1. Performance

• Over the trailing twelve months, the portfolio is up +18% against 20% for the S&P 500 (total return).

• Year-to-date, +13.2% against roughly +12.4% for the index. At the end of May I was at 18,9%, and with an ATH of 24% in June

• Since inception (2nd of October 2023): +21.2% vs S&P 500 +22.3%

All figures are pretax, net of fees, and exclude the effect of any cash contributions or withdrawals — only return on capital already at work.

I don’t use options and I’m currently unlevered, I plan to write about this later.

My job here is to follow around 15 stocks closely enough that you don’t have to — so you can track your portfolio in 1-2 hours a week, and still get access to the great buys when they show up.

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2. Sentiment

Patience is the key for investors: mistakes are made by entering the market too hastily, exiting too quickly, or trying to time the market—efforts that are unsuccessful most of the time.

Out of an abundance of caution, I’ve been tracking the S&P 500’s performance for several quarters now, and because my portfolio is divided into three parts:

• Stocks that are on the rise, such as Nebius, the star performer in my portfolio,

• New theses that need to be rolled out (Booking, HDS, THK, Microsoft)

• Theses that are taking longer than expected, or that are facing negative momentum (Atos, Novo Nordisk, Adobe).

I don’t see any issues in my portfolio right now that require me to make any decisions.

Valuations for AI stocks remain high and uncertain, and investor sentiment is splitting the market into two camps: the so-called AI winners and the AI losers. Getting into AI-related sectors like memory or photonics seems risky to me, and it’s important to track the momentum of stocks considered “losers” to improve your entry point. The discussion of Adobe’s stock price further on is a very good illustration of this.

Overall, the market is a bit expensive, but there are still plenty of opportunities available. In particular, I see stocks like Costco trading at a price that makes it highly likely they’ll be wiped out in the next market downturn—namely, a P/E ratio of 47, compared to annual growth of 15%...

3. Positions

Nebius Group - 22.83% of the portfolio

Status: On the quarterly results of August, 12 EPS beat estimates by a wide margin (-$0.12 vs -$0.69 expected), while revenue landed essentially in line ($582.3M vs $584.2M consensus). The stock rose more than 30% on the day the earnings were announced and quickly gave up those gains after a few days. The stock is up 9% over the past month.

Nebius is the largest holding in my portfolio, but I do not intend to reduce its weighting given its excellent results and outlook. I had mentioned that I might increase my position around $150, a price the stock briefly surpassed during the July 29 crisis related to Situational Awareness.

On August 24, Nebius completed a $5.75 billion convertible bond offering, including nearly $3.5 billion at 0.5% maturing in 2030, with the remainder at 4.5% maturing in 2034. In addition, $800 million in bonds were exchanged for nearly 16 million shares. This represents a potential dilution of 6%, which is minimal given the need to finance growth—especially growth at such a rapid pace.

Management always finds an opportune moment to announce bad news for shareholders—usually after a sharp rise in the stock price, a major contract, or an excellent quarterly report.

Atos Group - 13.05% of the portfolio

Status: No significant news since the H1 followup. Again, Management is delivering improvements, that the price didn’t catch up. According to my scenarios, Atos Group could be priced around €60-70. My portfolio stays in line with the SP500 performance since Atos price isn’t moving yet. Once it does, I should outperform the index.

Adobe - 10.8% of the portfolio

Status: Although there have been no major changes in the fundamentals, the stock has rebounded by 50% from its lows at the end of June. Its performance fluctuates based on investors’ projections for the software sector, which one day seems to have no future at all, only to become, the next day, an indispensable part of a company once again. The software sector is the perfect example of Mr. Market’s bipolar behavior in our time. The company is set to report on September 10, and this could lead to a re-rating given the lack of disruption anticipated in the deep dive, especially following the recent positive momentum. Keep in mind that the market is a bit slow to catch up, and may decide that the sell-off is over and that an uptrend lies ahead, attracting massive capital inflows to this sector, which is more predictable than the semiconductor sector.

Alphabet - 10.1% of the portfolio

Status: On August 6, Alphabet issued $31.5 billion in bonds, a record high for the company. Google’s parent company is no longer relying solely on its cash flows to finance its AI investments but is also turning to debt. In my view, a prudent use of debt is beneficial, assuming that the company, like its competitors, has visibility into the profitability of its investments. To support this, Google Cloud’s margins have been steadily increasing for several quarters. In addition, Berkshire Hathaway is increasing its stake in Alphabet at Warren Buffett’s express request—a sign that the Oracle of Omaha believes in the company’s competitive moat and its future over the coming decades.

