value and opportunity

Half year portfolio company review 2022 – Part 1.

Posted on 18. August 2022 by memyselfandi007 Leave a comment

Background:

Readers of my blog know that I am not a big fan of doing “sell side” style quarterly updates on my portfolio companies. Quite a few of my holdings don’t even report quarterly.

On the other hand, especially in times like this with fast moving fundamental changes, only looking at the holdings once a year is maybe not enough especially for those positions where my investment horizon is shorter and where I have not yet build up long term confidence.

Therefore I’ll start with half year updates in order to at least look at all my portfolio companies in a systematic way once during the year. In this installment I have selected the larger positions first with a few exceptions.

Admiral

Admiral reported a solid set of numbers for the first 6 months. Net income is slightly ahead of my estimates with a run rate of around 1,34 GBP EPS vs. 1,2. Interestingly, no specific reserve strengthening seems to have been necessary. The stock market seems to have been positively surprised. Even after the recent recovery, the stock trades below 10x P/E for 2022.

Half Year Portfolio review

Special Situation EXMAR NV (BE0003808251) – “Time to Tango ?”

Posted on 10. August 2022 by memyselfandi007 4 comments

Disclaimer: This is not investment Advice. Never trust any anonymous dude on the internet. DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH!!!

IMPORTANT UPDATE: Due to a formula error, I double counted the Net cash in the SOP calculation. Kindly check out the updated numbers ! Fair value is now ~14 EUR per share compared to 17 EUR. Still attractive but a little bit less then initially thought.

Background:

Due to time restrictions, I am not so active in special situations anymore, as the “return on time invested” is often not so great. However if a Special Situation basically “jumps at me”, I won’t say no. In this case some starts aligned: Two people I respect a lot (M. and C.) both independently mentioned this sitation.

In addition, I have a certain weakness for Belgian special situations since my SAPEC investment some years ago and at first sight, a lot of aspects “clicked” with what I am looking for in a special situation.

Just as a reminder for newer readers (and myself): A special situation in my definition is an investment where I am looking at shorter time horizons and where there are some kind of catalysts that could help to realize a significant undervaluation of a security. I have different requirements for special situations, for instance, the long term quality of the business or the management are less important.

The company:

Exmar NV is a Belgian holding company that comprises a couple of maritime activities. The major activities are LPG shipping, the operation of “maritime infrastructure” and other activities, among them interestingly a travel agency and a Yachting service.

Some links

Posted on 8. August 2022 by memyselfandi007 4 comments

Rob Vinall has released his half year letter and has announced a big surprise: Andreas Lechner will join him officially as partner

Iceberg research published a quite entertaining “short attack” on Victoria Plc, a UK flooring roll-up

Great write-up from Augustusville on Millicom (TIGO)

Failed Chinese fast grocery delivery MissFresh is a great case study for similar businesses

Former Tech Champion Intel looks like a train wreck these days

ProfitHunting with a write-up on Aluminium Producer Norsk Hydro

A very interesting article about the obscure market in Listerine royalties

What we read

Admiral Plc – Deep Dive and Re-underwriting the Stock

Posted on 21. July 2022 by memyselfandi007 9 comments

Disclaimer: This is not investment advise but some rather incoherent ramblings of an extremely incompetent former value investor. DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH AND NEVER TRUST ANONYMOUS DUDES ON THE INTERNET!!

On “re-underwriting” an existing position

While writing part 1 of the UK Insurance update and even earlier, during the analysis of Naked Wines, I realized that my investment process has (among other issues) one serious gap: I have no systematic way to reassess or “re-underwrite” a position, especially for those who are in the portfolio for a longer time.

I do a short review every year in my “xx stocks for 20xx” series, but I do not seriously analyse my longer term holdings unless there is a problem.

In some cases that works well, but in other cases, I have been missing things or the case goes far away from the original case. Due to time constraints, doing this every year is not realistic, but going forward, I plan to do this on a 3 year rolling basis for each long term holding.

