Monthly Archives: February 2018

The return of the Travel Series (9): Expedia (EXPE) – Cheaper than I thought

Disclaimer: This is not investment advise !!! Do your own research !!!!
The guy who wrote this post just lost a lot of money with his Silver Chef position. You might even consider shorting his recommendations 😉

Background:

When I looked at Expedia almost exactly one year ago as part of my 2017 Travel Series my key take negative aways were as follows:

– CEO has super high salary (90 mn USD in 2015)
– top line growth, operating profit stagnant
– expensive acquisitions in 2015/2016, number of shares and debt increased significantly
– reported growth numbers not adjusted for acquisitions in investor presentation
– lots of share options

Additionally, the stock looked expensive:

At 119 USD per share, Bloomberg tells me that they have a trailing P/E of 54, an expected 2017 P/E of 22,3 and an EV/EBITDA of ~16. This means that a lot of growth is already priced in.

As we can see in the chart, the stock became at first even more expensive before dropping back to a level of around 100 USD / share:

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Some links

Notes from the Daily Journal annual shareholder meeting (Charlie Munger)

Driverless cars might not be a safe as their main promoters often claim

A great and comprehensive list of essential readings to understand Crypto & Blockchain

Highly recommended: The 2017 Broyhilll Book club list

Some deep thoughts about what to do in a stock market correction (Spoiler: Nothing)

The UK value investor has a good post on how and when to let winning stocks run

Two of my favorite writers having a conversation: Matt Levine and Tyler Cowen

Boiron SA (ISIN FR0000061129) – Boring enough to invest ?

It’s no secret that I like French family run companies. TFF Group, G. Perrier, Installux, Dom Security are just the main examples of these kind of companies.

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Boiron SA is a French company which Bloomberg lists as “Specialty Pharmaceutical” company. Although “Specialty Pharma” is not exactly what they do. in fact, Boiron SA ist the only listed company that I know that exclusively produces and sells Homeopathic “pharmaceutical” products. The call themselves “World leader” of this field.

A few words on Homeopathy

From Wikipedia:

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Some links

Low risk banks seem to be relatively better investments than their risky peers

Is chip maker AMD a potential “Proxy short” for Crypto currencies (Ethereum) ?

Polleit & Riechert 2017 letter

Bronte doesn’t like potential short selling disclosure rules (for good reason)

Ben from WertArt invested into Geospace Technologies

Very interesting htought: Could Expedia & Priceline become Hotel brands ?

The UK Value Investor explores if Interserve and 4GS could be the “next Carillion”

 

 

 

Softbank & Swiss Re – is Masa Son just losing it ?

As I have covered Softbank just recently (part 1, part 2 ) and as I consider Insurance companies to be somehow in my circle of competence, the news that Softbank wants to acquire 30% of Swiss Re for 10 bn USD of course sparked my interest.

The big question of course is: Why on earth would Masa Son do that ?

Looking at his vision statements, his vision is a connected world via the internet of things, lots of robots, smart AIs and a lot of computing power. So he is buying chip makers (ARM; Nvidia), data companies like Uber, mobile phone companies, robotic companies etc. So far so good, somehow this could fit together.

But a Reinsurance company ? WTF is that ?

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Book review: “Machine, Platform, Crowd – Harnessing our Digital Future”

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“Machine, Platform Crowd” tries to summarize what in the author’s view are the currently most important changes that will impact both, individuals and companies going forward:They call it the “Triple Revolution” consisting of:

  1. The emergence of machines (Robots, AI)
  2. The evolution from Products to Platforms
  3. The increasing importance of the Crowd vs. the “core”

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