Monthly Archives: October 2025

Some links 24/2025

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The Brooklyn Investor with an long all-round post and another one on Bubbles

The “Made in Japan” Substack with a nice guide to get started in the Japanese stock market

A great summary from the Latticework 2025 conference with various “Value Investing Legends”

The French Focus Investing Substack with a nice deep dive into Safran

The current LLM’s models do not think highly of Private Equity as an Asset Class

A nice and easy CEO checklist from the Dutch Investors Substack

Thomas Puyo on why Argentina is not doing much better economically

Some links 23/2025

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Finally, 5X leveraged single Stock ETFs are available

The maybe most consistent financial blog out there, Abnormal Returns, celebrated it’s 20th Birthday this week.

Another OG, 20 Year Blogger, Eddie Elfenbein, has been on the Meb Faber Podcast

Good Morningstar article on “Performance Shenanigans” of Private Equity Secondary Funds

Liquid Air Energy storage is a very interesting concept

For some strange reason, horizontal paintings trade at a (significant) discount to vertical ones

Govro from Wintergems dives even deeper into Alcohol Stocks 

Was this the “Karpathy Moment” for the AI Industry ?

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Who is Andrej Karpathy ? Born in Slovakia and despite only 38 years young/old, he is already an AI “Veteran” having initially studied under AI Godfather Geoff Hinton in Canada, did internships at Google Brain and DeepMind, Co-founded OpenAI, was leading AI at Tesla, went back to OpenAi and now is focusing on teaching AI to everyone who would listen.

Since I discovered his Youtube educational Videos, I am following him because when he speaks about something, there is always a lot to learn. 

Yesterday, he did a 2 hour interview with maybe the best current “AI Podcaster” Dwarkesh Patel. Those two hours are quite dense and I had to use Gemini in parallel to understand some of the stuff, but at least on my Twitter timeline, it raised quite a “storm in the teacup” among AI “experts.

Here are some of his main talking points (as far as I understood them):

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Performance review Q3 2025 – Comment “Keep waiting for that European Economic rebound”

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In the first 9 months of 2025, the Value & Opportunity portfolio gained  +6,6% (including dividends, no taxes) against a gain of +16,7% 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:

After two relatively good monhts in June and July, August and Septmeber once again were underperforming months and I am now 100% sure that this will be the third underperforming year in a row.

Again, some stocks did really badly (Fuchs, STEF, AOC Fund) whereas the winners were not winning enough to match benchmark performance.

As mentioned before, the good thing is that I don’t have to care about unhappy external investors and/or paying subscribers. As I have indicated in the last review, I have been adjusting my approach and improving my investment “infrastructure” but it would be foolish to expect a short term rebound in relative performance in the current market environment. For next year, I am currently considerung to switch to 6M Performance reporting.

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Some links 22/2025

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Govro from WIntergems with a deep dive into Pernod Ricard’s brands

Interesting writeup on Wise Plc from Ennismore (h/t Govro)

The East72 Synasty Trust Quarterly letter is always worth reading (Exor, Swatch, Bolore, Man United)

The Flyover Stocks blog with a great post on why Management Integrity is so important

Interesting article on some high end Cooperage (Barrel making) operations and their issues

A very detailed deep dive on the worrying Capex Mania in AI/LLM land

John Hempton on “Crypto Bucket Shops”

Private Equity (Mini) Series 6: Private Equity for the masses – Y2K edition

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

Time Machine: Y2K

Some of the older readers of my blog might have active memories about the year 2000. There was the so-called “2YK Scare” in the late 1990ies, the fear that computer systems (and planes) would crash when the year 2000 would start. Of course it didn’t happen, the Dot.com bubble got pumped up once more and the rest is history.

Another event that got less attention was the that back in the year 2000, the now long gone Dresdner Bank issued a Certificate (which is a popular structure in Germany to give retail investors exposure to anything) that was actually a bond linked to the long term returns of an underlying Private Equity Portfolio managed by Swiss PE manager Partners Group. The very same Partners Group that now has teamed up with Deutsche Bank to run an ELTIF.

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Some links 21/2025

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Fantastic profile of Thomas Peterffy, the legendary founder of Interactive Brokers

Nice write-up on UK stock Johnson Matthey from the Modern Investing Substack

The Oracle of Oslo Substack on “sum-of-parts” play F.I.L.A. Spa 

Maynard Payton with a “Super Deep Dive” on FW Thorpe

A great summary of Andrej Kaparty’s LLM talk (Twitter/X link)

Bain’s 2025 Tech report is an interesting read
A critical look into the “Quantum Bubble 2.0” from the recommended Shorts & Squeezes Corner Substack