Novo Nordisk - 8.6% of the portfolio

Status: The central point of this quarter is the guidance raise for 2026, with adjusted sales now expected to grow from flat to -6% at CER, vs. -4% to -12% previously. Management gave us two reasons to adjust sales: one good, a provision reversal, and one semi-good, with impairment of terminated drugs.

The main growth is made by the obesity segment, and inside it, by the Wegovy pill (almost none by the injectable Wegovy). I expect the worldwide launch of Wegovy HD to provide additional revenue and operating profit.

Verdict: The volume effect, which is positive, is now outweighing the price effect. In front of us, I see the upside; behind us is the downside.

Booking Holdings - 8,6% of the portfolio

Status: Thesis on track. Despite fears of AI disruption, tourists are still booking with Booking. Room nights grew 5% YoY, the operating margin improved from 33.1 to 34%. Free cash flow minus SBC is up 17%. A pretty solid quarter with beating on expectations on all metrics.

The price is up 24% since my deep dive on June, 5.

Strategy Inc. - 8.6% of the portfolio

Status: Bitcoin was sitting around its floor near the 200-week moving average, slightly below it and suddenly the market decided that the price was too low. As the market is more concerned than obsessed with AI, appetite for crypto came back, but I’m confident it comes back into focus eventually. Momentum is rising again.

An 8-K filed August 24 shows that 18.26M Class A shares were sold for $2.006B net. $136.4M went to buy back STRC preferred shares, $300M to the USD Reserve, and $1.59B seeded a new “USD Cash” pool earmarked for dividends, buybacks, or convertible redemptions. Michael Saylor’s strategy were to “never sell”; it changes to opportunistic buys and sells depending on market conditions, which I find quite sound. The price of Bitcoin appears to be stabilizing around 80k USD, up from 60-65k.

Microsoft - 7.2% of the portfolio

Status: I started a position on the 2nd of July. All the information is in the deep dive and I don’t see major updates to the deep dive from then.

Since my article, the stock is up 31%.

Interparfums - 3,6% of the portfolio

Status: I made a recent buy from Novo Nordisk and Adobe. No issues with both, but I wanted to show you skin in the game. The repricing is underway, with analysts raising price targets.

Everquote - 3,4% of the portfolio

Status: Thesis on track. A deep dive is coming, but the short version is the following: this is an asymmetric position which combines the strengths of a quality company with the discount inherent in small-cap stocks. The bet is that the profitability collapse of 2022 doesn’t repeat, while the market is still pricing in a level of uncertainty that no longer matches the business. I will certainly sell this one to add to AppLovin once the momentum is better.

Harmonic Drive Systems - 1,6% of the portfolio and THK - 1,2% of the portfolio

Status: I wrote an update on both on August 10: both companies raised their guidance and saw their stock prices fall amid concerns over intervention in the yen and the sell-off in semiconductors, but they did not exceed analysts’ expectations.

That’s a pity, because THK’s 364% increase in profits seemed very impressive. HDS will increase production capacity by 33% at its Beverly, Massachusetts, facility and is continuing to invest in Japan, allocating approximately 10 billion yen to the production of gearboxes for humanoid robots at its Ariake plant. THK will once again expand its ball screw factory in Dalian, with completion scheduled for December 2027. Neither Europe nor China is benefiting from capacity investments by either of these companies—which supports the “trusted supplier to the bloc” argument put forward in July.

4. Outlook

I have the following companies on the radar:

• Micron and SanDisk: both are good buys at these prices. I am looking for a continuation of the selloff considering the risk of cyclicity.

• Netflix: a good buy at current price.

• Super Micro Computer: a very attractive PE of 15, with risk of commoditization vs opportunity of bottleneck.

• Dino Polska: A genuinely beautiful Polish compounder, sitting on my watchlist. I’m waiting for signals that the Polish grocery price war is ending before entering. I need to watch it more closely, as the price war could be at the end. The momentum is good on this one.

• AppLovin: the PE ratio tends to compress over time. The growth stays amazing. I made a deep dive about this wonderful company, and expect to buy whenever the momentum gets better.

• DLocal: a good buy at current price. Very good long-term outlook

I write “good buy” meaning that the long-term outlooks are very good, but the stock could go in any direction within a year.

I follow companies on an “anti-radar”:

• Nvidia: The PE has been compressing quarter after quarter, which on the surface looks like the same setup as Adobe or Novo — a quality business getting cheaper. It isn’t. I suppose that as the AI supercycle progresses, the P/E ratio declines due to investors’ fears of the end of the cycle. In the absence of strong conviction, I prefer to sit on the sidelines and wait.

• Eli Lilly: I found no financial shenanigans despite investigation on this subject.

