Welcome to the first ever installment of the Freedom Portfolio! As a reminder, the Freedom Portfolio represents my attempt to beat the market (represented by the S&P 500 index) by buying and selling shares of individual companies. The portfolio represents the vast majority of individual publicly traded companies that I am invested in. I’ve been managing this portfolio since 2003.

The Freedom Portfolio will be the primary way that I will measure how I am doing in my quest to beat the market, and October 1st, 2018 represents the starting point of where I will be measuring. My plan is to check in every quarter with an update on both the Freedom Portfolio’s return and the return of the S&P 500.

A few important points about the data below:

• M. Falcon? – Can’t remember what those crazy allocation terms stand for? Check out: The Freedom Portfolio – Defining my Terms for a refresher.
• Performance – The last two columns measure the performance of the given position since I bought it both in absolute terms and relative to the S&P 500. For example: Disney has gone up 89% since I purchased my shares in 2013, which might sound good, except it’s actually under-performing the S&P 500 by 18 percentage points during that time.
• Start Date – While October 1st, 2018 is the official start of the Freedom Portfolio, many of these positions have been held for me for years prior, which is what the performance numbers are based on. I included them simply to provide some context on which positions might’ve grown to the size they are currently (Amazon, Netflix, Axos Financial, for example) and to give a striking visual of the power of holding quality companies for the long term.
• Serenity Now – As of this moment, the portfolio is a little heavy on Serenity sized holdings. I don’t expect this to be the case moving forward. In preparation of launching this portfolio (and so I could make the claim that it represented the vast majority of my investment in individual, publicly traded companies), I had rolled over a 401(k) from a previous employer. As a result, I entered into a few new positions and added to some smaller ones, which coincidentally resulted in a lot more Serenity sized holdings than normal. Eagle-eyed viewers can probably identify the new positions by virtue of their 0% return so far. I expect this Serenity imbalance to remedy itself by the next check-in, as certain companies over-perform and others under-perform.
• Lots of positions – There are 28 different companies that make up the Freedom Portfolio right now. That’s a little on the high side for me, and I wouldn’t be too surprised if I ended up trimming one or two companies over the coming year.

Without further ado, here are the current companies in the Freedom Portfolio:

Ticker	Company Name	Allocation	Performance*	vs S&P*
AMZN	Amazon	Babylon 5	423%	343%
NFLX	Netflix	Enterprise	669%	598%
SHOP	Shopify	Enterprise	261%	227%
DIS	Disney	Serenity	89%	-18%
ATVI	Activision Blizzard	Serenity	116%	68%
AX	Axos Financial	Serenity	255%	158%
MELI	Mercado Libre	Serenity	166%	117%
SQ	Square	Serenity	59%	52%
TSLA	Tesla	Serenity	36%	-7%
ILMN	Illumina	Serenity	166%	119%
TWTR	Twitter	Serenity	27%	-23%
NVDA	Nvidia	Serenity	193%	165%
IQ	iQiyi	Serenity	25%	18%
RDFN	Redfin	Serenity	-8%	-14%
OAK	Oaktree Capital	Serenity	2%	-2%
JD	JD.com	Serenity	-5%	-6%
GOOG	Alphabet	Serenity	0%	0%
ISRG	Intuitive Surgical	Serenity	3%	2%
AABA	Altaba	Serenity	0%	0%
MKL	Markel	Serenity	0%	0%
TCEHY	Tencent	Serenity	-12%	-19%
BIDU	Baidu	Serenity	0%	0%
KSHB	KushCo	M. Falcon	38%	35%
NVCR	NovoCure	M. Falcon	16%	14%
TDOC	Teladoc	M. Falcon	58%	50%
BZUN	Baozun	M. Falcon	-7%	-7%
BLX	Bladex	M. Falcon	-19%	-28%
NVTA	Invitae	M. Falcon	-10%	-10%

*: Approximations. As of 10/3/2018

I’ve already written about one company in the portfolio (KushCo) and I plan to write about a handful more over the coming months to explain why I am optimistic about the company. In the meantime, I wanted to open the floor to you. Any companies above that you have questions about? Some that you wouldn’t want to invest in or would even consider shorting? Let me know!