Hey guys it's sasha in may this year i started a public challenge of trying to beat the stock market. I created a new investing account i put in some money and set out with the goal of trying to get a better return than the stock market. This is a fun challenge, because almost every active investor who tries to beat the market loses 90 to 95, actively managed funds lose versus the market, and i think it's probably much higher for retail investors. So the odds are firmly stacked against me, but i started it anyway, and it is now three months since that point.

So it is time for yet another monthly update to see how we're doing now this month. There is quite a lot to talk about because some things have happened. I've made some sharp moves with my investments and i'm going to share those with you and explain why i made them. The portfolio also jumped a lot in value and i'm gon na explain why.

Just before we jump right in, if you appreciate watching an idiot on youtube, putting in three thousand dollars trying to do the impossible task of beating the market, i'd really really be super grateful if you could just go and smash the like button for the youtube algorithm. Thank you so much for doing it. Now, let's talk about what happened over the last month, the market has been jittery, there's been a lot of talk about inflation and its long-term impact, and it's been affecting growth stocks, especially long-term growth stocks, which just happens to be the exact thing that i invest in And if that inflation does sustain, if it does materialize into a long-term issue, my portfolio is going to get hit hard because it is a literally a bunch of long-term growth stocks. So naturally, in that situation many people will go and make some defensive moves.

Some people will maybe move into recovery stocks. Some other people will begin pulling money out and sitting on the cash pile waiting for a crash. Other people will try to diversify their portfolios to move away from these types of stocks. Now i've done none of those things.

In fact, i have done the opposite, so i started out with positions in 12 different companies, but in the last two weeks that number has dropped down to seven. I have sold out in this portfolio out of five stocks. Now remember, this is exactly why i chose steak as the platform for doing this experiment for smaller investing amounts. Stake is the best platform.

In my opinion, for active investing in the uk. I can sell out of stocks and reinvest that money without paying any fees at all. If i had this portfolio on any other platform, including things like trading 212, which people think is the cheapest, it would cost me 0.15 to sell and another 0.15 to buy back into the same stock. So i would lose 0.3 every single time.

I change my money from one company to another: stake, only charges when i deposit or withdraw money from the account and while the money is in the account it is free all the trades are free. I don't have to pay anything. So if you do want to go and check stakeout, you can use my link in description below and get yourself a free share worth up to 150 dollars. Now some of the free shares are much less, and some of them are going to be only a few bucks in some cases, but they're still free so feel free to use the link and check it out if you're interested, so the first stock i sold was Adobe i sold it on the 2nd of august.

I made a whole video about adobe on that day, i'm going to link it up here in the description below, go and check it out if you're interested. The stock has gone up a lot over the last few months and my valuation did not show more of an upside, so i decided to sell out of the stock because i felt that the value was fair and that there wasn't any more that i felt that It was worth now. I didn't only sell out of adobe in steak. I actually sold out of adobe across my portfolio.

Then, on the 5th of august i also sold out of four other companies. I sold micron twilio apple and etsy in this portfolio. Now there are reasons for this uh and there are multiple different reasons why i particularly chose those companies - i'm not going to go into the depths, because this video will be too long. And but i am going to be making specific videos about each of those stocks.

Over the coming days and weeks, so if you do want to watch them, they will be coming, but these sales were not really because of what those stocks were doing. Those sales were actually because of what happened with another stock in my portfolio and that's fiverr. Fiverr released their q2 results just a few days ago, and their share price fell by 25. And that's because a couple of headline numbers did not look great.

Their official outlook for the year dropped on numbers that i think are actually relatively immaterial to the long-term optics of the business. But when i looked at the underlying numbers, the performance in the quota was actually great. I made a video in july saying that i see a huge upside for fiverr and these results have not really changed that perspective at all, except the upside. Now, because the share price has collapsed.

That much is significantly bigger. It is pretty rare to see such a huge undervaluation in my personal opinion, so i felt that i had to significantly increase my position in order to take advantage now. Remember this whole experiment here is trying to beat the market through active investing. You have to make aggressive moves and act fast if you want to win and that's exactly what i did so as i'm recording this video fiverr has gone up to become my third biggest holding in this portfolio after tesla and amd.

It is now 12 of the total. Now the price for fiverr is actually down from when i bought it, but i am here for the long term, because i see that upside and i don't really mind what's happening with the price in a short term, we'll see what the numbers look like over the Next few quarters, and maybe years so, let's talk about amd because amd has skyrocketed over the last few weeks they announced their quarterly results and suddenly the share price has gone up by 40. It's really interesting because their quarterly results were not too far off the model that i had before. So i was kind of expecting roughly those numbers, it turns out most other people weren't and in fact i revised my target price for amd and made a whole other video about it, check it again up here in the description below if you're interested um my target Price for amd has shifted up and i think, there's still another, roughly 50 60 uh potential in there, so i'm still holding on to that stock and that big jump in the amd's price has really pushed my overall performance, and that number is now looking ridiculous.

Let's see how we're doing against the market since the start of this epic investing battle, the vti index, which is the total stock market index that i'm trying to beat, has gone up by 4.75. This is assuming that i invested the same amount of money they invested in my portfolio on the same date into that index. That's actually a really good market return. My weighted average time in the market at the moment in this portfolio is only 2.56 months.

That is nothing in investing terms, and the market is up by almost 5 already. That is a lot now, if that rate continues, which probably won't, but if it did, that would be an annual rate of 24.3 percent, which is huge not as huge as 2020 granted but huge by any normal investing standards. So i invested 3076 dollars into this portfolio and the current value of that portfolio is 3737. That is a pretty good start.

That's a 21.5 percent return so far, which is just ridiculous because the annualized version of it is 149. Clearly, it is way too early to make any kind of judgment or to make any kind of determinations as to whether the strategy was good or not. Three months is absolutely nothing in investing and i struck some lucky streaks, but the dark months are going to come. We're going to have market crashes, we're going to have stocks, selling off and all kinds of wild things happening, and i'm sure some of these are going to hit this portfolio really hard.

So watch out for those, because those videos are going to be not quite as rosy as this one and then the market will be laughing as the market is doing much better than i am, but so far so good i mean a little graph, comparing the performance. So far, each point on the graph is my monthly video update, so in the last month that portfolio has actually gone up from 13.6 to 21.5 percent return, which is just ridiculous. I have made some aggressive moves this month, so let's see how those play out over the next few months and quarters, if you found this video useful, don't forget to smash the like button for the youtube algorithm. I'd be very, very grateful.

Thank you so much for watching. I really really appreciate it and, as always i'll see you guys later, you.