Final thoughts

To continue expanding the content available on my website and help new investors become self-sufficient, I’ve decided to write a series of articles on how to invest, with a particular focus on the basics. Part of what I hope to contribute is providing the information I wish I’d had as a new investor. As a priority, whenever I come across companies that seem like great buys with promising prospects, I’ll publish a deep dive. Otherwise, the focus will be on educational articles.

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Disclaimer: This content is for educational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice — see our full disclaimer.

• Over the trailing twelve months, the portfolio is up +26% against 18% for the S&P 500 (total return).

• Year-to-date, +8.3% against roughly +9.5% for the index. At the end of May I was at 18,9%, and with an ATH of 24% in June

• Since inception (2nd of October 2023): +19.5% vs S&P 500 +21.7%

All figures are pretax, net of fees, and exclude the effect of any cash contributions or withdrawals — this is a pure return on capital already at work.

I don’t use options and I’m currently unlevered, I plan to write about this later.

My job here is to follow around 15 stocks closely enough that you don’t have to — so you can track your portfolio in 1-2 hours a week, and still get access to the great buys when they show up.

2. Sentiment

I moved up with the market, and now I’m moving down with it. How do I feel about that? Genuinely, I don’t care. I’m confident in every single company I own, and I let their thesis play out.

I had a bit of FOMO with memory stocks going up so much in June, so I initiated a position in Sivers Semiconductors (0.5% of the portfolio), and sold it a couple of days after. I usually never invest without doing due diligence first, but I made an exception this time.

It was a bit of a bad surprise to see Atos Group didn’t reprice yet, because I strongly believe the company will recover and rerate significantly.

I feel like the semiconductor selloff will continue, and that I’ll get a chance to build positions in memory stocks — the prospects look very good for Micron and SanDisk.

What am I worried about? Losing my existing capital, with losses based on fundamentals. The market’s sentiment is now fluctuating because the investors don’t know how to position on AI stocks or how much to value them, since so much depends on the assumptions you start with.

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3. Pedagogical module : Compounder vs Multibagger: The Ratchet Effect

The concept: The portfolio runs on two buckets with different mandates.

Compounders

Do you remember the first rule of investing? Don’t lose.

The goal of this category is to secure your capital and let it appreciate over a long-term horizon. It’s the Quality phase of Warren Buffett (after his cigar-butt phase).

The objective is to maximize risk-adjusted return by holding exceptional companies you buy at a good price. Peter Lynch called it Growth at a Reasonable Price (GARP).

The rationale behind this is simple: roughly 4% of stocks generate 100% of long-term market returns.

The longer you hold them, the more important the growth of free cash flow becomes, and the less important the entry PE ratio becomes.

You can invest actively, holding individual stocks, or in a passive way with ETFs.

You may ask: which ones?

Since the best long-term risk-adjusted returns are in quality stocks and large ETFs, you would rather hold the Mag-7 or the MSCI World / Nasdaq-100 than no-growth dividend stocks. You could expect 15-25% per year of growth just on the FCF, plus a rerating of the PE.

Investors who got beaten down on a quality stock may say ‘I’m here for the long-term’. It is a good sentence because in this category, time is your friend, and you’d probably recover if you are patient enough.

Multibaggers

The goal of this category is to get massive gains in a short period of time. Why wouldn’t everybody do that ? Because it’s damn difficult ! You may find:

• Growth stock: finding it before everyone else

• Turnaround stocks: distinguish which company will recover

• Cyclical stocks: correctly anticipate the direction before the actual move

• Cryptoassets or commodities: correctly anticipate the direction before the actual move

You can also invest here in an active way, with the holding of individual stocks, or in a passive way with ETFs.

The way you deal with it is with the intrinsic asymmetry of the stock market: what you can lose is limited (max 100%), and what you can win is potentially unlimited. When you are leveraged, you break this asymmetry (generally, don’t be leveraged, especially in multibaggers). The ideal setup is a stock where ‘either I gain a significant amount, or I don’t lose much’. Don’t forget these are riskier stocks.

Some market spots are ideal for this category: small-caps, as they are under-covered, and inaccessible to big money because of illiquidity — meaning they can rapidly become a major shareholder.

Most 10-baggers come from small-caps, and some of them have the advantages of compounder as they have quality stocks, and of a multibagger with the re-rating.

I said you could expect 15-25% per year for the compounders, plus the rerating. For the multibaggers, almost everything is possible here, plus the rerating. It is a reason why I don’t like small-caps indexes. Moreover, the best ones will leave the intermediate indexes to be in the top indexes (nasdaq100, SP500, etc.)

