It's probably not unusual to have a love-hate relationship with your portfolio. You can't be equally passionate about all of your positions, but sometimes you're not ready to cut loose the stocks that are holding you back in the near term. I own more than three dozen stocks at the moment, and I can't say I'm smitten with all of them these days.
Chinese esports specialist Huya (HUYA 1.91%), cannabis grow-house landlord Innovative Industrial Properties (IIPR 0.20%), and e-commerce giant Amazon (AMZN -1.25%) are three of my investments that I am not pleased with at the moment. Let's get into my concerns, and -- perhaps more importantly -- why I'm still holding them.
1. Huya
It's fair to call Huya the Twitch of China. It's the leading streaming platform for gamer videos in the world's most populous nation. However, a quick look at its sharply decelerating top-line growth over the past few years is sobering. Is this the Twitch or the glitch of China?
- 2017: 174%
- 2018: 113%
- 2019: 80%
- 2020: 30%
- 2021: 4%
- 2022: (19%)
The scintillating growth that mesmerized the market when Huya went public at $12 in 2018 and was trading north of $50 a few weeks later is gone. Revenue growth has been negative for five consecutive quarters, including a 25% year-over-year decline in its latest report. The stock is trading 76% below its debut price and has lost a numbing 94% since its peak five summers ago.
Image source: Getty Images.
It's not just the top line that's struggling to remain positive. After three years of profitability, Huya posted an annual deficit in 2022. It has reported losses in four of the past five quarters.
Why am I still holding Huya? Gamers are sticking around. The 85.5 million mobile monthly active users on the Huya Live platform at start of this year -- including 5.5 million paying users -- is roughly in line with where the audience was a year ago. Engagement is still there, but monetization has been problematic. China slowing the approval rate of new games also isn't helping, but then we get to the best reason to hold out hope for Huya. Despite its $700 million market cap, the company has nearly $1.4 billion in net cash on its balance sheet. It's not just revenue growth and earnings that have turned negative. Huya trades at an enterprise value of negative $700 million. It will go through some of that cash, but it may not burn for long. With analysts projecting a return to profitability (and revenue growth) in 2024, Huya isn't worth less than worthless.
2. Innovative Industrial Properties
Income investors bid up real estate investment trusts, or REITs, when prevailing interest rates were low, and that helped birth some plays that were off the beaten path. One of the more unusual REITs is Innovative Industrial Properties. It offers state-licensed growers in the regulated cannabis industry the cash flow to expand or ramp up production by purchasing their assets and leasing them back to the growers on long-term contracts. Everybody wins, but lately Innovative Industrial Properties investors are losing.
REITs in general began to stumble last year when the returns on safer fixed income started to move higher. Innovative Industrial Properties made its own situation worse last summer, revealing that one of its largest tenants -- accounting for 8% of its revenue -- had stopped paying rent. The tenant has resumed paying rent for the four properties it is occupying, exploring a potential merger or sale of assets to help improve its financial state. However, the fear for investors is that this could be the first of many shoes to drop as momentum slows for the once-smoking cannabis industry.
Why am I still holding Innovative Industrial Properties? The sharp drop in the shares has pushed the yield up to 10.9%. Despite the challenges it faced last year, the distributions made in 2022 were 24% higher than the year before.
3. Amazon
I'll close with a more household name. I've been a fan of Amazon since the 1990s, but I admittedly took too long to become an investor. I established my position two years ago, after the shares had already run up a bit earlier in the pandemic. My stake is currently down 36%.
Amazon posted its first year of single-digit-percentage revenue growth in 2022, falling short of Wall Street earnings estimates in three of the past four quarters. Analysts see a mere 8% increase in revenue for 2023.
Why am I still holding Amazon? Because it continues to be the undisputed champ of e-commerce, and it also has a dominant but slowing cloud-hosting business. Consumers are hesitant to spend in the current environment, and near-term margin constraints need to be corrected. But you don't want to bet against Amazon over the long haul. It's built to dominate.
