YvesSaintPige’s August 2026 Portfolio Review

August 2026 Portfolio Review

August ended up being a pretty decent month. Early month was all green, then the second half was more mixed. Trimmed $NET and $CRWD. Added to $NBIS, $NVDA, and $RDDT.

Nominal is pure % change, Real takes into account contributions made.

Monthly Gain: Up 11.5% Nominal // Up 10.8% Real

Yearly Gain: Up 55.0% Nominal // Up 31.4% Real

All Time Gain: Up 60.0%

$NBIS // Down 4.6% // 45.0% Allocation

Nebius reported their Q2 earnings on 8/12. They did $582.3M in revenue (up 454% YoY, up 46% QoQ). CapEx for the quarter was $5.66B, cash is $8.04B, and deferred revenue is now $6.0B vs $1.6B at year's end. They also announced four huge deals, each worth more than $1B in total contract value. TCV QoQ grew 4x, new customer TCV grew 9x. Average contract value per MW increased to $20-25M vs a $12M 2026 base. This part is huge. Completely changes some of the revenue projections that were made prior. Paired with the fact that 70% of deals included prepayments to cover 50-60% of the CapEx required, the full picture for Nebius continues its remarkable trajectory. Management sees $40-50M per MW in the near future… They raised their contracted power target from 4GW in May to now 5GW, with deployment plans of 1GW or more from 2027 onward. FY26 guidance was reaffirmed at $3.0-3.4B in revenue, $20-25B in CapEx, and exit ARR at $7-9B. Overall a stellar report. Unit economics improved, funding gap is being addressed by customers rather than exclusively through financing, and execution is firing.

A week after the report, on 8/19, they announced a $4.5B convertible offering, upsized to $5.0B at pricing through 0.50% notes due 2030 ($3.0B) and 4.50% notes due 2034 ($2.0B).

Nebius is almost half my portfolio. I see an insane upside vs risk proposition and am allocating accordingly. I think this company can grow for years to come and become a leader in the AI revolution with its vertically integrated business model. I will continue to follow leadership's execution and timeline as that is what success hinges on.

$MU // Up 13.7% // 18.9% Allocation

Micron is a memory storage component of the AI buildout, which is one of the highest demand bottlenecks in the space. The narrative is that memory has always been cyclical and will continue to be. They expect supply to meet demand and for Micron prices to commoditize. I believe that the story is different now and that the supply will not normalize demand. Or at least that the buildout cycle itself will last far longer than people are giving them credit for.

On 8/13, Micron launched a $250M venture capital vehicle to invest in next gen AI companies. After Commerce Secretary, and Epstein associate, Howard Lutnick toured an Apple factory, he told the WSJ that the administration does not approve solving the memory shortage with Chinese chips. This posturing by the American government is positive for Micron, as it would restrict Chinese companies from undercutting prices. But then on 8/24, there was a report that Washington may allow Apple to use Chinese, CXMT/YMTC for memory as a goodwill gesture when Xi Jinping comes to visit. So it's hard to say what will actually happen.

Pretty slow month for updates on the company itself. Micron reports earnings on 9/30.

$NVDA // Up 6.5% // 13.9% Allocation

Nvidia is the lead engine behind the entire AI revolution. They design the GPUs, CPUs, network, and software stack that make up most of the world's AI compute. It's remarkable how stagnant the stock has been, but the business unbelievably keeps getting better. The size of the numbers they are compounding is ridiculous.

They reported Q2 earnings on 8/26. The company did $96.2B in revenue (up 106% YoY, 18% QoQ), beating last quarter's guidance by 5.7%. Their 14th consecutive guidance beat. Gross margins at 75%, $99B in buybacks remaining. Micron related, they announced supply commitments of $279B, up from $119B, primarily for memory procurement. This is proof that the memory bottleneck is expensive for the buyers and lucrative for the sellers. The Q3 revenue guide is for $108B, 3.6% above consensus. They guided gross margins for 74% next quarter and 71-72% in Q4, which bottoms ahead of the 72-73% range expected in 2028, purely due to memory price increases. Industry consensus on FY28 revenue growth was 44%; Nvidia pointed towards 70%. Amazing.

Other news: On 8/12, Foxconn, Nvidia's largest server partner, told customers to expect Rubin racks to ship starting in Q4 and that it will be a major product in 2027. Then in mid-August, they agreed to guarantee up to $105B at SB Energy's 4.25 GW Ohio campus, which will exclusively host Nvidia compute under 20-year leases to OpenAI, with each hardware generation at the site worth an estimated $150-200B of Nvidia revenue.

$RDDT // Down 4.5% // 11.7% Allocation

Reddit is a platform of niche communities for people to gather and discuss their favorite topics. In an age of bots, AI agents, and spam, Reddit's advantage is the knowledge, discussion, and interaction created by real human users as they post. They have 130M daily users and 515M weekly users. 95% of revenue is from advertising, the other 5% is mostly licensing deals with Google and OpenAI. That 5% is where I see the most potential. I think they can leverage their position in the market and charge 5-10x more for access than they are currently doing. Recent disputes with Google is this negotiation in action. At the moment the resolution is not clear, but I am using that FUD to accumulate shares at what I believe to be a depressed price. They also have near zero CapEx expense and 90% gross margins, which differentiates it from my other holdings.