Some stocks compound for so long that you end with a 10-bagger just by sitting on them: if you hold a stock for 10 years with a 25% CAGR, you have a 10-bagger. They are multibaggers in disguise - I still categorize them as compounders.

In this bucket, time may bless you or punish you. And the volatility is quite high (30-70% in a year is normal), you need a stronger stomach than in compounders. And if you’re leveraged, volatility is your enemy.

How to deal with both

• In a bull market, multibaggers may capture a significant part of the upside. When a multibagger pays off, it usually compensates for all the losers left along the way. As the portfolio grows, part of the gain stays safe in compounders, and part gets reallocated into other multibaggers. I call this a ratchet effect. It matters because a portfolio has a natural tendency to concentrate, especially toward its multibaggers, giving them a disproportionate size.

• In a bear market, capital can be reallocated from compounders to multibaggers to regain exposure to the upside and get strong entry points on beaten-down multibaggers.

• Tax matters from the moment you enter a position, not just at exit — always think in after-tax terms.

• As the portfolio grows, the natural tendency is to shrink the multibagger percentage and grow the compounder percentage. Above $1M, being 100% in multibaggers feels like madness: why risk losing everything you have for money you don’t need?

My personal portfolio of six figures is designed to run 50% compounders, and 50% multibaggers, though I frequently need to reallocate toward compounders (the ratchet effect).

Questions

This probably raises a few questions worth asking yourself:

• Categorize your own positions: which bucket does each one actually belong to?

• Are you satisfied with your current allocation between the two?

• Is there redundancy in your portfolio — multiple positions doing the same job?

• Is there real diversification, or does it just look diversified on paper? Are the underlying theses and key factors correlated?

• Do you understand what you hold and why you hold it?

• Is each stock you hold actually better than its category ETF?

4. Positions

Nebius Group - 21,93% of the portfolio

Status: Thesis on track. Exceptional business. The valuation went down from the June ATH, and I would increase my position with a price under $150. Generally speaking, when I tell myself such a price, the stock has a floor a bit higher. It just bottomed to this price on the 29th of July with the Situation Awareness selloff.

Atos Group - 15,19% of the portfolio

Status: I just published yesterday an article about the followup of the thesis. H1 followup

Management is delivering improvements, that the price didn’t catch up. According to my scenarios, Atos Group could be priced around €60-70. My portfolio stays in line with the SP500 performance since Atos price isn’t moving yet. Once it does, I should outperform the index.

Adobe - 11,39% of the portfolio

Status: Thesis on track, no change to the moat read laid out in the deep dive. Q2 FY2026 results, published June 11, confirmed the core of the thesis: record revenue of $6.62B (+13% reported), ending ARR of $27.1B (+12.5%), record gross margin, and EPS beating consensus ($5.96 non-GAAP vs. ~$5.82 expected). Adobe also repurchased 8.5M shares, continuing the buyback that’s been quietly compounding EPS regardless of sentiment.

The June 18 product announcement reinforced the moat thesis directly: Adobe is distributing Creative Agent through third-party LLMs (ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Gemini) instead of being disintermediated by them — confirming that the moat is orchestration and distribution, not raw model quality. The six largest global agencies (Dentsu, Havas, Omnicom, Publicis, Stagwell, WPP) are now standardizing on Adobe, which speaks directly to the enterprise lock-in argument from the deep dive.

The honest nuance: Adobe has still lost UI/UX to Figma and the consumer segment to Canva. The thesis rests on the 81% of revenue that sits in the fortresses — and nothing in this quarter’s numbers (ARR growth, gross margin above 87%, stable Creative Cloud retention) signals that those fortresses are cracking. The stock trades near a 7-year low, around 11x earnings, on sentiment and management transition noise (CFO departure to Marvell, CEO/CFO transition uncertainty) rather than on any fundamental deterioration.

The stock is up 30% from its lowest. I don’t see anybody left selling Adobe: those already did. As there are no more sellers, the stock is due to go up.

Q2 follow-up

Novo Nordisk - 11,29% of the portfolio

Status: Thesis on track, no breach versus the original deep dive — but it still needs to materialize in the numbers.

Novo Nordisk added a new U.S. distribution rail on July 23: a Crux collaboration giving employers transparent, no-markup Wegowy pricing through the NovoCare Network Pharmacy, funded via HRA contributions applied at point of sale.

As the efficacy of Wegowy HD vs Eli Lilly’s drug and prices are similar, and as Novo’s volumes are ahead, I do not see any reasons for the valuation gap to not close.

The stock is up 34% from its lowest: the momentum is quite in favor of the company for the coming quarters.

Next results: 5th of August, the earning call will be very interesting, with a potential guidance modification since Novo sandbagged its forecast for 2026.

