Cruise Lines, one of my best picks from the start of quarantine, has softened for the first time in eighteen months (right when I think it probably will begin making advances). No one is writing about it, but the median price target among 17 analysts tracked by CNNMoney is at $30, which is 25% above today's median and likely close. That might make it a good buy time for the stock, if someone is shopping.

All of that is well and good, I've broken back to even, even if I've retreated again, and its all be broad, both gain and retreat. That's good stuff, but nothing you can't learn just by following some better informed platform than myself. In fact, my fund, as I've noted recently, tracks pretty closely with a basket of 'tech, pharma tech and green auto,' and the whole portfolio has not bucked the broader market except when techs or autos went one way while the rest went the other. Good stuff but not particularly noteworthy.

I've noted that my two major red spots, the only ones not erased or nearly erased when the portfolio was sitting even, are my two recent IPO moves. I wanted to get in on Didi, but somehow never quite caught a notification when, exactly it was happening. My idea was to try to buy in during the first thirty minutes and to sell within two hours, in expectation that something like what happened to Coinbase and AirBNB would also happen to Didi, though obviously I did not expect their own government to kneecap them so ruthlessly. I'm not sure where the bottom of that hole will be for Didi's stock, but I do expect it to be a buy position again eventually, I don't expect the Chinese government, opaque as it is, would have done that without creating a path to respectability for the business, they care too much about money and global power.

Plug Power, of course, remains stubbornly hovering, but hovering above $30, which means the market is semi-consciously withholding investment until upward price pressure (or a press release) triggers a movement that will have momentum. So the two IPOs are the primary red numbers worth worrying about in terms of my overall portfolio health, which as noted, is at least 'solid, getting better.'

Mm. Two of the three IPO stocks I still hold. I've finally given up entirely on Bumble, which is the fourth one I tried to play around with. While we are on the subject, we can start there. Bumble appears to have bottomed, finally, just below $39 and about three weeks after we sold at $59 and change. It has recovered to as much as even with our selling price but is now closer to $50 than $60. This trend will likely continue, so that Bumble is probably a good growth stock purchase for the summer, but I feel reasonably validated to have had that money other places for the past two months.

I can say with reasonable confidence that even Bumble, among my disappointing efforts in the IPO realm, is a buy because I have (finally) reeled in Unity Software, my very first attempt to jump on the IPO wagon. I actually bought Unity shares on the upswing, but did not take the profit from the spike because I hoped it would continue for most of the trading day. Because it had already faded back past one of the buy points in the spread I'd set, I let it all ride and hoped the post-debut dip would be small and the position would return to growth quickly.

It did not. But on the other hand, it never showed the ongoing melt that Bumble did, and it did seem to stabilize, and the company fundamentals are good, and the company mission seems like a profitable racket, so what the ef--, I held on. And finally, as the broad market rally gained traction early last week, Unity stock clawed its way back to roughly even.

Because I continue to believe that whatever goes into the market predictions that say Plug Power will be valued at $70 by Christmas has not fundamentally changed, and that both the political and economic outlooks since then have both significantly improved and become more stable and predictable. Perhaps the $70 valuation is momentum dependent and so no longer achievable, the price clearly does not belong at $35. So I must put it out of my mind.

The next two big red marks, clear places in my investment strategy that could be improved, are yet showing that patience and research can still heal many such mistakes. If and when Coinbase and AirBNB come reeling back in, I can mark the episode 'disappointing' rather than 'failure,' which will be nice and very gratifying. But I can also set those funds in motion again, because the point that is emphasized is that very many market investments will break even value over time, and will even return the modest gain that represents the algorithm of real-dollar price against common interest, 'most' market investments is probably an understatement, in fact. To continue to do this 'for fun and profit' as the idiom goes, I need to generate better than (preferably much better than) common interest.

Technically, the fund I am tracking on this blog is up nearly 19%, $11,880 from the original $10k investment. But I have put other money into the market since starting this blog and it is not realistic or rational to separate the one from the other in the shorter term. There may come a point where the focused set of data from the focused set of positions I've been focused on is the more natural set of information, but for the time being, we will continue to learn from my efforts with all of that money.

From that perspective, we close the day down 5%, but assured that our study and research look poised to prove out on the one hand, and save for at least par on another, with a useful lesson thrown on top.