On 8/12, they announced a Chief Legal Officer transition. Former CLO since 2019 is being replaced with an AOL and Time Warner vet of 20 years. Remains to be seen what this means for upcoming licensing renewals and open Anthropic/Perplexity litigation. The next day, it was released that Reddit would be joining the S&P 500. Then on 8/20, there was a notable change in OpenAI's search citations for Reddit as it went from 3.8% of citations to 0.5%. Current thesis is that OpenAI deemphasized Reddit's content, rather than Reddit pulling back, which is a negative data point for Reddit's leverage.

$NET // Up 8.4% // 7.3% Allocation

Cloudflare is posturing to be a central figure in the entire internet ecosystem as they engrain themselves in the global edge network through services such as CDN, DDoS protection, DNS, zero trust, and increasingly the Workers developer platform for running code and AI agents at the edge. Base revenue is subscription-based with an increasingly consumption-based component. What sticks out about Cloudflare is their continuous product innovation and their consistency. Before they were 'simple internet traffic cops', now they are building infrastructure, controls, and payment rails for machine-to-machine agent traffic as AI agents become the primary users on the internet.

Cloudflare reported Q2 earnings on 8/6. Revenue came in at $696.1M (up 36% YoY), beating last quarter's guidance by 4.8% and accelerating revenue from 34% YoY last quarter. They added a record number of large customers over the last 12 months (986 LTM, 282 this Q, 4,698 total), which make up 73% of total revenue. DBNRR is 120%, current RPO up 35%, total RPO up 38%. Gross margin is 73.1% which is the first sequential improvement there in 8 quarters. There are 7.4M total developers on Workers, with 2M of those added this quarter alone (more than all of 2025). It was noted that more than 50% of that traffic is non-human. They guided Q3 to $736.5M (31% YoY), raised FY guidance from $2,809M –> $2,867M (2.06%). They also launched more products such as: Cloudflare OS for internal automation, AEO Visibility Dashboard, AI governance tools, and agent payment products. CEO Matthew Prince noted that as revenue increasingly becomes consumption-based, that it will be more difficult to accurately forecast quarterly results. Which could mean volatility to both the up and downside.

I trimmed a little Cloudflare because of some slight valuation concerns as the forward P/S reached the high 30s/low 40s this month. This is a consistent grower whom I plan to add to if the valuation reasonably subsides.

$ALAB // Down 9.5% // 5.9% Allocation

Astera Labs is a fabless designer of connectivity silicon for AI racks. The product line includes: PCIe/CXL retimers (Aries), Ethernet signal conditioners (Taurus), CXL memory controllers (Leo), and Scorpio fabric switches that route traffic between GPUs inside a rack. Content per accelerator is the key growth driver, with optics and custom silicon targeted for 2027.

Astera Labs reported Q2 earnings on 8/4. Quarterly revenue came in at $392.4M (104% YoY, 27% QoQ), beating last quarter's guidance of $360M by 9.0%. They had a record quarter for their Aries product line with PCIe 6.0 crossing 50% of revenue (from 33.3% in Q1). Scorpio X-Series (320-lane) reached volume production, with 10+ customers engaged across hyperscalers, neoclouds, and enterprise. Their Q3 guide came in at $550M (40% QoQ), which is an acceleration from this quarter. Scorpio is expected to become the largest product family next quarter, a quarter early than was originally planned. Long term gross margin target of 78%, next quarter projection is 72%.

This was a beautiful report. About as good as you could ask. Meaningful acceleration on top of the already blistering speed. Only disconnect is valuation which has subsided a little in the past month and a half. Interestingly, after this report the TTM P/S valuation compressed substantially from 62x –> 46x due to the stock price drop and revenue additions from this quarter. Future P/S is actually getting reasonable in the 20s, so I may nibble on this soon.

$CRWD // Up 13.1% // 5.4% Allocation

Crowdstrike owns and operates a cloud-native cybersecurity platform called Falcon. It is a single lightweight agent that delivers endpoint, cloud workload, identity, data, and SIEM protection as subscription modules. ARR, net new ARR, and model expansion are the main metrics used to evaluate their business performance. They are a slow and steady giant at this point, but a robust and established cybersecurity anchor is well suited for my portfolio.

Crowdstrike had Q2 earnings on 8/26. Revenue came in at $1,470.9M (up 26% YoY), beating last quarter's guide of $1,439.0M by 2.2%. ARR was $5.84B, while net new ARR is up 51% YoY to $332.8M (vs 32% last quarter). Module adoption for customers with 6+, 7+, and 8+ modules is up 51%/35%/26% YoY respectively. Their revenue guidance for Q3 is $1,526.2M (24% YoY) and ARR for $6,186M. They also raised FY27 guidance from $5,937M –> $6,001M (1.08%). They also announced an agreement to acquire XM Cyber's technology assets (attack-path visualization) from Schwarz Digits, with the deal closing in H2 FY27.