Alphabet - 11,08% of the portfolio

Status: Thesis on track. Exceptional business — the kind I’d consider holding forever if I were a buy-and-hold investor.

Alphabet is still an incredible cash-machine with world class products. The 82% improvement in the Cloud business is impressive at such revenue. The margin is expanding, so are Microsoft’s and Amazon’s. I see it as a confirmation of the profitability of AI’s investments.

For now, the PE is compressed by the exceptional results in the P&L of Anthropic and SpaceX.

Q2 followup

Booking Holdings - 8,54% of the portfolio

Status: Thesis on track, sleep-well-at-night territory. I funded this position by selling OKEA ASA, a Norwegian oil play I’d held since August 2025, for +110% in nine months. The rotation wasn’t incidental — my view was that the geopolitical conflict would stay on a plateau rather than escalate, which made rotating out of an oil-cycle bet and into a quality consumer cyclical at a sentiment trough the same logic applied twice, on opposite sides of the oil price. If the situation actually deteriorates into something closer to a real crash, that’s a different scenario entirely — I have a dedicated crash plan for that, and Booking’s sizing doesn’t need to account for it on its own.

Initiated on May 12 at a normalized PE of ~18x — the third time in ten years Booking has traded this cheap, after March 2016 and March 2020. The thesis is simple: a quality compounder priced as if it’s broken, when the numbers say otherwise. A great buy, and one I can hold without checking the price every day.

Move: No change this month. Prepared to add up to 20% of the portfolio if the stock falls further and the thesis holds — the original deep dive has the full scorecard.

Microsoft - 6,91% of the portfolio

Status: I started a position on the 2nd of July. All the information is in the deep dive.

Since my article, the stock is up 24%. The PE ratio of 22 seemed to be the floor for the stock. I am lucky to get such results this quickly.

Strategy Inc. - 6,65% of the portfolio

Status: Thesis on track, no breach — patience is what’s required here. Bitcoin is sitting around its floor near the 200-week moving average, slightly below it right now. The market is currently obsessed with AI and has little appetite for crypto, but I’m confident it comes back into focus eventually. No bankruptcy risk for MSTR — the balance sheet holds — but sentiment stays negative for now.

Everquote - 3,53% of the portfolio

Status: Thesis on track. A deep dive is coming, but the short version: this is an asymmetric position that combines the upside of quality with the structural discount of a small cap. The core bet is that the profitability collapse of 2022 doesn’t repeat, while the market is still pricing in a level of uncertainty that no longer matches the business. Patience is the main input here — I expect it to be rewarded over the next few quarters.

Move: I trimmed to add to multibaggers stocks in robotics.

Harmonic Drive Systems - 1,72% of the portfolio

Status: FY March 2026 closed out with revenue of ¥59.6bn (+7% YoY), but net income dropped -53.7% to ¥1.6bn, with net margin compressing to 2.7% vs 6.2% the prior year — so top-line growth is real, but profitability has weakened. The bright spot: FY March 2027 guidance is aggressive — revenue targeted at ¥68bn (+14.2%), operating income +141.5%, net income +179.7%, driven by demand in industrial robots, semiconductor equipment, and medical applications. TTM gross margin is around 28.3%.

The market is pricing in a sharp profitability rebound next year — but with a TTM P/E already north of 280x, this is a bet on guidance execution. The stock is in a pullback along with all the semis since June.

The company will publish next results on the 7th of August.

THK - 1,31% of the portfolio

Status: The fundamental momentum here is cleaner and more immediate: management has raised FY2026 guidance twice, on stronger-than-expected industrial machinery orders both in Japan and internationally. Latest guidance: H1 revenue of ¥138bn (+8.7%), H1 operating income of ¥15.4bn (+51%), and full-year revenue of ¥276bn with operating income of ¥31bn — a solid rebound after a 2025 marked by a large net loss. THK reports earnings on August 5, 2026 (in 4 days), worth watching closely to confirm the trajectory. The stock is also in a pullback along with all the semis since June.

5. Outlook

I have the following companies on the radar:

• Micron and SanDisk: both are good buys at these prices. I am looking for a continuation of the selloff considering the risk of cyclicity.

• Netflix: a good buy at current price.

• Super Micro Computer: a very attractive PE of 15, with risk of commoditization vs opportunity of bottleneck.

• Dino Polska: A genuinely beautiful Polish compounder, sitting on my watchlist. I’m waiting for signals that the Polish grocery price war is ending before entering.

• AppLovin: the PE ratio tends to compress over time. The growth stays amazing.

• DLocal: a good buy at current price.

I write “good buy” meaning that the long-term outlooks are very good, but the stock could go in any direction within a year.

