3 year follow-up on buying the dip on pandemic stocks

This is my 3-year investment update following buying the dip on ‘pandemic stocks’ that declined (70%+) in 2022. I started sharing public updates 1-2 times a year.

In early 2023 I built one of the first AI products at my company and my head exploded with the possibilities. So later that year I started reallocating into AI-related stocks. There’s more context in my previous updates linked below.

See my past updates:

Progress updates

Below are returns for this portfolio (opened in 2022) as of June 2025. The (*) indicates short term capital gain/loss (held for <1yr).

Realized (sold) in 2023

Affirm (AFRM): +18.09%
Allbirds (BIRD): +6.89%
Coinbase (COIN): +6.42%
Carvana (CVNA): +845.57%
Meta (META): +256.36%
Cloudflare (NET): +50.67%
Netflix (NFLX): +122.39%
Peloton (PTON): -71.51%
Roblox (RBLX): +25.57%
Shopify (SHOP): +51.27%
Snapchat (SNAP): -1.99%
Unity (U): +27.57%

See this update for comments.

Realized (sold) in 2024

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD): -18.69% (*)
Amazon (AMZN): +97.41%
Alphabet/Google (GOOGL): +75.05%
Apple (AAPL): +8.77% (*)
ARM (ARM): +10.52% (*)
ASML (ASML): -7.40% (*)
Intel (INTC): -20.12% (*)
Microsoft (MSFT): +4.53% (*)
Netflix (NFLX): +361.74%
Palantir (PLTR): +65.72% (*)
Roblox (RBLX): +42.66%
Shopify (SHOP): +86.96%
Snowflake (SNOW): +51.57%
Super Micro Computer (SMCI): +14.48% (*)
Taiwan Semiconductor (TSM): +103.19%
Tesla (TSLA): +92.16% (*)
Unity (U): -8.73%

See this update for comments.

Realized (sold) in 2025

Nebius (NBIS): -28.87% (*)
Nvidia (NVDA): +26.15% (*)
Super Micro Computer (SMCI): -19.81% (*)

Nvidia was the largest holding by far, so overall realized gain was positive: +18.42%.

I’m pretty disappointed in my performance for the first half of this year. Not necessarily because of the market swings due to tariffs (that’s just part of the game), but because of my poor planning.

Typically our accountant gives us estimated taxes early, but we were working with someone new this year, so the process started late. We also unfortunately had a death in our household in February, my mother-in-law passed unexpectedly, so that hit us really hard. I also started building a new habit tracking app. All together I just wasn’t paying much attention to the market turmoil.

So…I ended up having to liquidate some positions during the April lows to pay the large tax bill from last year’s realized gains. Yeah, I should have seen that coming and set some aside beforehand, so I locked in those losses, which was a big hit to my IRR 🤷‍♂️ Stupid mistake, lesson learned.

The upshot here is the NBIS and SMCI covered the tax bill and most of the NVDA was sold in late May/early June (HIFO) to reallocate into Coreweave, which we’ll cover next.

Unrealized (current investments)

Coreweave (CRWV): +32.23%
Meta (META): +585.99%
Nvidia (NVDA): +202.32%

I watched Corweave grow 3X since its IPO earlier this year. I wasn’t convinced initially, how would they really compete with the hyperscalers? I didn’t understand what I was missing. Then I saw an interview with Dynal Patel and Peter Salanki (CTO of Corweave) that gave me enough conviction to finally pull the trigger on a fairly large position.

I’m surprised Nvidia is only up ~10% over the last year given its continued growth, but my conviction in their execution and the broader market conditions around AI remains strong, so it remains my largest holding.

These returns are less impactful without the values or relative weights, but I’d like to maintain some anonymity around it. But for this update I exported my performance history to create the visual below for add’l context.

Rate of return (IRR)

My annual return for this portfolio (Jun 2022 to Jun 2025) is 56%. This is substantially lower than the 73.6% I posted in December in the 2.5 year investment update, but such is the cost of my failure to plan discussed earlier.
Portfolio growth is net of inflows/outflows.

Visualized

I exported my performance history from Vanguard since account creation and had ChatGPT create this visual.

Cumulative

2022

2023

2024

2025

Portfolio growth is net of inflows/outflows, S&P is price return baseline.

Investment thesis

My investment thesis remains the same, see a summary from this previous update. TL;DR:

“…AI is another secular trend like PCs (Windows, Mac), the internet (browsers, search, social) and mobile (iOS, Android, wearables). The difference is that new technology like AI can now spread faster than ever before and get used in new ways. Every new epoch uniquely benefits from the past, potentially bending the growth curve in new ways.

The other difference is that Nvidia has a monopoly position on the core technology driving this innovation. Therefore, the ~350% run up over the last 12 months doesn’t make Nvidia the stock of the last year, but rather it’s the stock of the next decade. The recent 3X gain will be a blip compared to what’s coming thanks to Nvidia’s CUDA (moat), among other things.”
1.5 year follow-up on buying the dip on pandemic stocks – Nov. 2023

We still underestimate the AI opportunity

In my last update I said we underestimate the AI opportunity and I still believe that’s the case, but to a greater extent that I did 6 months ago. I’ve been a heavy AI user for the last couple years, but I somehow continue to use it more and more.

For example, earlier this year I switched to Cursor (AI IDE) and use it daily. In the last week I also started using Superwhisper to dictate add’l context around my mocks, which lets me explore more, particularly since I now focus on frontend while my cofounder focuses on backend.

Robust tests, rules (MDC), etc. allow us to move quickly with minimal risk of breaking things thanks to the robust guardrails. And here’s the thing: This is the worst it’ll ever be.

I’m just constantly impressed at how much it improves productivity and my quality of life. It has also given me more time to pursue my slow but steady journey to learn the math behind AI (I’m at 628 days in a row as of today).

Past thoughts on AI

Final thoughts

I continue to be in the ‘maybe I’m just lucky‘ phase, and the major drop in IRR from ~70% to 56% shows just how fragile it is, especially doing it part time. In a previous update I also shared how my investment approach has changed.

I expect my next update to be the 3.5-year update later this year.

All posts from this series: