Monthly Archives: July 2025

Some links 17/2025

Posted on by 2 comments

Ben Thompson (Stratechery) thinks that “community” is to only answer for content creators in the age of AI

Rubicon Stockpicker 6M report with some interesting new positions (Novem, Stratec, Hgears update)

Verdad Capital on increasing buybacks and dividends in Japan

An interesting pitch on an GLP-1 “stock basket” (Novo etc.)

Plus a pretty decent analysis if GLP-1 is indeed a wonder drug or not

Even more than 100 years ago, price momentum seems to have been a relevant factor in stock investing

A recent paper on low volatility stock alpha 

Private Equity Mini series (4) : “Investing like a “billionaire” for retail investors in the UK stock market via PE Trusts

Posted on by 8 comments

Private Equity Mini series (4) : “Investing like a “billionaire” for retail investors in the UK stock market via PE Trusts

This is the 4th part of my Private Equity “mini” series. The previous posts can be found here:

Private Equity Mini Series (1): My IRR is not your Performance
Private Equity Mini series (2) – What kind of “Alpha” can you expect from Private Equity as a Retail Investor compared to public stocks ?
Private Equity Mini Series (3): Listed Private Asset Managers (KKR, Apollo & Co)

Background:

Not sure if this is mainly a German phenomenon, but you can’t listen to a German finance podcast without being quite aggressively advertised on how Private Equity is finally being democratized through some “revolutionary” retail offerings that almost always are quite complicated and contain another layer of fees on top of what the PE guys are charging.

The main pitch is that now even the small guy on the street can do what previously only billionaires could do: Invest into Private Equity and make boat loads of money.

The hard truth is that Private Equity has been democratized long ago in the UK but no one gives a sh** about it.

Read more

Some links 16/2025

Posted on by One comment

A great deep dive into the messy situation at Vivendi with some fascinating details on French Corporate Governance

Very interesting FT Alphaville deep dive on highly secretive PC Gaming platform Valve/Steam

Clarke Square Capital pitch on Grupa Pracuj, a classified player from Poland

Partners Fund (formerly known as TGV Partners) with its 10 year anniversary letter to investors

Accountants might be safe for a while from being replaced by an LLM (Twitter thread)

An optimistic report on Spain as a country

The Private Equity industry keeps innovating: They now invented “Continuation vehicles Squared” that invest into….other Continuation Vehicles.

Some (deep) thoughts on the current AI Datacenter Capex boom

Quick updates: Fuchs, EVS Broadcast, STEF & SFS

Posted on by 4 comments

Fuchs SE:
Let’s start with a negative surprise: Fuchs released 2 days ago that they will fall short of their (downward revised) 2025 forecast.

“For the financial year 2025, FUCHS now expects sales and EBIT on previous year’s level (financial year 2024: Sales at €3,525 million, EBIT at €434 million). The previous outlook for 2025 expected sales at around €3.7 billion and EBIT at around €460 million. Consensus for the financial year 2025 stands at
€3,660 million for sales and at €459 million for EBIT.”

Last year, when I decided to invest into Fuchs, the 2025 EBIT forecast was 500 mn EUR:

Read more

Performance review Q2 2025 – Comment: “Just keep going or reflect & adapt ?”

Posted on by 17 comments

In the first 6 months of 2025, the Value & Opportunity portfolio gained  +5,8% (including dividends, no taxes) against a gain of +15,6% 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.

Performance review:

As mentioned in Q1, in relative terms 2025 turned out to be a tough year. Despite my traditional overweight in European stocks, I didn’t have enough exposure to performing sectors (Financials, Defense) but instead too much exposure to weak sectors like Oil/Energy related (ATD, DCC), Alcohol (TFF) or construction (Thermador, Samse etc.). I also had no expsoure to takeovers or buy outs.

The only positive news is that June was a relatively good month, in relative terms the best month since December 2023 and the first few days in July looked quite good as well.

Read more