My Financial Journey

Well something else interesting happened today. The value of one of my Netflix purchases exceeded 100 times my original purchase price back in 2007. I purchased 28 shares of Netflix for $19.72 back on June 22nd of 2007. Today after a previous 7 to 1 split I have 196 shares at a cost basis of $2.81 per share and today the stock price is north of $286 per share netting me 100x my original money. In addition the value of all of my Netflix holdings (4 purchases amounting to $1800) has exceeded $100,000 with $98,200 of that coming in investment gains. Pretty sweet.

In the grand scheme of things it doesn’t mean too much, but I do seem to like to celebrate nice round number milestones around here and set nice round number goals for myself. Having a stock go up 100 times in value and having my first individual stock be worth $100,000 is a fun milestone to take note of, especially with it happening in the same day. It is cool because it shows the power of investing over time and the amazing power that time and compounding have. My initial invested amount over quadrupled just today. I know how damn hard it was to save $100,000 by the time I turned 30 and more importantly how damned important it was. Milestones like this kind of validate that the young MFJ had a clue of what he was doing and that true wealth is built very simply and relatively slowly over time.

Well as with my portfolio in general I had some high flyers when it came to my individual stocks. I had 3 stocks more than double and 11 stocks outperform the market out of my 27 individual stocks. Overall it doesn’t take too many winners to wipe out a lot of losers and well I sure had a lot of big winners this year. Looking at this list I feel very good about their prospects long term even given the large run up in 2017. Panera was bought out so that is no longer part of my portfolio. It is also interesting that some of my biggest winners this year are pretty massive companies and have been winners for me for quite a few years (Amazon, Netflix, Apple, Tesla).

Arista Networks +142.71%
Shopify +135.87%
IPG Photonics Corp +116.77%
Proto Labs +95.08%
Intuitive Surgical +70.59%
Panera +56%
Amazon +55.17%
Netflix +50.57%
Apple +45.70%
Tesla +43.49%
Brookfield Infrastructure Partners +34.00%

Now to my losers. 3D systems did it again! Every year I have owned it, it has easily made my best/worst list. Thankfully it’s only worth 0.13% of my portfolio and is currently down 73% for me.

3D systems annual performance
2012 +90.40%
2013 +172.91%
2014 -63.79%
2015 -73.63%
2016 +52.93%
2017 -36.89%

The big kick in the gut with this list was Under Armour and Chipotle, both of who have been very good long term wealth accumulators for me and which had previously been a pretty good portion of my portfolio. They both have their current short term struggles and I am more than willing to give them a few years to work things out.

Under Armour -48.29%
3D Systems -36.89%
Zoes Kitchen -28.79%
Chipotle -22.88%

In annual tradition I will list all of my current investments. These really do not change significantly from year to year as I don’t do a lot of buying and selling and well now as my portfolio has grown so big the amount of money I am putting in towards new investments tends to be sort of insignificant.

As I look at my holdings at year end one thing that sticks out to me is that my largest holdings have grown as an even larger percentage of my portfolio. I think I can interpret this two ways. One would be that I have my money in the right spot as my larger holdings did better than some of my other holdings. The other and probably just as likely scenario is that darned thing called compounding. Larger number get larger. I think I am seeing this in my portfolio as my largest holdings will continue to grow by a disproportionate size in my portfolio just by the fact that they were larger to start with. Compounding truly is incredibly powerful and I am starting to see it in more and more areas in the world and realize that simply by having a larger base you have incredible advantages over things that are smaller. Size matters big time.

I have no plans currently to modify my investments despite the continued growth of many of my large investments. My top 4 investments are diversified mutual funds in my 401k which are pretty much tracking the market. The fact that they have grown to be a larger portion of my overall nestegg kind of solidifies that previous statement about compounding as I have many other investments that outperformed them but fell in overall percentage due to the effects of larger numbers getting larger.

My largest individual stock holding at the end of the year was Tesla closely followed by Netflix. Each of these is less than 8% of my nestegg and I feel very very strongly about both of these investments going forward. The next holding is a private bank located in my hometown and then Amazon rounds out the top 4 of my individual stocks that account for almost 29% of my portfolio. I feel very good about my allocation right now. One thing that is kind of strange is I actually have 1.78% ($15k) in cash right now due to the fact that Buffalo Wild Wings was bought out. Panera was another stock that dropped off my list from last year due to acquisition.

Overall I don’t see this list changing in any significant fashion in 2018