Monthly Archives: April 2023

All Norwegian Stocks Part 9 – Nr. 121-135

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And on we go, after a small break, with a fresh batch of 15 randomly selected Norwegian stocks. This time, the random number generator selected a wide variety of businesses compared to the ususal “Fsih & Ships”. 3 stocks made it onto the watch list, one of them had been in my portfolio in the past. Enjoy !!

121. HAV Group AS

HAV Group is a 32 mn EUR market cap supplier to the maritime industry. Looking at the website, they seem to focus on at least optically on “Green” technologies, for instance electric ships and hydrogen solutions.

That all sounds very good on paper and for 2021 has translated into decent profits, but 2022 looks very different, with declining sales and disappearing profits. Q4 2022 was especially bad with an EBIT margin of -16%.

Looking at the chart, we can see that the timing of the IPO in March 2021 seems to have been perfect….for those who were selling:

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“Freedom Insulation” update – A Deeper Dive & Top Down market estimate

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Disclaimer: As I am an investor and not a Building & Construction specialist, this post might contain a lot of wrong or even misleading information. All I can say is that I do this on a “best effort” basis. DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH !!!!

Time flies. Already more than 7 Months ago, I introduced my “Freedom insulation” basket. Since then I had pruned the basket, mainly because of the contraction in the construction industry and currently I only hold Rockwool (1,1%), Sto (1%) and Recticel (0,6%). Back then, the underlying case for insulation was a very high level one, this time I want to dig a little deeper and substantiate it if possible.

Regulatory background:

Just a few weeks ago, the EU Parlament passed a quite impactful law, basically requiring the “energetic renovation” (and insulation) of old buildings within the next 4-10 years. The most important part is that for each EU country, the worst 15% of buildings must be thoroughly renovated by 2027 (commercial) and 2030 (residential), with even stricter rules after another 3 years.

As this is Europe, the details of this law now need to be discussed with each and every member country and for sure, there will be excemtoptions and delays, but the direction is clear: There will be a strong push towards renovations which in turn will require a lot of insulation. Naturally, with the Green Party in charge, Germany has passed already some laws that require property owners to do something quickly, like for instance baning Oil and gas heating from 2024

What happened to insulation stocks since then ?

Interestingly, this hasn’t helped insulation stocks at all, as the stock charts below show. Over 1 year, insulation stocks significantly underperformed the broad construction index, since my post in September performance was on average “in line” (yellow is Steico):

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Performance review 3M 2023 – Comment: “Please don’t give me a cyrstal ball & How to cope best with massive changes (Covid, Ukraine, Inflation)”

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In the first 3 months of 2023, the Value & Opportunity portfolio gained  +4,7% (including dividends, no taxes) against a gain of +11,3% 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 2023:

Partners Fund TGV: -3,3%
Profitlich/Schmidlin: +8,0%
Squad European Convictions +5,3%
Frankfurter Aktienfonds für Stiftungen 1,3%
Squad Aguja Special Situation +3,9%
Paladin One +4,9%
Alphastars Europe + 4,2%

I have slightly adjusted the Peer Group by eliminating Ennismore as it is actually a long/short Fund and Greiff Special situations. I have added Alphastars Europa, a quite new fund,. What I like about Alphastars is that one has an almost real time view into the portfolio. The Europa funds contains a selection of quite unusual but very interesting selection of European small caps and will be a challenging peer for me going forward.

Performance review:

Overall, the portfolio performance was again more or less in the middle of my peer group. As the peer group is pretty Small cap focused, the relative low returns correspond with the returns of European small cap indices. Looking at the monthly returns, it is not difficult to see that especially January was in relative terms very disappointing.

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