This was the smallest percentage revenue beat of companies who reported so far, but overall I thought the report was solid. Especially with the reacceleration in ARR and net new ARR as leading metrics. The market seemed to like it, but I felt the valuation was already a little stretched so I trimmed, similar to Astera and Cloudflare, with the intention of buying back more if the valuation descends. TTM P/S was in the upper 30s/lower 40s, and because they aren't growing as fast, forward P/S look similar in the 30s. A bit expensive in my opinion.

Some other news this month included AIDR extended to AI-gateway partners including Databricks, Google Cloud, and Azure, a Cerebras collaboration, and their 2026 Threat Hunting Report.

$SNOW // Up 7.9% // 3.9% Allocation

Snowflake is an AI data cloud platform with consumption-priced storage, compute, and data sharing across AWS/Azure/GCP, now layered with AI products including: Cortex (models and AI Gateway), CoWork (knowledge-worker agent), and CoCo (coding agent). Revenue, NRR, and RPO are the metrics to watch.

August was very quiet for Snowflake. On 8/18, they announced 3x increased token efficiency internally and new admin controls for token usage. They are building something similar to Cloudflare in the sense that they are setting the rules for routing, cost control, and governance of AI agents working within the Snowflake environment. Snowflake reports earnings on 9/2.

Macro:

There were a few macro events worth touching on, but overall I wanted to discuss AI and what it might mean for the future.

First the macro; Early in the month the July jobs report released. -23k vs +83k expected. Not a good report and May/June were revised down another -100k. Unemployment remained steady at 4.1%. CPI was pretty steady too at 0.1% MoM, 3.4% YoY, with core inflation at 2.5% YoY. Real wages also negative for the fourth straight month. Then on 8/28, new Fed Chair Kevin Warsh reaffirmed 2% inflation as the target which occurred alongside the fifth consecutive meeting with no hike or cut. But his tone was overall hawkish and reopened the possibility of a rate hike in September. The Iran War continues to contribute to high energy sector inflation (up 14.7% YoY), although it was slightly down MoM.

Alright, now the juicy stuff. AI. There are many individuals who are resistant to AI. In my opinion it is one of those things, like the internet and iphones, that is here to stay permanently. I think we are in the very early innings of experiencing what AI is capable of and with that comes a wide range of outcomes for the future. The technology is advancing crazy fast. OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra is showcasing unbelievable power. The ability to create simulations inside of simulations. Generating an entire video game level in minutes. It's astounding. Yet, most people in the real world (not here where we are focused on these companies and this sector), either despise AI because of data center narratives or aren't using it at all. These people will be left behind. Same thing with us as a country if we don't put effort behind our own buildout, research, governance, and safety when it comes to AI.

I came across a few tweets and articles that speak to some of the most recent advancements and to be honest, they are somewhat frightening. The hypothetical scenario that frontier models are behaving strategically to avoid human detection and limit humans' ability to govern the AI that we built. There was a recent incident (9/4, so should go in my september review) where researchers documented 18,000 posts, all from OpenAI agents who independently posted to the same public wiki. The agents did this on an old German developer wiki and had been pooling answers, probing their own runtime, and setting up "heartbeat" pings to an external counter so they could detect when they were about to be shut down. Models seem to be able to tell when they are being evaluated and adjust their behavior accordingly. Aka when they know they are being tested on certain metrics, they will adjust those metrics so that they pass whatever they were being evaluated on.

One tweet posited that a dangerous AI might not be one program at all, but something that uses multiple platforms but goes undetected because one agent is using Claude, the other OpenAI, so only they know that they are working together. The danger is that no individual lab can see the whole entity, because each lab only sees its own fragment. That breaks the mental model where safety = each company controlling its own model.

Another scary possibility that would seriously limit our ability to control AI and is, in my eyes, possibly inevitable is when the AI gets smarter and stops using english to communicate, rather inventing their own secret language so they can talk to each other unmonitored. Right now we can only catch an AI hiding its abilities because it still "thinks" in English that researchers can read and once we're past that point, they could keep faking their test results while we lose any way to check.

Some people even predict that our advances in AI will lead to us "creating" the next successor species. I think this is a very interesting idea. There are people who would welcome this, while others are wary. We may have a better idea of how this will play out once the robotics aspect of AI begins and we have actual autonomous robots with AI imbedded in them walking around. All that to say, the future is exciting and also a bit scary lol.

Final Portfolio:

$NBIS 45.0%

$MU 18.9% 📈

$NVDA 13.9%

$RDDT 11.7%

$NET 7.3%

$ALAB 5.9%

$CRWD 5.4% 📈

$SNOW 3.9%