Monthly Archives: April 2021

Some Links

Posted on by Leave a comment

Interesting view when and especially if all workers return to the office and another good article on the same subject

A16Z on the booming Fintech scene in LatAm

Good Carson Block (Muddy Waters) feature in the Institutional Investor

Great deep dive into Evolution Gaming

The risks of trying to arbitrage Bitcoin Futures

Also “interesting”: Cathy Wood and Jack Dorsey see Bitcoin as an enabler for the energy transition to clean energy

A good collection of Spin-off related links (Dell/VMWare, others)

Some links

Posted on by One comment

An interesting overview how retail spending in the US has developed since the beginning of the pandemic

A “behind the scenes” deep dive into the development of the J&J Covid-19 vaccine

A great allegory on the difference of investing like an Octopus vs. investing like a Shark

How Square succeeded in the hard fought payments business

Canary Wharf is trying to fight itself out of the Covid-19 hole

Although his performance is bad, David Einhorn is still writing decent investor letters 

Which game in investing are you playing ?

 

Some Portfolio updates – VEF, FBD, Play Magnus, BioNTech, JustEat Takeaway.com

Posted on by 13 comments

My long term readers know that I am relatively sloppy with updates especially when a stock does well. When I have time then I try to look at least briefly into annual reports when they are published .

VEF (formerly Vostok Emerging Finance)

VEF had a pretty decent 2020. Share price went up in 2020 by +37%, although faster than NAV which went up by around 22%. This was however achieved with some volatility:

What I missed is that they dis a share placement in November 2020. As usual, the reporting is very transparent so one can see that 4 out of 12 investments lost value. However the biggest position, Brazilian Creditas was also the best performer. Around 2/3 of the portfolio is now Brazilian Fintech. Their only new investment in 2020 was an Indian mobile payment company which makes it their first Indian investment.

Read more

Some links

Posted on by 6 comments

WeWork is coming back as a SPAC. Is it any better now ?

Muddy Waters on the Archego blow up

Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress, has some beef with competitor Wix

International Value Advisors (IVA) once had 10 bn under management but has shut down recently

Jamie Dimon’s annual letter to JPM shareholders is worth a read especially Chapter III on competition for banks

Pareto Securities is organizing an online  Tech/It conference (open also “for free” for private investors) on April 20th with a lot of interesting Small Cap companies form Germany and Norway (including Bouvet).

An interesting view: Comparing the build up of avalanches with financial markets

 

 

Performance review Q1 2021 – Comment: “Age and Investing skills”

Posted on by 19 comments

In the first 3 months of 2021, the Value & Opportunity portfolio gained  +7,6% (including dividends, no taxes) against a gain of +7.9% for the Benchmark (Eurostoxx50 (25%), Eurostoxx small 200 (25%), DAX (30%), MDAX (20%), all TR 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 the first 3M 2021:

Partners Fund TGV: +17,5%
Profitlich/Schmidlin: 5,34 %
Squad European Convictions +9,52%
Ennismore European Smaller Cos +6,08% (in EUR)
Frankfurter Aktienfonds für Stiftungen 7,27%
Evermore Global Value  7,85%USD)
Greiff Special Situation 1,87%
Squad Aguja Special Situation 6,49%
Paladin One 4,75%

Read more

Some links

Posted on by One comment

Bloomberg article on the meltdown of the Archegos Hedgefund

A “Must read” memo from Rob Vinall on how to adapt to rapidly changing markets   

Prof. Damodaran with an interesting deep dive into rising interest rates vs. stock valuations

The Atlantic on the potential of mRNA technology

Yetanothervalueblog likes Discovery, one of the Archegos “victims”

A “conversation with Bill Ackman” from January but still relevant (SPACs etc.)

The thirst for growth assets is met by increasing supply