The “All German Shares Series” – Intro
Background:
My roots as an investor are domestic German stocks. For the first 10-15 years of my investing “career” I would only look at German stocks (with minor exceptions during the Dot.com boom), only after some time I moved on to a more international focus. Even at the beginning of this blog in December 2010, the majority of our shares back then were still German.
These days, I only have a relatively small domestic stock allocation left (P. Hartmann, Draeger, Innogy) and mostly screen for international stocks.
One interesting thing happened in the meantime: I kind of lost my comprehensive knowledge about German shares. A lot of companies have newly been listed or disappeared and somehow I never ket track of what was happening. Also I didn’t follow the good ones very closely.
Time for change: Looking at every German share
Inspired by Wexboy’s great Irish Share Valuation series, I decided to refresh my knowledge on German shares in a new series. As a basis I simply took this Wikipedia list, which might not be completely comprehensive but will be a good starting point of 818 listed German companies.
The “analysis” will be a very simple screening process:
- The selection will be based on a random order
- I look at basic information like Market cap, stock price chart etc.
- I will look at the last annual report and at the most comprehensive German stock discussion forum “Wallstreet Online” to get an understanding of the company (by the way, if you digg deep you will find some posts from a guy called memyselfandi007 there, like this one from 16 yearsa ago: https://www.wallstreet-online.de/diskussion/788867-1-10/r-stahl-ag-ist-das-der-turnaround)
- and then subjectively decide if this is a company that is worth going on a watch list or not
- super nano caps and everything that looks like a pump and dump penny stock will automatically be a “pass” as well as pure shell companies or defaulted ones (there is a surprising amount of crap listed on German exchanges…)
There will be no valuation exercise in this first step. Maybe in a second step when I have my watch list.
I will post in “Batches” of 10 to 15 companies in irregular intervals, although I try to do a post at least once a week. This can take some time but on the other hand should also be a fun exercise (for a stock nerd lilke me at least…).
One final remark: The start of the series does not imply that especially now is agood point in time to invest into German shares.
value and opportunity 
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Next week is the German Corporate Conference with dozens of German companies! Good moment to revisit them! I have one in mind that looks really attractive, Aumann. They are not in their best moment, like other autoparts, but i remember just 12months ago everybody excited with it. Now trading at low valuations implying no growth but trust me, it’s a high growth company in the long run.
Thanks for your promotion of that stock. I rarely listen to people that use “trust me” in their comments. Better to trust not.
Agree! “Trust me” that I dont have a crystal ball… what I meant is that investors changed their minds radically in 1 year and this kind of reversal are always worth a look because sometimes are overdone.
I am still mostly looking at German companies because I think there is a lot of opportunities to dig up.
It helps that I dont need that many to fill up my portfolio (~10) and reading annual reports takes time.
Looking forward to this
Great! It will be exciting.. Looking forward to it!
Great! It will be exciting.. Looking forward to it!
Interessante deutsche Aktien, die du für deine Analyse heranziehen könntest wären neben Paul Hartmann und Drägerwerk folgende:
Krones
Hermle
Jungheinrich
Fuchs Petrolub
I will work in random order as mentioned in the post…
MMI, I greatly value the blog, so please take this in the spirit it is intended – to help arrive at a better investment process, which is why (or at least one of the reasons why) you write this blog.
If time is not infinite, why is it rational to look at these in random order?
The only reason I can think why is if it’s impossible to sort them in any other order, but that seems very unlikely. If you have finite time and can sort them, surely you should look at them in some sort order where more interesting ones are likely to be looked at sooner? Anything else strikes me as irrational.
Well, the main goal is to refresh my overall knowledge of German stocks. The second goal is to actually finish the series. And somehow random order makes this much more fun.
memyselfandi007 might be working in a random order which is a great approach for a project like that.
I would agree that Jungheinrich and Fuchs Petrolub are very interesting at the moment.
Let’s wait until he gets there 🙂
Looking forward to it!
Hope they go better than Metro !
Despite your strange grammatics, what do you actually mean with this comment ?
Cool, looking Forward to it!
Welcome back!