value and opportunity

Sky Deutschland

A short quiz: Can you spot the day when the 6,75 EUR offer expired ?

My initial strategy obviously didn’t work out. Now however I am wondering why I didn’t short Sky Deutschland instead before the offer expired. It seems to be clear now that the price didn’t move above 6,75 EUR during the offer period, because most people attach a fundamental value of less than 6,75 EUR to the shares. That would have been second level thinking, but I missed it.

I read somewhere that you should only sell a stock from a portfolio if you are ready to short it. That would have been the best approach here.

Rhoen Klinikum

Looking at the chart, my decision to take a profit at 23,15 EUR looks stupid:

The mechanics of the current “listed transferable tender rights” are the following: The less people who want to actually sell there shares, the lower the price of the tender rights and the higher the share price. As for now, it seems that not so many people want to sell. I have to confess that I got nervous when the price of Rhoen dropped after I bought on the first day ex rights.

In the future, I think it makes sense to wait longer and see how these special situation plays out. I think I waisted some “intrinsic optionality” by taking the small profit much too early.

Bilfinger

In August I looked at Bilfinger for the first time. My arguments against an investment back then were the following:

– some of the many acquisitions could lead to further write downs, especially if a new CEO comes in and goes for the “kitchen sink” approach
– especially the energy business has some structural problems
– fundamentally the company is cheap but not super cheap
– often, when the bad news start to hit, the really bad news only comes out later like for instance Royal Imtech, which was in a very similar business. I don’t think that we will see actual fraud issues at Bilfinger, but who knows ?

Yesterday, Bilfinger released Q3 numbers.

For me, it was therefore no big surprise that they had to write down in total of ~230 mn EUR. The market however seems to have been expecting other things as the extreme drop in the share price shows:

I think Bilfinger is now approaching the “very cheap” area and I will look at them a little closer in the next weeks.

Vossloh

Vossloh, another potential “turn around” story also released Q3 numbers a few days ago. Similar to Bilfinger, investors seemed to have been spooked by the numbers.

In my opinion, two issues might have irritated investors:

– new orders in Q3 were very weak (new orders in the first 6 months were very strong)
– management basically said that a “full” recovery can only be expected for 2017

Interestingly, the whole press release had a very negative tone, they make no attempt to strip out the one offs etc. etc. Maybe it is coincidence, but if I would want to talk the stock down in order to maybe buy the company cheaply, I would do it exactly that way…..

This is what I said in September:

Looking at the chart, this might not be unrealistic as the stock price is still in free fall and any “technical” support levels would be somewhere around 39 EUR per share if one would be into chart analysis. In any of those “falling knife” cases, patience is essential anyway.

Vossloh will therefore be “only” on my watch list with a limit of 42 EUR where I would start to buy if no adverse developments arise.

So we are now very close to my potential entry point. I will watch this as closely as Bilfinger. Both for Bilfinger and Vossloh, Iit will be interesting to see if there will be some year end tax loss selling.