Monthly Archives: May 2017

Travel series part 6: Tripadvisor (TRIP) – Riding a dead horse ?

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So this is part 6 of my little travel series. Previous posts were:

Part 1 – lastminute.com
Part 2 – Expedia
Part 3 – Trivago
Part  4 & 5 – Flight Centre

ta_logo

The company

Tripadvisor is clearly one of the most well-known names in Online Travel. The company was founded in 2000, but was then acquired by Interactive Group in 2004 and rolled into Expedia. In 2011 the company then was spun out and listed separately. Similar to Expedia in true John Malone style, there are two entities listed: Tripadvisor and Liberty Tripadvisor.

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Some links

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Another reason to trade less: Decision fatigue

Some interesting musings about how to find 28 baggers (Trifast)

Geoff Gannon’s former partner Quan with interesting thoughts about investment writing and Quants vs. longterm investors

Bery Ritholtz’s summer reading list and 5 books recommended by Bill Gates

Tulips & crypto currencies

A good collection of studies for spin-off stock price action directly after the event

 

Italgas SPA (ISIN IT0005211237)- follow & SELL

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People who follow my blog for some time know that timing of purchase and sales of stocks is not one of my strengths. I usually buy too early and sell too early. Italgas is one of the very rare exceptions:

When I looked at Italgas and then bought it end of November, I really managed to buy at or very close to the absolute low after the company had been spun off.

Looking at the stock chart we can see that Italgas outperfomed the broad index (lower blue line) but mostly mirrored the Italian small cap index with a slight outperformance if we consider the dividend which was paid early this week (0,20 EUR/share).

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Sapec SA – follow up

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Annual Report 2016

So now Sapec is out with their annual report for the last year (or 15 months).

The report is in French, so I am not sure if understood everything by 100% but I try to summarize the relevant issues:

  • Book value per share at year-end was 191,6 EUR
  • The operating result of the business ex the sold business is slightly negative
  • The Agro business was sold at 318,4 mn equity value, resulting in a gain of 226 mn EUR
  • They provisioned the full 36 mn Novo Bank guarantee.

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Nickels, steam rollers and other (bad) investment heuristics

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Every now and then some more or less famous investor is quoted with some common wisdom that rarely gets challenged but which in my opinion is total nonsense if used in the wrong context.

Example: “Picking up Nickels in front of a steam roller” should be generally avoided

This is a comment I often here when I discuss certain special situations like for instance the Stada case.

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