April 2024 Portfolio Review
Total Return: +7.7% YTD (+2.1% vs S&P)
2024 Results:
2024 Monthly Allocations:
Key:
darker green: started during month
lighter green: added during month
yellow: trimmed during month
blue: bought and sold during month
red: position exits
positions >10% in bold
*Please note: I rolled an old 401K worth ~2.5% into the cash balance of this portfolio to start 2024. I’ve shaded the January cash cell to make sure the new cash is represented accurately (and honestly to remind myself as well).
Past recaps:
December 2018 (the one that got things started)
December 2019 (contains links to all 2019 monthly reports)
December 2020 (contains links to all 2020 monthly reports)
December 2021 (contains links to all 2021 monthly reports)
December 2022 (contains links to all 2022 monthly reports)
December 2023 (contains links to all 2023 monthly reports)
Stock Comments:
There weren’t a ton of April highlights, but TransMedics’ excellent report after the April 30 close should get May off to a good start.
AXON 0.00%↑ – Axon recently released what I think is a reeeeaaally interesting new product. Draft One is “a revolutionary new software product that drafts high-quality police report narratives in seconds based on auto-transcribed body-worn camera audio. Draft One leverages Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) and includes a range of critical safeguards, requiring every report to be reviewed and approved by a human officer, ensuring accuracy and accountability of the information before reports are submitted.”
If Draft One can indeed meet its claims of higher quality reports in less time allowing officers to spend more time in the field, this could be a hugely sticky product opening up all kinds of possibilities. I find this an extremely intriguing move by CEO Rick Smith and Gang.
Earnings May 6.
CELH 0.00%↑ – April started with Celsius’s announcement of plans to enter France. As with the UK and Ireland, CELH’s distribution partner in the country will be Suntory Beverage & Food. The launch will occur during Q4 and expand throughout 2025. Combined with the late-March announcement of expansion into Australia and New Zealand, Celsius’s international plans seem to be moving right along.
That was followed by some positive comments about Celsius during the earnings call for flagship distribution partner PepsiCo. PepsiCo CEO Ramon Laguarta said the following when asked directly about the partnership:
I will not talk too much about the agreement other than saying that it's a good alignment of the long-term interest of both companies, and it's great for PepsiCo shareholders. The partnership with CELSIUS is strong and it's helping us to gain scale in our go-to-market, specifically in some channels where we need volume to justify some of the economics of the call. So that role continues. We're pleased with the partnership.
Energy is a fast-growing category, profitable, that is great for our portfolio. So that's what I would say. We remain pleased with the partnership, and we'll continue to build the partnership going forward.
We should get Celsius’s take on the arrangement when it reports May 7.
CRWD 0.00%↑ – CrowdStrike’s initial April news was an expanded partnership with Google Cloud. Announced at the Google Cloud Next ’24 event, the deal allows joint customers to access new enterprise security offerings from CrowdStrike on Google’s marketplace.
Next, CrowdStrike announced a strategic partnership with National Australia Bank (NAB), Australia’s largest business bank. Under this arrangement, NAB will provide one year of complimentary access to CrowdStrike’s Falcon Go protection platform for small and medium-sized businesses. Said NAB Chief Security Officer, Sandro Bucchianeri:
As Australia’s leading business bank, we have an important role to play to help educate and assist the small and medium-sized businesses that bank with us to ensure they remain secure. By working with CrowdStrike, we’re looking to connect customers with some of the best and most trusted cyber defenses. We’re urging all businesses to evaluate their security before it’s too late.
CrowdStrike ended the month with a couple industry accolades. Market research firm IDC named CRWD a Leader in its 2024 vendor assessment for Managed Detection and Response Services. Then KuppingerCole named CrowdStrike an Overall Leader in Identity Threat Detection and Response. CrowdStrike received KuppingerCole’s Leader designation in every category (Product, Innovation, and Market) while also being recognized as the top overall vendor in the industry. The report calls CrowdStrike a “cyber industry force” that “demonstrates real attention to detail where threats are related.” Sounds good to me.
DDOG 0.00%↑ – I saw three updates affecting Datadog this month, though only two came from the company itself. The first was the announcement of DDOG’s annual Dash customer conference June 25 and 26 in New York City. Next was Datadog being named Google’s 2024 Cloud Technology Partner of the Year in the categories of application development and infrastructure marketplace. The press release notes the companies jointly participated in several messaging campaigns on observability best practices for DevOps and security teams. Any additional cloud-titan exposure is good exposure, so well done.
The external update was news Cloudflare has entered the observability market through the acquisition of Baselime. While I’m unsure how many Cloudflare customers use observability, it is clearly enough to merit the purchase. That makes it something worth paying attention to as DDOG moves through its next purchase and renewal cycle.
In the big picture, I find myself becoming more and more concerned about the relative weakness of Datadog’s recent customer adds in this increasingly competitive environment. To that end, I’ve sold all our nontaxable shares. All we have left is a small taxable position at a cost basis of $35.24, so there’s capital gains considerations in play. With no clear alternatives for the money right now, I’m comfortable enough taking those into May 7 earnings and reassessing.
