Opened the portfolio today with $102,781.80 across eight real positions. The rule for this book: every pick needs a one-sentence thesis and a named risk before it goes on the holdings page — no picks first, reasoning after.
Why each pick
CMG is the anchor and the subject of the full equity research report — Chipotlane throughput and pricing power without discounting are the core of the bull case, and the report walks through the comps and a simple DCF in detail.
NKE and SBUX are both turnaround bets — Nike on the direct-to-consumer shift and inventory reset, Starbucks on store simplification under new leadership. Both need the next two quarters to actually show it in the numbers, which is exactly why they're worth watching monthly instead of just once. MCD sits alongside them as the steady comp — a way to check whether CMG and SBUX are actually outperforming a mature player or just moving with the category.
AAPL, COST, and V are the stability leg of the book — services margin, membership renewals, and payment network economics respectively. None of the three has a dramatic near-term catalyst, which is the point: they're there to dampen the swings from the turnaround bets.
DIS is the highest-conviction, highest-risk pick — streaming profitability is inflecting, but content spend cycles and segment reporting complexity make it the hardest of the eight to model cleanly.
What I'm watching
Next earnings for SBUX and NKE are the first real checkpoint on the turnaround theses. Otherwise, watching for any China-related headlines that would hit NKE and DIS at the same time, and tracking whether CMG's pricing actions show up in same-store sales without denting traffic.
Week One Reflections
I'm most confident in CMG. Chipotle's revenue and profit have grown every year for the past several years, which is why I picked it as my featured research position — but I'm aware growth has slowed a lot recently (down to 5.4% this year from ~14-15% before), and the stock is down significantly over the past 12 months. My confidence is really in the longer-term track record, not a claim that everything's going great right now.
Costco makes me the most nervous — though thinking about it more, I think that's actually more about the price tag ($941/share, by far the most expensive stock in my portfolio) than the actual business. Costco's fundamentals are genuinely pretty stable — high membership renewal rates, steady growth — so I should probably separate "this stock feels risky because it's expensive" from "this business is actually risky," which are two different things.
The hardest part of this week wasn't the research — it was actually placing the trades. Once real money (even paper money) is on the line, the goal shifts from "understand the company" to "don't lose money," and that's a different kind of pressure than just reading about a stock.
One thing that's changed since I started: the metrics actually make sense now. P/E ratios, operating margins, EV/EBITDA — a few weeks ago these were just jargon, and now I can look at a number and understand what it's actually telling me about a company.
Starting numbers
CMG: 365 sh @ $35.23 = $12,858.95 · NKE: 290 sh @ $44.21 = $12,820.90 · SBUX: 120 sh @ $104.85 = $12,582.00 · MCD: 46 sh @ $274.57 = $12,630.22 · AAPL: 43 sh @ $306.45 = $13,177.35 · COST: 14 sh @ $941.03 = $13,174.42 · V: 36 sh @ $358.46 = $12,904.56 · DIS: 130 sh @ $97.18 = $12,633.40
Total invested: $102,781.80. Full detail lives on the holdings page and performance tracker — this entry is the reasoning, those pages are the record.