Monthly Archives: June 2021

Some links

On the difficult relationship between Restaurants and Delivery Apps

Remote work is going to stay

The founders of  a South African Crypto platform disappeared with a few billions of Bitcon

Zero Knowledge Proof (ZKP) technology could solve a lot of issues with data privacy

John Kingham with an in-depth look into QinetiQ

Swen Lorenz on SBM (Société des Bains de Mer et du Cercle des Etrangers à Monaco S.A)

Noah Smith interviews Marc Andreessen

Investors are maybe too optimistic about stock market returns

And a special link: Anyone who registers on Swen Lorenz Undervalued Shares website, get his new Ebook with the best Finance blogs of the world for free (incl. V&O)

All Swiss Shares Series Part 5 – Nr. 41 – 50

Another 10 randomly selected Swiss shares. This time, two share made it into the watch list.

41. WISeKey AG

WISekey is a 102 mn CHF market cap Cybersecurity firm that went public in 2016. The company made some headlines pre IPO as Kevin Spacey was one of the investors. The first quoted price has been 12 CHF/share, in the meantime, the stock lost -90%. The company investor presentation manages to have 27 pages without a single hard number.

The company claims to be in the midst of Blockchain, IOT and AI. However Sales have been shrinking and losses are at a level of 2x sales. “Pass”.

42. Banque Cantonal de Jura SA

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Some Links

Useful vocabulary if you want to follow r/wsb

A super helpful list for “sniff tests” on company management

Great profile on Australian Private Equity investor William Dingby

Podcast with great insights on Moderna and mRNA technology

Winners and Losers of a “Work from Home” world

The delivery model is a big differentiator for E-Commerce business models

Good write-up on how Nintendo seems to better monetize their IP

Just Eat Takeaway.com (JET) Update – “The attack of the 10 minute delivery services”

Intro/Background:

JustEat Takeaway.com (JET) is one of my riskier bets as I outlined in my initial post from January. In a nutshell, the thesis was that JET has reached a dominating position in running a food delivery market place in many countries (among them Germany, UK, Canada etc.), has got an extra kick from Covid-19 lock downs and will begin to make money soon, similar to their home market Netherlands. Within JET’s business, Germany clearly looked like the most promising market as it is a big and growing market and they are the only player left.

This is supported by the assumption that JET’s main competitors (Uber, Deliveroo, DoorDash) are now stock listed and need to stop burning money. The assumption was also, that despite offering own delivery as a feature, in the long run JET will manage to dominate the Market place business model which is more profitable than actually employing drivers.

Since then, the stock hasn’t done that well, despite having released very encouraging top line growth numbers which motivated me to even increase the position from 2% of the portfolio to 3% (at cost).

With today’s closing of the Grubhub deal I think it is worth trying to do a quick update.

What changed

New competitors – It’s getting crowded 

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Some Links

Highly interesting post from Marc Rubinstein on Maker DAO, a fully decentralized Crypto bank

Good write-up on UK micro cap Quarto Plc

Yetanothervalueblog with some deep thoughts on the Music Industry

Deep Insights into the “Deca-Unicorn” Stripe

The always excellent Morgan Housel on the importance of “Managing Expectations”

Prof. Damodaran on SPACs

Good profile on John Rogers (Ariel) who is very bullish on Value Investing

 

 

The Energy Transition basket: Are Cables the new “Shovels” ? (Prysmian, Nexans, NKT)

Disclaimer: This is not investment advice. PLEASE DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH !!!

Background:

I am currently trying to build up exposure to what I expect to be a long term trend towards electrification (see the first post). As I am still learning on the way, I decided to start with a “basket” approach where I try to build a basket of (lower weighted)  potentially interesting stocks and then dive deeper during the following months/years So the initial analysis will be a little bit more shallow than usual.

This should be seen as a “scientific experiment”, so it could easily be that I find out that some (or all) of the positions don’t make any sense and I will sell them.

An alternative would be to read for months/years, write down a lot of stuff and then come out with a few “conviction investments” but that path is more difficult for me to implement. I prefer to get my toes into the water early in order to remain motivated.

As the whole effort in this sector/industry is about building up the infrastructure of the future, many of the companies will have a capital intensive business model. Of course I would prefer capital light business models at super low valuations but I haven’t been able to identify any yet.

Finally I am aware that I am maybe a little bit late to the party, but my expectation is that the party will last for a long time.

Are Cables the new shovels ?

During the Wild West Gold rush, there was the famous saying that the surest way to get rich in the gold rush was not to dig for gold but sell shovels to gold diggers. The deeper meaning of this saying is in my opinion, that in a situation similar to a gold rush you can make a lot of money by selling relatively ordinary things to people who desperately need them if there is a (local) shortage of these items.

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All Swiss Shares Series Part 4 – Nr. 31 – 40

Another week, another 10 Swiss stocks, this time with one stock to “watch”.

31. Plazza AG

Plazza is a 581 mn CHF market cap real estate company that invests in and around Zurich. The company seems to trade close to NAV and as a rule I normally don’t consider listed real estate as part of my investment universe, therefore I’ll “pass”.

32. Komax AG

Komax is a 831 mn CHF market cap company that supplies cable automation machines to mainly car manufacturers but also the Aerospace industry as well as other industries. As a automobile supplier, business suffered already in 2019 before getting hit again in 2020.

The stock chart shows a significant cyclicality which is not a surprise:

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Some links

Interesting feature on David Rolfe from Wedgewood Partners

The New Yorker with a feature on the “Master of SPACs” Chamath Palihapitiya

Nine (strong) arguments for ESG Investing

Restaurants in the US are scaling back delivery options

The Pro-Brexit CEO of JD Wetherspoon wants more migrant workers for the UK

An interesting article on how Amazon forces market place sellers not to sell cheaper elsewhere

Good interview by Good Investing with the two founders of Worm Capital