Portfolio Update: May 2026
May was a surpringly tranquil month, despite being a month with earnigns realses. I ended the month with +3.2%. Bringing YTD return to +21.4%, and overall returns since Jan 2023 to 175%, a 34.35% CAGR.
Brief market commentary
Lots of people are calling tops on the current market. That might be true, I don’t know. I don’t have an opinion on the market, as I have never read a 10-K of any S&P 500 company, so I am just not informed enough to form an opinion on that. Therefore I will stay away from any “top calling” — however, I do respect price action, and the more efficient a market is, which bigger markets are most of the time, I think that there have been reasons to justify some of the stock movements. Look at Micron’s fundamentals as an example:
Yes, it’s cyclical. Yes, the cycle will end eventually. But I believe some people are expressing their vocal opinion about that subject from a place of anchor/price bias. Because shares are up almost 10x in one year, which sounds absolutely insane. Yet it trades now at 10x NTM earnings, so if you’re calling it too expensive, what did you expect the market to do? Value it on 3x NTM earnings? I want to clarify, this does not mean Micron is cheap or attractive here. I just want to rationalise the stock movement which looks insane if you just look at the chart, but much less so when you overlap it with the fundamentals.
Overall, I have zero AI exposure, and my performance will be determined more on the outcome of two strategic reviews than by what Micron, NVIDIA or the S&P does, so I don’t have a horse in that race.
Commentary on Colombian (oil) stocks
At the beginning of the year I was somewhat vocal about the oil sector and especially Colombian oil stocks.
In my article in March I laid out several potential catalysts for a re-rating. Most likely the largest of those, the election, took place yesterday. Colombia held its first-round election and the results were surprisingly good for Colombian equities with far-right-wing candidate Abelardo de la Espriella winning the first round with roughly 44% of votes in front of left-wing candidate Iván Cepeda with 41%.
These two will go into the second round to determine who will become the next president. De la Espriella is the clear favorite now as he can pull the remaining votes easily from other right-wing candidate Paloma Valencia (who got a disapointing ~7%). Iván Cepeda, on the other hand, has no natural voter pool to beat De la Espriella, since Cepeda is the only left-wing candidate. The closest might be some centrist voters who voted for Fajardo (3%).
If de la Espriella wins this will cause a general re-rating of Colombian equities. Especially the Oil and Gas sector will benefit as he will get rid of the fracking ban, and issue new exploration licenses. Hence most companies that are currently valued as melting ice cubes with short reserve life would begin to increase their reserve lives and valuations. More about that here:
