Fellow blogger Wexboy with his 6M portfolio review
Overstock looks like a good candidate to short
Must read: The LT3000 blog on structural market inefficiencies (and Hongkong Land)
The unbelievablee Government assisted “pump” of the Kodak share
Unlike other multinational chains, Starbucks is really struggling through the pandemic
Nice write up on Vertiv from GreenWood
“Next generation Buffett wannabe”Sardar Biglari has seen better times
Another 25 carefully randomly selected German stocks.
576. TDMI AG
Zombie stock, “pass”.
577. New Work AG (XING AG)
New Work AG (former XING AG) is a very interesting company. The 1.3 bn market cap company is the German speaking version of LinkedIn. I used to be a (happy) member of XING until they began flooding me with tons of unwanted adverts. I still maintain an account there but since then have moved to LinkedIn. That’s maybe one of the reasons why the B2C side seems to be stagnating, but they compensate with increasing B2B revenues. They also run the German version of “Glasdoor” called kununu.
RV Capital’s half year letter (New position: Prosus)
A deep dive into the structural fraud culture of Chinese Companies
A more positive take on SPACs from a VC perspective
And a more negative opinion on SPACs from a value investor perspective
And finally a deep dive into Bill Ackman’s recent 4 bn “super SPAC”
Fantastic story about a “Stock market oracle toad” during the 80s Japanese Stock frenzy
Good write-up on UK based Headlam as a potential counter cyclical opportunity
Background:
More than five years ago I wrote about why it could make sense to invest into other actively managed funds even if one considers oneself an active investor. I would summarize the criteria that were important to me as follows:
The interests of the manager should be long term aligned with investors and the manager should possess specific skills to complement the own portfolio as well as to enable some learning.
Must read: Morgan Housel trying to make sense of today’s world via five stories
Rob Vinall’s take on Wirecard
Some smart thoughts if and what type of “value investing” might work in the future
TGV Partners 6M 2020 report (DCC, TGS Nopec & others)
TGV Rubicon Stockpicker 6M 2020 report
Very good write-up/update on UK ad company System1
Interesting Freudian approach trying to explain the adversity of Americans to face masks
German Startups Group – Sell
As mentioned in the comments of the original post, I sold out the complete position today at an average price of ~1,71 EUR per share.
When I established the position in December 2019, the case was simple:
My assumption was that the intrinsic value of the portfolio was higher than the ~ 1,40 EUR share price, that the management would continue to liquidate the portfolio and that there would be a catalyst in form of share repurchases.
From an incentive perspective, the CEO had a big incentive to move the share price above 1,80 EUR so that the management fees would kick back in.
Implicitly however there was always the risk, that the CEO would hesitate to reduce the asset base as this would reduce the AUM and management fees accordingly, but the risk/return profile looked OK for me.
After a 4 week break, a new batch of 25 randomly selected German shares. Seven of them I found worth “watching”, although none of them with super high priority. And only 200 more stocks to go 😉
551. Pfeiffer Vacuum AG
Pfeiffer is a 1.7 bn company that specializes in vacuum technology and especially vacuum pumps. the stock price recovered quickly after the crisis despite a pretty disappointing 2019 and is still within the long term growth path:
Roughly 4 months have passed since my first post that I called the “Panic Journal” series in order to document my thought process during the “corona crisis”. Time to look back and reflect. These were the posts so far:
March 15th Part 2 – Fear & Bullet proof your portfolio
March 18th Part 3 – Expert Virologists and statistics
March 23rd Part 4 – Consolidation
March 29th Part 5 – Everyone has a plan
April 13th Part 6 – After the Hammer
May 7th Part 7 – Where is my bail out
June 7th Part 8 – Easy Dancing
Major missjudgements made: Covid-19 winners and time available
Interesting interview (Video) with Barry Diller (Expedia, Match.com etc..) on Covid-19 impacts
Undervalued Shares with a nice intro to Poland and its stock market
Great story on the current status of the financial system
The stock market as a gigantic carry trade
Good background article on the new breed of “David Portnoy” like retail speculators
FtAlphaville is sceptical about current SaaS company valuations (me Too…)
In the first 6 months of 2020, the Value & Opportunity portfolio gained +0,9% (including dividends, no taxes) against a loss of -9.6% 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 2020:
Partners Fund TGV: +0.9%
Profitlich/Schmidlin: -4,1%
Squad European Convictions -4.7%
Ennismore European Smaller Cos –7.49% (in GBP)
Frankfurter Aktienfonds für Stiftungen -13.5%
Evermore Global Value -23.6%(USD)
Greiff Special Situation -4.2%
Squad Aguja Special Situation -0.2%
Since inception (01.01.2011), this translates into +193,0% vs. 93.1% for the Benchmark.
