Interesting article on the current music rights catalog “gold rush” (Hypgnosis)
Rob Vinall with some deep reflections on “Compounders”
A comprehensive list of Q4 fund letters is to be found in this quiet corner of Reddit.…
Good write-up on Polish game developer CD Project
Cullen Roche on short selling and Citron Research is going “long only”
A very interesting introduction into the “Micro PE market”
A great reminder: Check up on cognitive biases on a regular basis !!
By coincidence, I downloaded this book before I got interested in Play Magnus a few months ago. However this clearly motivated me to move the book to the front of the reading list…..
Garry Kasparow has been named as one of the greatest Chess players of all time and became Chess world chmapion in 1985 at the age of 22 and held the title over 15 years. After his chess carreer, he surprisingly went into politics. As a funny side note: Kasparov was involved in founding the first online chess company in 1999. In between he coached younger chess players, for instance Magnus Carlsen in 2009.
In this book, Kasparov tries to transport strategic lessons from Chess into fields like business, politics and investment. In between he also covers his greatest matches, hardest opponents (Karpov !!) and the lessons he learned both, from victories and defeats.
Disclaimer: This is not investment advice. PLEASE DO YOU OWN RESEARCH !!!
Management Summary:
Alimentation Couche-Tard (“CT”) is one of the historically best performing Canadian companies, operating gas stations and convenience stores around the world with a focus on North America.
The company currently looks like a very interesting GARP (growth at a reasonable price) stock. Over the last 10 years, the company showed exceptionally good numbers: 23% EPS CAGR and 10 year average returns on capital >20% (23% ROE, ~20% ROCE). The business model is very resilient, Covid-19 actually led to an increase in margins and profits, both on the convenience store segment as well as in fuel despite declining sales.
The Brooklyn Investor on Howard Marks, RenTech, Bubbles and other stuff
First year review of “Junto” (h/t searching4value)
Ghost kitchens meet celebrities: Innovation in the Restaurant sector
How Solar Power is “eating the energy world”
Great advice: Just buy stocks that go up and sell when it stops going up
Cathie Wood’s “Agressive growth” fund company Ark Investment is doing great
And some annual letters to investors:
TGV Partners
TGV Rubicon
TGV Truffle
Giverny Capital
Massif Capital
Intro:
As part of an improved investment process, I will try to write better “post mortem” analysis after exiting an investment. I did this in the past especially for bad investments but I plan to do this now for every investment that I fully exit. Interestingly, very few fund mangers talk or write in detail why they have been selling.
Installux post mortem:
As mentioned in the comments of the original post, I sold my Installux shares yesterday at around 390 EUR, netting a total gain of 206% or ~13,7% p.a. over ~ 8.5 years.
Installux was my second longest standing position in the portfolio. I was able to buy the shares cheaply mostly on a “mechanical basis” in 2012. This was my summary back then:
We have a consistently growing and profitable business with very low volatility, attractive ROE and ROIC and a valuation of 2x EV/EBITDA and 5x P/E adjusted for cash (7.8 unadjusted) which produces a large amount of free cashflow despite growing nicely over the years.
So what happened since then ? This is how the stock price looks like for the last 10 years:
Great long read on Jack Ma and Alibaba
“The friendly Bear” thinks Lemonade is a “ESG Pump and Dump”
Rob Vinall with a great post on Conspiracy theories
Absolutely must read: Howard Marks on the useless divide between “value” and “growth” investing
Great summary of Nick Sleep’s (Nomad) investment wisdom
Some stock spin-off ideas for 2021
RenTechs “own money” Medaillion fund had another great year, its funds for outside investors however suffered big losses
Joachim Klement is a native German, London based investment professional who, among other things writes one of my favorite financial blogs named “KOI – Klement on Investing”.
Despite having a full time job and a high quality, frequent blog, he also managed to write a book. Being a German of course, he doesn’t promise to make one rich quickly but it tries to identify and provide solutions for very common mistakes that indeed almost all investor make.
Although Klement is a more Macro oriented investor, his advice is great also for stock pickers or any other investment styles. He emphasizes a lot of points that I share 100%. The mistakes that he concentrates are:
Health Warning: This is not investment advise. PLEASE DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH !!!!!
Introduction
Just Eat Takeaway.com or “JET” is another of these stocks that popped up from different “high quality” sources. A few friends mentioned the stock, most recently Swen Lorenz featured JET (behind paywall). By coincidence I am also a relatively happy user of their service, especially since the lock downs started.
The company
A good starting point for an analysis is this write-up from a US based 2 bn USD hedgefund called “Catrock” which has invested ~30% of its NAV into JET and not surprisingly is very bullish. therefore I will only describe here what I find important.
Must read (as always): Rob Vinall’s 2020 letter to investors
FTAlphaville is very skeptical about the Hypgnosis (SONG) business model
A very deep and very skeptical look into Bill.com
Jeremy Grantham is calling the bubble (good summary of all bubble arguments even if I would suggest to ignore it)
What John Hempton (Bronte) learned in 2020 (Podcast)
Very interesting talk with Weijian Shan, an Asian PE investor and book author
Aggressive Buy: The next German Mega-Unicorn Pöny
After the 2020 Performance review a few days ago, this time a more “in depth” look into the 10 year performance of the portfolio. For the record: The Performance page of the blog is now fully updated 😉
As this has become a very long post, these are the main sections:
1. Numbers & Statistics
The hard numbers: Over the 10 years from 12/31/2010 to 12/31/2020, the portfolio gained +270,3% against +122,7% against the Benchmark (Eurostoxx50(25%), Eurostoxx small 200 (25%), DAX (30%), MDAX (20%), all performance indices including Dividends).. In CAGR numbers this translates into 14,0% p.a. for the portfolio vs. 8,3% p.a. for the Benchmark. As a graph this looks as follows:
value and opportunity 