I follow companies on an “anti-radar”:

• Nvidia: The PE has been compressing quarter after quarter, which on the surface looks like the same setup as Adobe or Novo — a quality business getting cheaper. It isn’t. On a cyclical name approaching the back end of its cycle, a falling PE is often a misleading signal: the market is pricing in earnings that haven’t shown up yet to fall, and the multiple compresses precisely because the cycle, not the sentiment, is turning. This is the trap the good buy / great buy / scream buy framework is supposed to help you avoid — the multiple alone doesn’t tell you which kind of “cheap” you’re looking at.

• Eli Lilly: I will track financial shenanigans because of the trial for misleading information about drug efficacy vs Wegowy. It is generally the consequence of the little arrangements with the truth that the company is accused of.

Conclusion

Performance of the portfolio is in line with the SP500, as Atos Group’s price doesn’t reflect the positive changes from the H1. The outperformance of the portfolio could happen fast after the rerating. I entered new positions where the theses are playing out, such as Booking, Strategy, Microsoft and robotic stocks.

My objective is also to reach 15 positions, so my dear readers can have a variety of stocks to read, but I’m in no rush to get there. The primary point is to identify great buys. I am pretty confident I’ll achieve 30% at the end of the year if the market continues in this direction. Otherwise, I would be happy to buy great companies at better prices. We are here to take advantage of the inefficiencies and madness of the stock market: that is where alpha lies.

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Important Disclosure & Disclaimer

All content published by JB Peter on this platform is strictly for educational and informational purposes. It does not constitute investment, financial, legal, or tax advice, nor does it represent a personal recommendation or solicitation to buy or sell securities. This research is operated by ORIACON (SASU) and reflects independent corporate analysis. Every reader must conduct their own independent research (Due Diligence) or consult a licensed professional before making any financial decision, as financial markets involve a high risk of capital loss. At the time of writing, ORIACON or the author HOLD shares in the company analyzed in this article. Following this publication, ORIACON and the author reserve the right to buy, sell, or modify positions in any security mentioned at any time, without prior notice to readers or subscribers.

Over the trailing twelve months, the portfolio is up +31% against +25-26% for the S&P 500 (total return). Year-to-date, +12% against roughly +10% for the index.

Track record:

• Current year YTD: +12% vs S&P 500 +8%, last end of may I was at 18,9%, and with an ATH of 24% in June

• Since inception (2nd of October 2023): +22% vs S&P 500 +22%

All figures are pretax, net of fees, and exclude the effect of any cash contributions or withdrawals — this is a pure return on capital already at work, not a reflection of savings added or removed.

I don’t use options, short positions. I’m currently unlevered, I plan to write about this later.

My job here is to follow around 15 stocks closely enough that you don’t have to — so you can track your portfolio in 1-2 hours a week, and still get access to the great buys when they show up.

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2. Sentiment

I’ve had strong movements on my portfolio this month, with amplitudes of more than 10% on some positions. I went from 10 positions in April to 8 today.

I made some changes to the portfolio in April and May. I now have more time to extend my research horizon, and plan to cover 15 companies, with skin in the game on the companies I cover. It’s my full-time job now.

I also closed one position, GigaCloud Technology (12% of my portfolio), at the end of May, as I suspected it to be a fraud. As I am currently buying a house, I divested the amount to pay down a mortgage. The goal here is financial freedom, and this newsletter is also built toward that goal.

I’m aware I’m too concentrated, with close to 50% of the portfolio on two stocks, following strong positive moves on those and YTD pullbacks on others. This doesn’t shake my conviction on the names that are down, and it doesn’t unsettle me on the names that are up. I’m waiting for each thesis to play out. I planted these, and I’m now waiting for their fruit.

I’m rather satisfied with my YoY performance, and my cumulative performance, after almost three years in the markets. I think the best is yet to come. My long term plan is to provide annual returns of 30-50%. Warren Buffett said it’s doable with small amounts of capital (a few million dollars…) —and I’m taking him at his word.

3. Pedagogical module : Good buy, great buy, screaming buy

I have good news and bad news. The bad news: I made several mistakes and will do more. The good news: you can learn from mine.

I bought Adobe on March 19, 2025, at a PE of 25.6. A good buy — a strong business, a reasonable price, nothing more. I was satisfied with that. By the end of the year, the multiple had compressed into great buy territory. Today, at roughly 11x, it’s sitting in a zone that could turn out to be a screaming buy.

I got the business right. I got the momentum wrong. I was happy with the good buy result instead of waiting for the market to tell me where it was actually going. I had to come back and add to the position later to make up for entering too early. The thesis never wavered — I’m still fully convinced of it today. The timing did.