Review of my initial Admiral case

My original Admiral investment case was from 2014 and can be read here. The initial “underwritten business case” was as follows:

Insurance vs. Inflation & Interest rates (Admiral, Sabre, DirectLine) – Part 1

Posted on 18. July 2022 by memyselfandi007 7 comments

Spoiler: Readers only looking for “actionable investment advice” might skip this post as this is about the basics. The short summary is: Inflation is not good for P&C insurers.

Background: Inflation is back

Last week, especially UK insurance stocks were rattled by news from Sabre Insurance that inflation was hurting them both, through rising claims but also rising reinsurance costs.

Sabre lost -40% that day Admiral and DirectLine were down double digits. On Monday, DirectLine, another UK direct insurer issued a very cautious Trading Update which again led to further losses. The whole disaster can be seen in this chart:

admiral comps

Inflation and Insurance

Some links

Posted on 18. July 2022 by memyselfandi007 One comment

The Rational Walk blog on why researching companies that are too expensive might actually make a lot of sense

The “Uber leaks” picture a horrible company

SPACs were never a good idea for anyone except the promoters and even Bill Ackman is sending money back to investors

Interesting post on AMETEK, a company that compounded nicely over several decades

Companies with difficult to pronounce names might be systematically undervalued

Chrysalis and other “listed VCs” seem to be far behind the curve in valuation of their holdings

Some interesting details on “Twitter vs. Musk”

What we read

Performance review 6M 2022 – Comment “The Siren’s Song of Fallen Angels and (very) low P/E stocks”

Posted on 11. July 2022 by memyselfandi007 26 comments

In the first 6 months of 2022, the Value & Opportunity portfolio lost -14,4% (including dividends, no taxes) against a loss of -20,2% for the Benchmark (Eurostoxx50 (25%), EuroStoxx small 200 (25%), DAX (30%), MDAX (20%), all TR indices).

Links to previous Performance reviews can be found on the Performance Page of the blog. Some other funds that I follow have performed as follows in the first 6M 2022:

Partners Fund TGV: -33,5%
Profitlich/Schmidlin: -18,1 %
Squad European Convictions -13,1%
Ennismore European Smaller Cos -2,5% (in EUR)
Frankfurter Aktienfonds für Stiftungen -14,1%
Greiff Special Situation -2,5%
Squad Aguja Special Situation -12,7%
Paladin One -17,0%

Performance review:

Overall, the portfolio was more or less in the middle of my peer group. Looking at the monthly returns, it is clear that June was one of the worst months in the 11 1/2 years of the blog in absolute terms:

Anlage Philosophie

All Danish Shares part 9 – Nr. 81-90

Posted on 4. July 2022 by memyselfandi007 5 comments

And on we go, another 10 randomly selected Danish stocks. In the current batch, there are some very interesting and unique business models, however only one made it onto the “watch list”. We are now at ~50% coverage of the universe. Once again a quick reminder: Thank you for any requests to look at a specific company, but the random generator determines in what order I look at companies.

81. Scandinavian Medical Solution A/S

Scandinavian Medical is a 17 mn EUR market cap company that seems to be active in trading second-hand medical equipment that was IPOed in late 2021. Not my area of expertise. “pass”.

82. ChemoMetec A/S

ChemoMetec is a 1,9 bn EUR market cap MedTech company that offers Equipment to count cells which, among others is used for Advanced Cell Analysis, Counting of Mammalian Cells, Yeast Cells, and Sperm Cells.

The stock has performed very well over the last 5 years:

Chmeometec

Naked Wines ($WINE) update – The Good, The Bad and the Ugly

Posted on 27. June 2022 by memyselfandi007 28 comments

Disclaimer: this s not investment advice. PLEASE DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH !!!

Naked Wines released their full earnings last week and the result was a full disaster with the share price down a whopping -43% despite the fact that the headline numbers were already known. It is a good reminder that even being down more than -60% from its top, a stock can still fall another -40% on one day. Although the stock was only a 2,9% position prior to that drop, it still warrants a deeper dive than usual.

The signs were already obvious

Before moving to the actual numbers and the report, I have to criticize myself for not acting on the stock despite the following issues that I had identified already some time ago: