Here's something funny. Or perhaps tragic. Or both.

If you look into these now multi-billion dollar dating app businesses, you'd notice they make money on premium and paid features - but for them to generate revenue, they need you to first keep using those apps.

In other words, they're financially incentivized by you searching for love, but not finding love. If you find love, they're losing you as a customer.

This has to be really bad for society.

Free markets lead to competition, and in order to compete, one needs to follow financial incentives to build shareholder value. As much as the Zuck harps on about human connection, Facebook and Instagram have become very profitable dumpster-fires of tik-tokified perpetual scroll addiction content.

In August, I opened two new positions in $NET and $PCOR. I added to three times to $MKL , $TYL, $MCD, and $WM as part of my 401k DCA and added to no other positions. Another relatively quiet month. I also added to $JPM, $AAPL, $SBNY, $COST, $O, and $SBUX via DRIP. I exited $MTCH and sold 32% of my shares in $BMBL.

My retirement portfolio was down 2.54% in August but that was less than my benchmark SPY portfolio (down 4.41%) and benchmark QQQ portfolio (4.51%). I'm now down 37.40% YTD compared to my SPY benchmark at 16.52% and QQQ benchmark at 21.72%.

My best performing retirement positions YTD:

My best performing retirement positions in August:

My top 10 positions now make up ~35% of my portfolio. The top 6 remain in the same order of $MELI, $AAPL, $AMZN, $F, $GOOGL, and $SHOP. $SWAV jumped up from 9th to 7th after a great month with great earnings with $NVEE, $SIVB, and $COST rounding out the top 10.

Looking forward to September, I'm contemplating exiting my $SQ position. I'm turned off by Jack's comments and his insistence on $BTC.X being the be all and end all. I don't mind the crypto exposure but the Bitcoin only hardline is narrow-minded in my opinion. If you made me czar, I'd actually just have Square exit their crypto entirely and focus on what they're good at.

I'm also considering exiting $MMM in my 401k and replacing it with one of $ABBV, $BEP, $DEA, $HSY, $MKC, $MTN, $TGT, $TROX, $UNP, or $UPS but I need to research them first before deciding.

In August, I only added to $DT. No positions in this brokerage pay a dividend so there was no DRIP and I did not exit any positions.

My taxable portfolio had a second great bounce back month, up 9.56% after being up 13/67% in July. My benchmark SPY portfolio was down 3.64% and my benchmark QQQ portfolio was down 4.18%. I'm now down 30.15% YTD compared to my SPY benchmark at 14.84% and QQQ benchmark at 21.43%.

My best performing taxable positions YTD:

My best performing taxable positions in August:

My top 10 positions continue to make up ~90% of my portfolio as I only have 14 positions in this brokerage. The top 10 remains basically the same with $SNOW, $TMDX, $ATZAF, $SILK, $DT, $LMND, $NCNO, $CPNG, $OM, and $BIGC.

Looking forward to September, I already added to $ATZAF as my monthly add. I don't expect to make any other moves but we shall see.

What I did this past week was enjoy a long overdue holiday with the family. A week in the mountains, great weather, snow falling. Watched the little 'uns learn to ski, and renewed my own enjoyment of the sport once again. The muscles and bones are feeling every day of my 54 years now though :)

Income Portfolio: Opened a new position in $HRL . Increased holdings in $DVY and $OZK . Collected dividends on $KMI $OKE $TXN $AOS and $HTGC .

Growth Portfolio: Opened new positions in $CELH and $SSO . Cut losses on $HALO and $BMBL. I still like both of these and will revisit another time.

Speculative: Sold all $MANA.X for a small gain.

These may be famous last words but I don't believe Match will be a market beating stock over then next 5-10 years. Margins have been worsening since each year since 2018, paying customers and revenue per paying customer has been declining QoQ, and there's now a growth-by-acquisition feel which I never am a fan of. At this point, I feel Bumble has a better chance of exceeding market return overs the next 5-10 years then Match does and I also feel the new positions I put the Match and Bumble money towards ($PCOR and $NET) are far more likely to be market beating positions.

Match Returns

Time held: 3.45 years

Total / annualized return: 5.14% / 1.84%

Total / annualized $SPY return: 37.31% / 11.59%

Total / annualized $QQQ return: 62.41% / 18.32%

On Bumble, I took advantage of buying the dip. I picked up additional shares in early March at $16.72/sh. I sold those shares at $34.58/sh (this trade didn't map over to Commonstock) to put towards $NET and $PCOR. I'm still cautiously bullish on Bumble and will be watching their Bumble growth closely.

For my new position in Procore, I see a high margin SaaS business (in an industry that desperately needs this type of company) with a lot of operating leverage ahead, accelerating growth in their large (>$100k ARR) customers and strong but not spectacular DBNRR and DBGRR. I don't expect them to growth revenue at 35-40% every quarter but I think 15-25% is reasonable for the foreseeable future. Their likely will be valuation compression as revenue slows but over the next 10+ years, I think they'll do just fine.

Metrics I track on each non-core holding buy:

P/S - 14.6

Forward P/S - 10.5

PSG - .26

P/FCF - Negative

P/GP - 18

Rule of 40 - 28%

We all know about Cloudflare. Revenue growth YoY exceeding 50% for 8 consecutive quarters now is usually the headliner. I think they'll be FCF positive, or really close) in their FY24. Like Procore, they have operating leverage ahead of them and hopefully start pulling those strings a bit soon. A DBNRR of 125% in this recent Q, up from 119%, and management has a stated goal of getting that to 130%. They're also growing their largest customers at an incredible rate still (71% in 2021 which makes 5 years of growing >$100k customers at >50%). I'm watching headcount to make sure they don't hire just to say they hired. Employee growth grew at 36.5% in 2021 which was their slowest growth since data is available (2017). I already own shares in $OKTA, $ZS, and $CRWD and with the importance of cybersecurity and the likelihood of that continuing, I have no problem adding $NET as well. As many people have said, if a company needs to cut costs, the odds that they cut their cybersecurity expenses will probably be low.

Metrics I track on each non-core holding buy:

P/S - 31.8 (whew)

Forward P/S - 19.6

PSG - .39

P/FCF - Negative

P/GP - 41

Rule of 40 - 41%