This is the lesson behind three categories of stock you’ll experience as a buyer.

Good buy. Often called “a no brainer” by people who haven’t thought about the downside. You pay a reasonable price for a good business. That’s exactly what Adobe and Novo were last year. The business case looks obvious — and it is, on the merits. But the multiple, and investor sentiment, can still go lower. A good buy gives you no real margin of safety. If the narrative keeps deteriorating, you bleed before you win. After a few years, if you are patient enough, you can get easily 20% per year on those.

Great buy. The ratio between potential loss and potential upside turns clearly in your favor. You’re paying an attractive price for an excellent business at a moment when sentiment is depressed — not euphoric, not capitulating, just unloved. This is the zone where discipline is enough. You don’t need to be a hero. You don’t need perfect timing. You need to recognize the mispricing and act on it. It’s Alphabet on April 25, at 17x earnings in the middle of the AI-disruption scare on Search.

Screaming buy. A market anomaly. Meta and Netflix in 2022 — both crushed in the same bear market, both recovering into some of the best returns of the decade (Netflix is almost a 7-bagger in 3 years). This is the dream every investor chases — and it’s rare, and brutally hard to catch, because it shows up in the middle of panic, exactly when most people have no cash left and no stomach to act.

Example with Netflix in 2022

With a buy in the good buy zone (60$), and a sell in may 2025 (120$), you made 25% CAGR. With a great buy (40$), you made 43% CAGR, and with the screaming buy zone (20$), you made 80% CAGR.

If you just buy and hold, your performance tends to the long term rentability of the stock, with probably no more than 25% (which is already excellent on the long term).

The general guide — not a formula. For an exceptional business with its fundamentals intact, a PE in the 15-19x range is a reasonable marker for great buy territory; below that, you’re approaching screaming buy. But this is a guide, not an automatic trigger. It only applies if the moat is genuinely intact. If fundamentals are deteriorating, a falling multiple isn’t a discount — it’s the market correctly repricing a weaker business, and that’s not a buy at any price.

Where this puts Adobe and Novo today. Both currently trade in the 11-12x PE range, well below what the 15-19x marker would suggest for a great buy on an exceptional business. Whether that makes them screaming buys isn’t something I’m willing to claim. A screaming buy is a market anomaly — rare, and confirmed only after the fact. My conviction is that both are great buys.

What I take from this. I’ve raised my own bar. I used to settle for good buys. Not anymore. The Adobe experience — being satisfied too early, then having to come back and add to the position to correct for it — taught me that patience has a cost when you skip it, even when the thesis holds. My new standard for any new position: great buy, minimum. As long as the opportunity of a great buy, I will stay with my portfolio and continue to investigate. I won’t add positions for the sake of diversification.

4. Positions

It’s a first edition, I will improve the status over time.

Nebius Group — 28.1% of the portfolio

Status: Thesis on track. Exceptional business, and I find the valuation rich at current levels. But selling a position that keeps performing, just because it looks expensive, is exactly the kind of market-timing call I’m bad at. I’d rather follow the stock than try to outguess it. Volatility on this one isn’t a concern; conviction on the business is what matters here, not the swings.

Move: No change this month. Position held as is.

Alphabet — 15.7% of the portfolio

Status: Thesis on track. Exceptional business — the kind I’d consider holding forever if I were a buy-and-hold investor. Fundamentals keep growing fast, and the capex raise doesn’t worry me. I’m planning a deep dive on the name. Up close to 100% since May 2025, and I’m perfectly satisfied with the position as it stands.

Move: I plan to trim this position to fund a new one — not a change of view on Alphabet, but an arbitrage to put skin in the game on a name I’m about to start covering.

Novo Nordisk — 11.4% of the portfolio

Status: Thesis on track, no breach versus the original deep dive — but it still needs to materialize in the numbers. Since the end of May, Wegovy has been reimbursed at 65% by the French national health insurance (Sécurité sociale) — the European leg of the thesis is moving forward.

Move: Divested Fortinet in April to add to this position. A direct expression of relative conviction between the two. Novo is also a great example of the good/great buy described above

Adobe — 9.0% of the portfolio

Status: Thesis on track, no change to the moat read laid out in the deep dive. Q2 FY2026 results, published June 11, confirmed the core of the thesis: record revenue of $6.62B (+13% reported), ending ARR of $27.1B (+12.5%), record gross margin, and EPS beating consensus ($5.96 non-GAAP vs. ~$5.82 expected). Adobe also repurchased 8.5M shares, continuing the buyback that’s been quietly compounding EPS regardless of sentiment.

