With the S&P 500 down about 3% this week, and the Nasdaq down even more, I’m starting to see some more appealing prices flash through for some of the companies I know well and really like, so I’ve done some buying throughout the portfolio, all in pretty small bites — these purchases in total add up to less than 1% of my equity portfolio, so these aren’t big “gotta get it now” buys, but that’s generally how I prefer to build the portfolio.

Yes, we do see bigger buy opportunities when catalysts hit and bring a temporary discount to our attention, or new information otherwise floats to the top of my cup of coffee, and we add new companies to the portfolio when we find them, and occasionally sell stocks where we’ve gotten it very wrong, or take profits when the valuation has reached a completely unjustifiable extreme… but in general, my long-term strategy is just keep adding to the companies you think are well-positioned, at times when their price is relatively attractive.

Making lots of small decisions is much easier than trying to make one big one — and since I know some of my decisions will be wrong, in the fullness of time, making small decisions usually also means I’m making smaller mistakes.

So I’ll go through that handful of buys in a moment… but first, let’s take a look at probably the most critical “story change” in the Real Money Portfolio this week.

This week we had something pretty rare happen: A company released important financial news during a “fireside chat” at a run-of-the-mill investment conference, instead of in an earnings call or even a “preannouncement.”

And, as you might note from the fact that Celsius Holdings (CELH) shares dropped dramatically, the info that came out during their talk at the Barclay’s Global Consumer Staples Conference at Noon on Wednesday was bad news. And pretty big bad news, essentially pre-announcing that the third quarter, which is seasonally their most important quarter, is likely to be terrible.

And not just “disappointing” or “below estimates” terrible, but quite possibly “revenue will shrink a lot, not grow” terrible. Which is horrible news for a company that is primarily valued, even now, as a “growth” story. This could be their first quarter with a year-over-year decline in revenue since 2018.  To the point that ...