Some links 30/2025

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The Blackstone Christmas Video is actually quite funny

The French Focus Investing Substack on why the Universal Registration Document is a treasure trove for French companies

Paul Kedrowsky argues that current LLMs are close to a dead end in further development

The productivity gains of AI in coding might be lower as many think

Interesting FT Article on “Accounting Shenanigans” at WH Smith

Morningstar with a nice analysis of what drives and helps long term growth for companies

Some interesting “non intuitive” stock market lessons from TIKR

15 Year Anniversary of Value & Opportunity

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Every year on December 15th, the blog celebrates another anniversary, because on that day in December 2010, the blog went live for the first time. As always a big “THANK YOU” to all readers who still keep reading the stuff.

As always there will be a separate performance portfolio review in the beginning of January.  

The top 10 posts in 2025 were the following (based on WordPress, LTM)

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Quick (and dirty): Cie Bois Sauvage Special Situation

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This is not Investment Advice. PLEASE DO YOU OWN RESEARCH !!!

Bois Sauvage is a Belgian Holding Company that I owned in the past and have written several times about:

2014 Write-up Bois Sauvage

2014 Update on Bois Sauvage and Ackerman

In essence it’s main business is high-end Belgian Chocolate (Neuhaus, Jeff de Brugges) and a variety of other assets, from real estate, listed Belgian stocks and some VC/PE like investments.

What created my renewed interest in the stock was this passage in a recent “Newletter” sent out by the company:

These topics are part of a broader transformation. For several months now, we have been conducting an in-depth strategic review of all our holdings. This review will result in concrete announcements in March 2026. It reflects our desire to better focus our efforts on our areas of expertise, align our portfolio with our ambition for sustainable growth, and enhance the clarity of our investment profile.

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Some links 29/2025

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Highly recommended: Prof. Damodaran on Market Cap thresholds over time , Nvidia and how to calculate implied growth rates

Another Flavour & Fragrances “Banger analysis” from Sector Stories, this time IFF 

French Focused Investing substack on Dividend Aristokrats in France

How (and when) to derisk portfolios before retirement

Great deep dive into the company Duolingo from Quartr

Interestingly, Dwarkesh will prioritize writing essays over doing podcasts

52 Interesting and entertaining things Tom Whitwell learned in 2025

Some links 28/2025

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Bill Gates has some Book recommendations

Some very interesting thoughts around Micheal Burry’s decision to close his fund

Dwarkesh with another “AI Banger”: Ilya Sutskever talks about LLMs

Ben Evans has published his new “AI eats the world” slide deck

Real Madrid is considering the sale of a minority stake to an investor

Retired retail investors tend to trade more and perform worse
A very nice write-up on Asseco Poland from The Outsiders’ corner Substack

Some links 27/2025

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Once again a pretty decent write-up on Symrise from the Sector Stories substack

A good article about Circle, the US Stable Coin company

The Verge has a look into the Abyss errr AI Data Center company CoreWeave

An interesting deep dive into Fraudulent FinTwix favorite Intellego

A couple of interesting Spin-offs have been happening lately

Monevator with a good intro into Derisiking your portfolio for retirement

A decent write-up on Oil&Gas terminal operator Vopak

Random ramblings on AI

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You didn’t ask for it but you get it nevertheless: Some random thoughts on various aspects of Artificial Intelligence. Spoiler: No actionable insights (I think).

Gemini 3.0. vs. Nvidia

Google Gemini 3.0 seems to be a really good model. I am currently using it with my prompts and it seems a little bit better but not that much.  NotebookLM seems to have improved a lot.

However, according to various sources, the model was trained and runs exclusively on Google TPU chips. The Nvidia Bulls keep saying that Nvidia has such a large advantage including their software, that those ultrafat margins will persist for many years as there is no alternative. I am not so sure about this. 

This is the EBIT margin development of NVIDIA since 2002:

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Some links 26/2025

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Decent write-up on Robertet form the Sector Stories Substack. The earlier post on Givaudan is really good, too, as well as the Flavor & Fragrances intro

A significant percentage of today’s investors has not experienced a real bear market

A deep dive into the major issues of the PE industry from the LT3000 blog

Monevator with an interesting post on those battered UK Renewables Trusts

Prof. Damodaran on Gold

And of course Warren Buffett’s “Thanksgiving letter”

The CFA institute thinks private investors should not invest into Private Equity

Wise Plc – The “Costco of Currency transfers” ?

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Investment Disclaimer: This is not investment advice. PLEASE DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH !!!!

AI Disclaimer: This post has been written entirely “by hand”. I do use LLMs as a research assistant but not for generating any parts of this post.

Introduction:

Wise Plc has been on my to do list for some time. A long time ago, part of my professional duty was to monitor and execute (large) international payments and I was always perplexed how slow and cumbersome the process was even for large Financial Institutions. Back then we made the joke that it would be much faster to travel by plane with the cash in a suitcase instead of wiring it through the SWIFT system.

The final push to look deeper into it came when Wise moved into the “Top 10” of my newly created watchlist.

Initially I planned to write a shorter post as a couple of really good write-ups already exist (see appendix), but I had so much fun looking into Wise that I decided to give it the “full treatment” however with a stronger focus on business model, competition and uniqueness.

Here is “the full monty” in PDF form.

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