The June 18 product announcement reinforced the moat thesis directly: Adobe is distributing Creative Agent through third-party LLMs (ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Gemini) instead of being disintermediated by them — confirming that the moat is orchestration and distribution, not raw model quality. The six largest global agencies (Dentsu, Havas, Omnicom, Publicis, Stagwell, WPP) are now standardizing on Adobe, which speaks directly to the enterprise lock-in argument from the deep dive.

The honest nuance: Adobe has still lost UI/UX to Figma and the consumer segment to Canva. The thesis rests on the 81% of revenue that sits in the fortresses — and nothing in this quarter’s numbers (ARR growth, gross margin above 87%, stable Creative Cloud retention) signals that those fortresses are cracking. The stock trades near a 7-year low, around 11x earnings, on sentiment and management transition noise (CFO departure to Marvell, CEO/CFO transition uncertainty) rather than on any fundamental deterioration.

The good buy → great buy progression is detailed in the pedagogical module above — same story, reinforced by the print.

Move: No change this month. Q2 follow-up

Booking Holdings — 7.8% of the portfolio

Status: Thesis on track, sleep-well-at-night territory. I funded this position by selling OKEA ASA, a Norwegian oil play I’d held since August 2025, for +110% in nine months. The rotation wasn’t incidental — my view was that the geopolitical conflict would stay on a plateau rather than escalate, which made rotating out of an oil-cycle bet and into a quality consumer cyclical at a sentiment trough the same logic applied twice, on opposite sides of the oil price. If the situation actually deteriorates into something closer to a real crash, that’s a different scenario entirely — I have a dedicated crash plan for that, and Booking’s sizing doesn’t need to account for it on its own.

Initiated on May 12 at a normalized PE of ~18x — the third time in ten years Booking has traded this cheap, after March 2016 and March 2020. The thesis is simple: a quality compounder priced as if it’s broken, when the numbers say otherwise. A great buy, and one I can hold without checking the price every day.

Move: No change this month. Prepared to add up to 20% of the portfolio if the stock falls further and the thesis holds — the original deep dive has the full scorecard.

Everquote — 6.8% of the portfolio

Status: Thesis on track. A deep dive is coming, but the short version: this is an asymmetric position that combines the upside of quality with the structural discount of a small cap. The core bet is that the profitability collapse of 2022 doesn’t repeat, while the market is still pricing in a level of uncertainty that no longer matches the business. Patience is the main input here — I expect it to be rewarded over the next few semesters, not the next few weeks.

Move: No change this month.

Strategy Inc. — 6.1% of the portfolio

Status: Thesis on track, no breach — patience is what’s required here. Bitcoin is sitting around its floor near the 200-week moving average, slightly below it right now. The market is currently obsessed with AI and has little appetite for crypto, but I’m confident it comes back into focus eventually. No bankruptcy risk for MSTR — the balance sheet holds — but sentiment stays negative for now.

5. Outlook

I want to improve my knowledge of a lot of companies I want to follow, so most of my time is spent on this and on writing deep dives on the companies I own.

On the radar — Microsoft. I’m finalizing my due diligence on MSFT. If it checks out, I’ll write up the deep dive and very likely initiate a position shortly after. The stock seems to stabilize around its 200 day moving average.

On the radar — Dino Polska. A genuinely beautiful Polish compounder, sitting on my watchlist. I’m waiting for signals that the Polish grocery price war is ending before entering. (Not currently held.)

On the radar — Netflix and dLocal. Both are good buys at current prices. They could enter the portfolio if the price comes down further — not urgent, but on the list. (Not currently held.)

A broader observation: software names look unusually interesting right now across the board — more candidates than I can act on at once.

Anti-radar — Nvidia. The PE has been compressing quarter after quarter, which on the surface looks like the same setup as Adobe or Novo — a quality business getting cheaper. It isn’t. On a cyclical name approaching the back end of its cycle, a falling PE is often a misleading signal: the market is pricing in earnings that haven’t shown up yet to fall, and the multiple compresses precisely because the cycle, not the sentiment, is turning. This is the trap the good buy / great buy / screaming buy framework is supposed to help you avoid — the multiple alone doesn’t tell you which kind of “cheap” you’re looking at.

Conclusion

This month was less about any single trade and more about discipline catching up with conviction. Eight positions instead of ten, a research horizon stretching toward fifteen, and a standard for new money that’s gone from “good enough” to “great buy, minimum.” Adobe and Novo are the proof that the lesson came from real mistakes, not from theory — and Microsoft, if the due diligence holds, will be the first position built under the new bar from day one.

The portfolio is concentrated, the conviction is high, and I’m not in a hurry. Plant the thesis, do the work, let the price come to you.

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