Playing in the Garden
June 7, 2023
After the coldest, snowiest winter we’ve seen here in the Rocky Mountain states since 1983, it’s really nice to feel the sunshine. As a gardener, to see my plants starting to perk up, seeing the flowers in bloom, and looking forward to some fresh fruits and vegetables on my table. However, for those of you who have ever tried growing, there are always threats to the garden lurking. Blight, snails, squash bugs, tomato hornworms, lack of rain, you name it. Sometimes they’re manageable, sometimes not. More often than not, it’s something that you don’t anticipate that’ll damage your crop. But for me, I have a process that I go through to make sure that everything I can do, I do. Short of pulling out all my plants, there is no way to avoid every risk to every plant. It’s disappointing, but reality.
Why the gardening story? Investing seems to be a parallel endeavor. For the fund, we just went through the coldest, nastiest winter for emerging tech since 2000-2002. For perspective, Amazon, hardly an emerging company or technology, was down 45% in 2022. Many smaller tech companies were down 60-80% for the year. However, with a new year comes the possibility of a fresh start. The fund is up about 2% in the last 5 weeks. Not earth shattering, but a start. There are still many stocks we track that aren’t close to being eligible for purchase, but a handful have shown some movement and allowed us to take a bit more risk. Don’t get me wrong, we’re still 80% or so in cash and T Bills, so risk mitigation remains a priority.
I can go through all the risks that seem apparent to us all if we just watch the news, but a few parts of the market seem to be taking hold. If these little plants can sprout more, we’ll certainly move toward buying more, but as always, we need that confirmation from the market, not some talking head on some random business news channel.
I’m not one to prognosticate, but the mood is so negative that I actually have a bit of hope that we’ll see a bit more of a rally going through the summer. One thing that I’ve learned: The masses are almost always wrong (see the inevitable credit default of the US Government)……
As always, we appreciate your confidence and loyalty!