Looks like the stock market in 2021 is picking up where the 2020 stock market left off. Maybe one day I’ll write about the day I almost bought some $7 Gamestop (GME) calls in August of 2020 and do the math to figure out exactly how much of a gain I lost out on. Maybe it will top my previous biggest investing mistake that I made with Netflix (NFLX) which at last check was at $2.3+ million.

I’ve made a few tweaks to the Freedom Portfolio over the past few weeks and wanted to briefly outline my thought process below:

Sells

Tesla (TSLA) – Tesla has been so difficult for me to deal with. I strongly believe in letting my winners run and doing so has paid off handsomely with companies like Shopify (SHOP) and not doing so has been incredibly painful (see: Netflix example above). At the same time, I find the current valuation to be completely indefensible and am having an incredibly difficult time seeing how there can still be a significant amount of upside left at these levels. And yet, every time I have trimmed my position, the stock continues to go up. The simple fact of the matter is that I am uncomfortable letting Tesla grow to be too big of a position in my portfolio, which is why I have continued to trim. It still remains a Babylon 5 level position (RIP, Mira Furlan), but I intend to keep trimming for now to avoid letting it get to be too large.

Fastly (FSLY) – I haven’t felt like I’ve had the time to do any deep dives into any of my holdings lately and, as a result, I haven’t mentioned the P.A.U.L. System recently. However, I absolutely have still been using my system to mentally score my positions. When it came to Fastly, I had been getting more and more concerned the “Understanding” score. Put simply, I found that I couldn’t articulate why Fastly was better or even different from Cloudflare (NET), one of its main competitors. Without that level of understanding, it’s hard to have high conviction, and so I decided it was time to redeploy that capital into higher conviction picks.

Buys

Zoom (ZM) – Over the past 3 months, Zoom has fallen around 30% from its all time highs. Presumably the reason is because people think that once everybody is vaccinated and COVID is “over”, that Zoom won’t be nearly as ubiquitous. I think that could be short-sighted and an over-simplification. I believe that the lockdowns have permanently altered some business behavior and that a certain level of video conferencing that didn’t exist before is here to stay, and I believe Zoom is the primary beneficiary of that. For that reason, I wanted to take advantage of the dip in price.

Etsy (ETSY) and Fiverr (FVRR) – I initiated these positions last year based on the idea that a growing “side-hustle” movement and maturing ecommerce space would greatly benefit these companies. The more research that I do, the higher my conviction has grown on these two companies and I wanted to increase my position size. Both companies are now solidly Serenity level positions.

Nano-X (NNOX) – Despite being excited about the potential with Nano-X, I had decided to not add to my position because a series of short reports had me wondering if there was a possibility that the company was a fraud. The jury is still out, and likely will continue to be out until FDA approval either comes or doesn’t. A decision is expected in the first half of 2021. Until then, though, I’m becoming less and less concerned over the idea that the company is a complete fraud. As a result, I added slightly to my position, although it remains a Millennium Falcon level position.

Skillz (SKLZ) and fuboTV (FUBO) – Two new positions that I have added to try to get additional exposure to live sports streaming and online gambling. Both are tiny positions and if my conviction grows (or the position does), then I might consider writing more about what excites me about the companies. For now, though, I just wanted to get a little skin in the game.