Monthly Archives: April 2020

FBD Holdings Plc- Welcome back to Ireland !!!

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Disclaimer: This is not investment advise. Please do your own research !!!

Background:

FBD is a local Irish Insurance company that I first wrote about in early 2015 when the stock look cheap. Luckily I didn’t invest back then as 7 months later FBD got already in trouble mainly due to under reserving plus another few skeletons in the closet. A month later, Prem Watsa came to the rescue with a slightly unusual deal structure.

What caught my eye now again (thanks to a friend mentioning the stock) is the relatively weak share price combined with super strong 2019 results and no bounce back from the Covid-19 crisis levels:

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Some links

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The ProfitHunting blog with a nice series on Disney – Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

Larry Swedroe thinks that even 10 years are too short to judge active investment managers

Some deep thoughts on E-Sports and value creation

How an oil ETF become the driving force of the recent oil price crash

The case for (Quality) Small Cap Value stocks

Must Read: Paul Singer’s (pesimistic) letter to investors 

Jeff Bezos letter to Amazon shareholders

All German Shares Part 21 (Nr. 426-450)

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And the next batch of (mostly) randomly selected German stocks. The only exception I do make for my selection is when one company owns a big stake or is related closely to another listed company. Then I’ll try to look at them in sequence. This time, 5 stocks made it onto the watch list.

426. MBB SE

Another listed “Mittelstands” holding company with a 317 mn EUR market cap. Looking at the stock chart we can see, that between 2015 and 2017 the stock price went up significantly,  Since then the stock is on a downward trend, despite share repurchases:

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Panic Journal 6 – After the “Hammer”

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At the time of writing, it seems that the worst is over at least for the developing world. Numbers of newly infected persons are shrinking and in the Epicenter, Wuhan, life slowly seems to open up again. Yes, the number of deaths is still rising but this is to be expected as there is at least a 10-14 day delay in deaths compared to new infections.

All in all, it looks that “the hammer” including lock downs seems to have worked for the time being. For me time to think about two areas:

  1. What did I learn in the last few weeks ?
  2. What should I focus on going forward ?

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Performance review Q1 2020

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In the first 3 months 2020, the Value & Opportunity portfolio lost  -17.7% (including dividends, no taxes) against a loss of -24.6% for the Benchmark (Eurostoxx50 (Perf.Ind) (25%), Eurostoxx small 200 (25%), DAX (30%), MDAX (20%), all perfomance 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 Q1 2020:

Partners Fund TGV: -19.5% 
Profitlich/Schmidlin: -19,2%
Squad European Convictions -21.9%
Ennismore European Smaller Cos -10.53% (in GBP)
Frankfurter Aktienfonds für Stiftungen -21.6%
Evermore Global Value  -32.2%(USD)
Greiff Special Situation -10.6%
Squad Aguja Special Situation -13.8%

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All German Shares Part 18 (Nr. 351-375)

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So back to the “new normal” with another episode of my German Stock series. Most of these summaries have been written before the crisis hit, so I just added a few comments here and there and updated the numbers.

351. Rhoen Klinikum AG

Rhoen Klinikum is a 1.1 bn 1.2 bn EUR market cap company owns and runs a series of clinics in Germany.  I used to own the shares some time ago but more like a “special situation” investment. The company was target of a take-over battle some years ago and sold a large part of its clinics to a competitor and kept the more difficult ones. The stock did quite well for some time but the started to decline with no end in sight:

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