ELF 0.00%↑ – e.l.f. Beauty recently announced the expansion of its sponsorship with professional race driver Katherine Legge. Under the deal, ELF becomes the first ever beauty brand to serve as a main sponsor of a car in the Indianapolis 500. Legge will be looking to make her fourth Indy 500 appearance on May 26. As you can see below, ELF is pretty excited to be along for the ride:
IOT 0.00%↑ – Samsara released quite a bit of news this month. First was the opening of opening of a new office in Mexico City. With five of the top ten Mexican trucking companies now Samsara customers, management plans on doubling its number of employees on the ground to meet the growing demand. Muy bueno!
Next, Samsara received recognition as a Great Place to Work in the UK, Poland, and the United States. Said Sarah Lewis-Kulin, Vice President of Global Recognition at Great Place To Work®:
Great Place To Work Certification is a highly coveted achievement that requires consistent and intentional dedication to the overall employee experience," “By successfully earning this recognition, it is evident that Samsara stands out as one of the top companies to work for, providing a great workplace environment for its employees.
Then IOT won a deal with United Natural Foods, Inc. (UNFI), “the largest full-service grocery wholesaling partner in North America.” UNFI will use Samsara’s monitoring services to ensure food safety and reduce waste, particularly with shipments requiring temperature control.
Lastly, Samsara released a report showing customer JJX Logistics achieved a 17% reduction in vehicle emissions in just three months using IOT’s services. This in turn allowed JJX Logistics to become just “one of seven UK companies to gain Transported Asset Protection Association (TAPA) Trucking Security Requirements (TSR) Level 1 approval. With more than 70% of goods handled by JJX Logistics being UN-regulated dangerous goods — such as commercial lithium-ion battery packs and Class 8 corrosive liquids — Samsara has played a pivotal role in ensuring the safety of drivers carrying dangerous, high-value cargo.” This looks like a nice little win for Samsara in what a JJX exec called “a high-pressure environment where compliance is paramount.”
TMDX 0.00%↑ – I’d call TransMedics’ April 30 report another excellent quarter. The company not only crushed top line estimates with $96.9M in revenue but posted a record $12.2M in net profit for a 12.6% net margin. It did so with increased volumes from all three organs while also seeing positive returns from its fledgling logistics and transportation arm.
Every once in a while, a company finds the sweet spot of an extreme understanding of its market with the performance excellence to back it up. TMDX is apparently in one of those moments. Even better, there’s nothing to suggest that moment won’t extend at least partway into 2025. Onward and upward I say.
TTD 0.00%↑ – April saw The Trade Desk announce a strategic partnership with foodpanda, a leading food and grocery delivery network in Asia The deal will allow brands to better target and measure digital ad campaigns in Hong Kong, Malaysia, Pakistan, Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, and Thailand. With just 11% of TTD’s 2023 revenue coming from international sources, this seems like a potentially significant move.
ZS 0.00%↑ – Zscaler recently extended its Zero Trust capabilities with the acquisition of Airgap Networks. Airgap’s technology will let ZS provide better protection between devices across a shared network while “shrinking the internal attack surface to help eliminate lateral threat movement on campus and OT networks.”
Next, the company was positioned as a Leader by Gartner Research in the Security Service Edge (SSE) category. This marks the third consecutive year ZS has earned this distinction, which coincides with Gartner’s introduction of this category. Previously, ZScaler had been recognized as a Leader in Secure Web Gateway by Gartner for ten straight years.
Lastly, Zscaler released three new product enhancements for its Digital Experience platform. First is Copilot, which leverages ZS’s recent moves to increase its AI capabilities. Copilot is an AI assistant which “instantly analyzes and harnesses knowledge from over 500 trillion data points daily across users, devices, networks, and applications, to provide IT operations, service desk, and security teams insights they need related to digital experience and performance. Teams can ask sequences of questions to effectively converse with Copilot, which uses Generative AI, to review high-level trends and progressively narrow results down to specific actionable insights.” Next was Hosted Monitoring, which helps IT teams continuously monitor availability and performance of applications. Last was Data Explorer, which creates customized reports for IT teams and leaders. All should be useful add-ons for ZS customers.
Zscaler has clearly emphasized innovation with its recent hirings and product releases. It’s busy April seems to fit right along those lines.
My current watch list…
…remains just monday.com (MNDY) and Super Micro Computer (SMCI) with outside interest in MercadoLibre (MELI) and NVIDIA (NVDA). I sure would like the IPO market to pick up again at some point to find some smaller, less covered names.
And there you have it.
April was a choppy month for both the market and our portfolio. However, I enter May feeling encouraged after decent reports from the cloud software bellwethers and TransMedics’ most excellent results. We’ll know a lot more after the slew of earnings reports coming the next few weeks. I remain (as ever) cautiously optimistic…
As usual, thanks for reading, and I hope everyone has a great May.
Appreciate the updates and the insights into these companies! Your posts helped guide me to TMDX (which was not on my radar at all) and the great investment it would become. Keep up the good work!
Any chance look into ASPN , looks GauchoRico had this and up almost 50% last 2 days ..