Finishing April: Our Portfolio Outperforms S&P 500 by 32%, Here Is What We Own!
Our portfolio is now up by 62% year-to-date against 30% of S&P 500. Here is our updated portfolio.
💥Our portfolio is outperforming the market by 30%!
Portfolio is now up 62% over the last twelve months against 30% of the S&P 500!
It’s been a wild ride! — This is probably what best explains how I feel about the last few months.
It’s truly been a wild ride, and I am extremely happy and proud of where our portfolio has reached today after this wild ride. I’ll give you the update and talk about the strategies and investment philosophy, but first, let me start by extending my thanks to the great community we have here.
If you are a human with a conscience, writing about finance and stocks is very hard because you know that people make financial decisions based on what you write. The only way to have a clear conscience is to fully align yourself with what you write.
When something you write wins, you win; when it loses, you lose as well.
This is what I have always practiced here. If you have been in the community for a while, you have probably heard me say, “I can’t say buy because I am not holding it.” And not getting a concrete answer might have disappointed you at that point, but that’s the only way to have a clear conscience on my end.
As a result, sincerity has emerged as the default mode of operation in this community, and we have developed a strong sense of friendship. We have exchanged ideas, poked holes in our theses, and restored sanity through discussions when things got volatile.
So, thank you.
When it comes to our performance, I’ll say again what I have said a few times in the past—forget the performance, what’s important is how well your positioning played out.
Indeed, this performance could be 45% today instead of 62%, but this wouldn’t change anything in its impressiveness because what’s important was being able to position to generate this level of return.
If you remember, at the end of last year, I said two things:
The market is overvalued.
2025 was hard, and 2026 will be harder because there is no single asset class that is clearly positioned to go higher.
Yet, despite all this, I also said “stay in the market.” I recommended exiting fundamentally weak or overextended positions, building a nice cash cushion, and leaving the rest in the market and allocating to opportunities as they come.
Then the war happened, and we still didn’t sell a single share.
Because our position was this:
All our holdings were very strong fundamentally.
In the worst-case scenario, they would go undervalued, which is never a reason to sell.
In the end, optimism won once again, and parties to the war entered a de-escalation path, so the market has come back. Then, AI optimism peaked as Anthropic revenues tripled in Q1 and compute demand skyrocketed again, driving further optimism.
Result? Most of our positions are now at or near all-time highs.
What’s even more valuable is that we have achieved this without any leverage or mass buying speculative stocks.
Fundamentals of all our positions today justify either the current valuations or way more than the current valuations, but not less. Having said this, I have to talk a bit about a dangerous trend I see on Substack and X (Twitter), under the name of “bottleneck investing.”
This is pure speculation, given a fancy name to make it look more reasonable. Bottlenecks, of course, exist, and it’s often productive to see the bottlenecks ahead and invest in them. If the bottleneck proves legit, companies operating there will likely have strong pricing power, and this will be enough to boost earnings by a lot.
Many positions in our portfolio are there because we believe they address certain bottlenecks as well. There is nothing wrong with this.
But… This doesn’t mean every price is justified or that the stock should be priced as if the bottleneck will persist forever. When this happens, the result is almost always a disaster.
Here is an example:
When you look at Corning stock, you see the last time a price movement like this happened was back in 2000. We know how it ended. This won’t be any different.
In some small-cap stocks, the situation is even more absurd.
You should be careful. If the fundamentals of those stocks were able to take them to highs, those who own them wouldn’t need to shill them every day. Those positions will be dumped on some people at some point.
We have never engaged in such speculative behaviors, and will never do.
Our philosophy is simple. We run a barbell portfolio where:
We buy companies with durable competitive advantages, i.e., foundational stocks.
We combine foundationals with growth positions that have strong balance sheets.
We don’t sell unless fundamentals deteriorate or the price goes off the roof.
This has worked incredibly well for us so far:
Our portfolio is now up by 62% against 30% of S&P 500!
The following transactions took place in our portfolio in November:
Exited 1 position.
Opened 1 new position.
In the previous updates, I had provided my outlook for each company in the portfolio.
In this update, I’ll also provide an outlook for our new position and share my overall portfolio commentary and strategy going forward.
Let’s dive in!
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📊Here Is Our Full Portfolio!
As of today, we have 18 holdings in our portfolio.
8 of these positions can be considered foundational.