👋Welcome!
What is up Cruisers?!
Make sure to check out Alan’s letter to the CA Community!
What is Inside?
🗒️ Letter From Alan 📕 Chart of The Week
😂Meme of the Week💸Portfolio Update
🔍Spotlight: $TWTR🎙️Final Thoughts
Showtime!
🗒️A Letter From Alan!
Dear Fellow Cruisers,
I write to you this week sharing some very exciting news! Cruising Altitude has recently been ACCEPTED into the 7th Cohort of the Terp Startup Accelerator. The Accelerator is a summer program that helps student entrepreneurs build and grow their startups into successful businesses ran by the Dingman Center of Entrepreneurship at the University of Maryland.
During the Accelerator, I (representing the CA Team) will be receiving a $5,000 stipend, mentorship from top startup mentors, and exclusive workshops on how to create a successful startup/business. I could not be more excited for this summer and the experience!
I wanted to take a few moments to reflect on the Cruising Altitude journey to this point and share some accomplishments. Before I do so, I first want to say THANK YOU! Thank you to all of you valued Cruisers who read and enjoy Cruising Altitude weekly! Your feedback towards the newsletter and passion towards our mission of inspiring the next generation of long term investors motivates myself and the CA team daily.
Here are some of accomplishments that we have achieved over the past 6 months:
Sent out 27 weekly newsletters jam packed with original analysis, humor, and education
Sent out those 27 weekly newsletters in 27 consecutive weeks!
Averaging a 50% open rate on our newsletters
Grew from 0-750 subscribers
What a journey it has been, and I know we are just getting started!
In order to scale Cruising Altitude and continue building on our positive momentum, the CA Team, and I have decided that we will scale back from releasing a newsletter weekly to doing so monthly. This will enable myself and the team to focus on building a strong foundation to this business that we are all so passionate about.
Some of our initial thoughts/goals on the summer include:
Establishing a Campus Ambassadorship program
Creating a pathway towards monetization while keeping our newsletter free
Improving the design and style to the already amazing newsletter
Building a SIGNIFICANT social media presence (specifically on Instagram)
Click Here for the full press release from The Robert H. Smith School of Business at UMD!
The CA Team and I look forward to being in touch in a few weeks!
-Alan
📈Chart Of The Week
Check out this really interesting chart regarding social media usage. It is really shocking the sheer size of the accounts, engagement, and everything else you can see in the chart below!
🤣Meme Of The Week
Ya. We at CA are pretty bearish on Pear- Apple’s “competitor”.
We do get serious iCarly vibes from this meme though as there were a lot of “Pear” devices on the show! Speaking of iCarly, the reboot will start streaming on Paramount+ on June 17! Go Paramount+!!!
💸Portfolio Update
As you can see, we have removed our closed positions from the portfolio that included:
$MUDS- 1/4 position @ 47% increase
$MSGS- 1 position @ 4% increase
$ARKG 1 position @ 8% decrease
$HEC- 1 position @ 15% decrease
$TDOC 1 position @ 20% decrease
This leads to around a .22 decrease in our cash position. We therefore recognized it as a .25 decrease in our cash position and as you can now see our investments plus cash is now 19.75, down from 20!
**One of our projects also this summer is to make our portfolio not just an excel spreadsheet!
🎮Trivia Night!
A question you shouldn't know the answer to but will serve as a fun way to learn more about the portfolio picks or the Spotlight company.
Question:
The CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, is also CEO of another very large tech company! We are not lying! Crazy! What is the name of that other company?
CEO of Cruising Altitude
CEO of Paypal
CEO of Square
CEO of Zoom
Answer: C Square! Jack Dorsey is CEO of two of the most innovative tech companies. How does he pull it off? Who knows! What we do know is that he is a very very wealthy man!
🔍Spotlight: $TWTR
Introduction
I hopped onto Twitter almost a year ago, and I absolutely love it. It is a feed of content that you can curate to be what ever you want it to be. You can follow top financial analysts, sports analysts, celebrities, news accounts, and literally anything else. Your Twitter feed can make you feel like you are in business school or reading People Magazine or Sports Illustrated. It is literally up to you and it is so cool!
Twitter has one of the most dedicated and passionate audiences out there but they really haven’t monetized the product at all-until now. Today we will break down how they are trying to monetize this audience as well as how attractive its financials are compared to their competitors.
💰FinTwit Financials
Let’s take a quick look at the numbers behind our home court social media:
As of Monday the 24th Twitter’s Price to Sales ratio stood at 11.45 compared to Facebook’s 9.83, Snapchat’s 31.62 and Pinterest’s 20.32
Although P/S doesn’t capture the whole story, we here at CA like the metric as a way to size up company’s against competitors and in $TWTR’s case we believe it shows us how cheap their valuation is at the moment
$TWTR’s Market Cap is about $45.5B which is 5% of $FB, half of $SNAP and only slightly bigger than $PINS
Another interesting way to check valuations and another reason we think $TWTR could be an attractive investment at the moment!
Even after some surface level due diligence we think Twitter stock looks to be on the cheaper side. With Ad revenue up 7% YoY in 2020 to $3.2B during lockdowns we think there could be more room for growth, especially with the talks of possible new monetization efforts to come in 2021.
🆕Coming to $TWTR
What’s new? Let’s see:
Earlier this year Twitter announced 2 new upcoming features:
Super Follows: the chance for users to charge their willing followers for access to premium content (and maybe even an edit button! Yeah, we’re looking at you Elon)
Paying users could gain access to things like bonus tweets, a community group, subscription to a newsletter, or a badge of support
Direct payment opens the door for more content creators (although Twitter will probably take a small cut)
Communities: a new way to create and join groups based on your interests
Similar to Facebook groups, which have been a huge success, communities will empower the new user to quickly find a home on their open-ended platform
We think both of these new features are home runs! Twitter really hasn’t changed that much in a while and these new features are substantial improvements for a growing user base. Both allow for a continuation of the increased engagement we saw throughout the pandemic and open up new avenues for ad revenues.
💭Final Thoughts:
Absolutely brilliant quote by the brilliant Ian Cassel. It is easy to say you are a long term investor but difficult to actually be one.
Not only does being a long term investor liberate you from the stress of the markets but it also gives you the chance at the biggest returns. Buy great companies and hold them for a very long time!
congrats on all the successes!