value and opportunity

Every year on December 15th, the blog celebrates another anniversary, because on that day in December 2010, the blog went live for the first time. (Edit: This should have gone out yesterday….).

As always there will be a separate performance portfolio review in the beginning of Januray.  This time, it is the 11th. I have googled around a little bit and the Number 11 seems to mean sometimes achieving a higher spiritual level. I am not sure if I managed this in my 11th year in the blog, although I feel strangely relaxed about the recent market turbulences 😉

Again, a big thank you to all readers, especially those who contribute (and motivate) via constructive comments but of course also to all the silent readers.

The top 10 posts in 2021 were the following:

1. BioNTech SE – “One hit wonder” or Game changing Biotech platform ?
2. Just EAT Takeaway.com – Just another roll-up or long term growth opportunity ?
3. Alimentation Couche-Tard: Cheap Quality Compounder or Gasoline Dinosaur ?
4. Fossil Fuel investments – who to blame for high energy prices ? (David Einhorn, Warren Buffett, ESG)
5. Just Eat Takeaway.com (JET) Update – “The attack of the 10 minute delivery services”
6. The new “Energy Transition” Basket Part 1 – (Siemens Energy, Orsted, Aker Horizon)
7. Some Portfolio updates – VEF, FBD, Play Magnus, BioNTech, JustEat Takeaway.com
8. The Energy Transition basket: Are Cables the new “Shovels” ? (Prysmian, Nexans, NKT)
9. Grenke AG – Update: All clear or the “same old song” Again ?
10. The “All Swiss Shares” Series Part 1 – Nr. 1-10 

Blogging highlights 2021:

So far, in 2021 I managed to post 94 times, more than half of that were weekly links. The biggest achievement (and fun) has clearly been the “All Swiss Shares series” which comprised 20 posts overall.

Overall, stock pitches were the most popular posts, especially for somehow larger, better known names. If I would be in the publishing business, then posting about well known stocks is clearly good for number of hits.

I also finished my Covid Panic Journal only to revive it a few weeks ago. Usually market commentary is not my focus, but in these more extreme circumstances I think this helps to avoid Level 1 thinking.

Digging into Energy transition topics was also big fun on my side and led to the creation of quite some ideas, including the “Energy transition basket”. This is something that I also look forward to deepen in 2022.

Luckily I also managed to read and write about a couple of good books. Reading a book is a big time investment, but good books have incredible high ROICs.

Statistics:

Overall, views are at around 370 k for this ear, well below the 635k from 2017. On the other hand, the numbers of followers slowly and steadily increases and the top posts in the year reach more people than in the years back then. I guess the overall reduction of views seems to be partially also a function of a change of some Google algorithms as many of the older general interest posts that generated a lot of views each year are hardly found any more. But as I don’t need to earn money from this, I couldn’t care less.

What changed in 2021 ?

Not much with one exception: Some readers might have noticed a Twitter Plugin in the top of the blog. I signed  for Twitter in 2012 as memyselfandi006 (007 had been already taken) and never used it that much. The last few months however I better learned to navigate it and now think it is actually a very useful tool. Of course it is a kind of “rabbit hole” with the potential of many wasted hours, on the other hand it is also a treasure trove of very interesting content on stocks and financial markets.

I still prefer long form for write-ups, but Twitter has definitely its uses and is a lot of fun.

The year ahead

As mentioned in the final episode of the “All Swiss” series, the next country to look at is Denmark. I also plan to look deeper into Energy Transition and Decarbonisation. And don’t be surprised to read something on Crypto soon.

Other than that, the goal is to finish year 12 !!!

Bonus Track: