Q3 2025 - Celebrating 3 Years!

Dear Shareholders,

It has been three years since the launch of The Stewardship Fund, and I am proud to say that the first three years have been highly successful!  Over the past three years initial investors have seen their portfolios grow by over 65% or 18.25% CAGR.  The fund itself has nearly quadrupled in size since the launch.  In fact, we just ended our best quarter yet with a quarterly return of 9.75%.

The progress we have made has allowed us to bring on our first hire, Ashton Johnson, who will be serving as a part time Executive Assistant.  I believe that this is only the beginning for The Stewardship Fund!  We are in discussions with several ministries that are interested in potentially joining our partnership.  This is an exciting time for The Stewardship Fund and we are so thankful for your partnership, prayers, and support.

Portfolio Update

As we look back at the first three years of The Stewardship Fund, there are many lessons to learn.  Every investor makes good and bad investments over time.  I believe one of the secrets to success is learning from both successes and failures to continue improving in the future.  In this letter we will look at the best investment as well as the worst investment over the past three years and see if there is a lesson we can learn from each.

META - When The Stewardship Fund launched we were in a bear market.  I had been following many stocks in the years leading up to the launch of the fund, one of which was Meta.  Meta was in the midst of a flurry of bad news: Higher cap-ex spending, a slowdown in user growth, a doubt that their metaverse would pay off, etc., etc.  Fear was rampant, which pushed the price down to below $100 per share and a P/E of less than 10.

Having studied Meta thoroughly, I knew that this was a “screaming buy,” my only concern was how low it would go.  I bought a large position in Meta when the fund launched, and it quickly became my biggest winner.  Meta went on to return hundreds of percent over the next three years beating everything else in The Stewardship Fund as well as vastly outperforming the overall market.  While it could be tempting to take this win and move on without a further thought, when I look back I see two things I wish I had done differently.

First, knowing how cheap Meta was and how confident I was in the long-term prospects, I was a bit too slow in deploying capital into Meta.  I was attempting to dollar cost average a bit while it was going down, but it turns out that we were already at the bottom.  While there is no way to time the bottom, I learned that when something reaches a price where you are confident that it is an amazing buy, go ahead and buy what you want rather than wait.  It is ok if the price drops more. If a company is selling at a price that is truly a great deal, it will recover much more in the long run.

Secondly, I let a bit of fear slip in.  It may not look like I had fear when looking at a fairly large position in Meta; however, it took me 9 months to build a 10% portfolio position in Meta at a time when I knew Meta was extremely cheap.  10% may seem like a large position, but it is far from the largest position I am willing to take.  Fear kept my position size lower than it should have been on such a high quality company trading at an enormous discount.  The Stewardship Fund would have made much more money if we had jumped in quickly and used the available cash we had right away.

ARE (Alexandria Real Estate Investment Trust) - It is much easier to discuss winners than losers, but it is arguably more important to learn from mistakes.  The worst investment I have made over the last three years was in ARE.  Interestingly, I still believe that ARE will be a great long-term buy; however, I ignored too much of the short-term problems with ARE leading to a long period of declines.

For those that don’t know, ARE is a REIT that specializes in medical research labs.  They own many of the best labs in the best locations in the country.  As our population ages I believe there will be more and more need for these labs are biopharmaceuticals grow to meet the growing need in the population.  The problem isn’t with the long-term thesis, but rather the short-term problems that are continuing to persist.  These problems include: an overbuild out of lab space during the COVID pandemic, a decreasing willingness for government to help fund medical research, a strong pushback on medical prices, an increase in the FED funds rate, increasing funding costs, increasing competition from China, which has a much lower cost of research, a threat from AI potentially leading to a decrease in the need for lab space, and an overall slump in the office sector, which parallels what ARE does.

While I did look at these risks, I wasn’t worried as I viewed, and still view, these factors as short-term headwinds rather than systemic long-term risks.  It became very clear to me that these “short-term” risks were going to last much longer than initially expected when ARE’s latest earnings report dropped recently.  We saw a decline in earnings, revenue, AFFO, FFO, occupancy, leasing, and almost every positive metric available.  It was a report that made it clear to me that ARE still has quite a bit more pain ahead before it turns around.  I made the painful decision to fully exit at a loss on the day of the earnings report, and the stock is down another 17% plus already from the price we sold.  I will continue following this company as it is one that may be worth coming back to in the future, but I want to see some of the problems start to get resolved before we enter back in a meaningful way.

The lessons from ARE are clear to me: Don’t ignore short-term problems.  Some short-term problems are more relevant than others, but long-term problems usually start as short-term problems that end up persisting for longer than expected.  As I continue investing into the future I will try to continue to have a well balanced view of each investment, and most importantly, continue learning from both the successes and failures.

As we have done in the past, I have included a chart of the fund’s performance over time after all fees as well as a portfolio update on the following pages.  I would like to note one major change, which is that we now have a new largest position in the portfolio!  Back during the tariff fears earlier this year, I recognized that Google was becoming a major opportunity in the market and I decided to increase our position dramatically.  Since this purchase Google has been rocketing higher, quickly overtaking Enterprise Product Partners (EPD) as the largest position in our portfolio.  Even though Google shares are much more expensive at the moment then when they are purchased, we are not looking to sell anytime soon as we believe Google to be an amazing company that is growing quickly and that has a bright future ahead.

You can see that this growth of the fund has not slowed down yet, and we are excited to see our partners continue to benefit from our long-term strategy.

The following page contains our portfolio summary as of 10/31/25.  Please note that a high or lower allocation doesn’t necessarily mean a purchase or sale of a stock, but may simply be a reflection of money entering or leaving the fund.  Positions under .1% are not individually detailed and are included under Cash, MM, and Options.  These numbers represent our best estimates as of the stated date.

Conclusion

I love researching companies, learning about industries, and overall investing.  It is a passion for me, and something I will continue doing my entire life.  Most of all, I am excited to help people, ministries, and other organizations to be good Biblical Stewards of their resources.  Thank you for partnering with me over these first few years.  I am excited to see where The Stewardship Fund leads me in the years to come!

God Bless,

Bobby Boyd

CEO of The Stewardship Fund