How I’m Investing With $1.5 Million Stock Portfolio

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Joseph Carlson (0:54)

Welcome back, everyone. Today on The Joseph Carlson Show, we'll be looking at my $1.5 million portfolio, every single holding and what's going on with them. We have some big questions around Google. They haven't done much this year. Meta has taken off recently. We also have Mastercard and Amazon and so on. We'll be breaking down and looking at the situation with each one of them. Now we also have a lot of news to get to. For example, Meta apparently just hired the CEO of MongoDB, like the active CEO, and a day before their investor day. I don't know how he pulled this off. MongoDB is down like 25% on the news. It's crazy. We also have Jensen is one of the only sane people going on to TV, continually talking about how AI is not going to destroy us all. That's the message he's trying to share. And Jensen has his work cut out for him, because while he's doing that, we have politicians, ones like Andrew Yang, that continue to go on to different appearances, different shows, and share his gloomy view of the future. Well, he talks about how AI is a zero-sum game, and automation is a zero-sum game. And this is one of the worst errors that politicians make. It's a complete misunderstanding of economics and business, and I'll be responding to it in this episode. And then finally, in this week's Fail of the Week, we have Bob Iger.

Now, Bob Chapek is the one talking here, so there's two Bobs, but it's not Bob Chapek that's a Fail of the Week. It's Bob Iger, and I believe this one is long overdue. So we have a ton to get to in this episode. If you enjoy this type of content, make sure that you like the video, subscribe to the channel, so you can follow along, because I share my portfolio every single week, sometimes multiple times a week. And I'll be doing so again right now. What we're looking at here is real money. It's a real portfolio. In early 2019, I started tracking this portfolio publicly on YouTube, and I've continued doing that ever since. The portfolio has grown substantially. The gains have grown substantially. Now this portfolio is up $507,000.

Now, when you look at the year to date in 2026, we're not doing great. It's down 1.28%.

About a week ago, it was up like 4%.

So it's bouncing around between a little bit in the red, a little bit in the green. We're trailing the S&P 500 this year.

But in investing, you're not looking at the year to date as the ultimate truth. That's not the one metric that defines how good you're doing. It's your overall performance. When we zoom out overall, this has had market beating performance. And in fact, it's generated over half a million dollars in gains. And a lot of these gains were made with much smaller dollar amounts invested. I did not start with a million dollars. I didn't invest in day one with a million dollars. You can see in 2017, I had $4,000 in this account. I started it just like anyone else, budgeting, putting a couple hundred dollars a week into my account. In 2021, I had around 300 to 400,000. We had the big COVID dip. It went down a bit there, but I kept buying stocks aggressively. And then in 2023 is really where the outperformance begin. After 2023, this portfolio raced up. The gains continued to accumulate, and the majority of the gains have been made in only the past couple of years. In fact, a lot of them have come from a select companies that I still hold in my portfolio. So let's go ahead and take a look at the top positions. In rank number one today, overall, it's Google. Now, Meta did jump up above Google for a couple of days, but Meta is going down. Meta went down like 4% today and a couple of percent the last market day. So Meta has given up about $8,000 in gains, bumping itself down. But you can see how close these are. With Google, I'm up $108,000, and a lot of these gains have been made in just the past couple of years. When I look at Google, there's a couple of things that are concerning right now.