Monthly Archives: September 2025

The Anatomy of a 100 Bagger – How a Canadian Investor managed to hold Google for 21 years

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A few weeks ago, fellow blogger Govro from the Wintergems Substack casually mentioned on Twitter/X that he has now realised his first 100 bagger with Google/Alphabet.

I found this fascinating for several reasons. First, he is the only guy I know who has been holding Google/Alphabet for 20 years. Secondly, I had often pondered investing into Google/Alphabet but always found it too expensive. And thirdly, I never managed to hold a well performing stock for so long.

In addition, I also think that there are a lot of private investors out there, who are not famous, but from which one can learn maybe more than from “Super Stars” like Warren Buffett or Bill Ackman.

Therefore I was highly interested to learn better how he managed to do so and maybe this is kind of interesting for other investors as well.  

I sent him a list of questions and he answered them in detail. Below you’ll find the Q&A. The first questions are about his general investment approach, the second half on the Google position.

In any case, I highly recommend to follow his Substack (it’s 100% free).

My summary and learnings follows:

  1. Govro is an experienced, self-taught investor who identified Google early as a stock that was showing great growth at a reasonable valuation.
  2. He invested also in not so great tech stocks like Ebay and Yahoo, but managed to get out of them and keep the compounder
  3. As a “quality growth”  investor, he seems to be able to invest based on a pretty long time horizon (3-5 years at any time).
  4. His approach of diversifying between Fast and Slow compounders is quite unique. The slow compounders provide some stability and allow him to create liquidity in general market drawdowns/panics in order to increase his best performing positions
  5. He does deep research and concentrates on certain industries only, but on a global level
  6. He is able to hold a quite concentrated portfolio, allowing a single position to go up to 20% of the portfolio, or in the case of GOOG even 33%.
  7. His deep research and conviction also allow him to double down in a general market panic like 2008
  8. Besides Google, he owns another stock that is already up 50x. So Google/alphabet might not be just a “one hit wonder” for him

Compared to my approach, I think the main difference is clearly the strong focus on mid term growth, allowing for higher starting PE’s and the nerves to let a position run to 20% (or more) of the portfolio.

So far, I only “copied” two stocks from his portfolio, Bombardier and Logistec, which were great successes. I will clearly pay very high attention to what he is doing in the future. 

Here is the detailed Q&A with Govro:

Govro Q&A final.docxDownload

Some links 20/2025

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Interesting deep dive into the London Stock Exchange Group and its current problems

Already a few weeks ago, Rob Vinall published a very detailed 6M letter including a post mortem of Ryman

OpenAI has released interesting usage data for ChatGPT

The Valuelytica Substack (for some reason) backtested my own old BOSS Score method

Streaming services are jacking up prices on an ongoing basis without delivering more value 

Again, in 2025, Momentum investing is the way to gain Alpha (for the time being)

Secret Sauce Investing Substack with a deep dive into Novo Nordisk

Private Equity Mini Series (5): Trade Republic offers Private Equity for the masses (ELTIFs) -“Nice try, but hell no” 

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Previous episodes in this series:

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

Management summary:

In this post of the “Private Equity Mini series”, I look a little bit deeper into a Retail Private Equity offering (ELTIF) that has been distributed to 10 mn clients of German Neo Broker Trade Republic since last week (including myself).

There were a lot of articles in the German press trying to explain the product and the associated fees, which in my opinion were mostly wrong. Not surprisingly, as it is extremely difficult to find out what these vehicles actually charge in fees and costs. I’ll therefore concentrate only on the fees and expected returns.

As a spoiler, I do not think that the return expectations of 12-15% p.a. net after fees and costs are anywhere close to reality. I would go as far and even call this “miss selling” as these levels would be “best case” outcomes in my opinion.

Fees and cost based on my estimates will be between 4-7% p.a. (for the deal that I analysed) depending on the performance of the underlying assets and overall returns are dragged further down by the required cash allocation.

I also think that the regulator should here require a full and fair disclosure of Total Expense ratios (including all fees and costs) for different gross return scenarios. For a normal investor, it is close to impossible to gain this information, even for a professional it is hard to estimate based on the provided documentation.

Due to the effort of analyzing the fee structure, I did not have the motivation to look into issues like liquidity windows, early redemption panalties etc. as it just makes things worse for the retail investor.

In the case of the analyzed “Single Manager” EQT Nexus product, the whole purpose of giving private investors access to Private Equity is an actual waste of time, as investors can easily get a very similar exposure with a much better return/risk profile simply by investing into the underlying share of EQT.

In any case, a low cost, diversified Equity ETF will most likely outperform these retail Private Equity structures significantly in the mid- to long term. Although I have analysed only one fee structure, I do think that the main take-aways are applicable to most similar “Semi liquid” structures targeted towards retail investors.

Here is the “full monty” on 18 pages if you are interested in the details.

EQT Nexus.docx-1Download

I have a link for the fee model in the pdf but you can also send me an Email/message if you like to receive it.