15 Year Anniversary of Value & Opportunity

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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. As always a big “THANK YOU” to all readers who still keep reading the stuff.

As always there will be a separate performance portfolio review in the beginning of January.  

The top 10 posts in 2025 were the following (based on WordPress, LTM)

  1. Jensen-Group (ISIN BE0003858751) – Hidden European Champion at a “Dirt Cheap” price
  2. Panic Journal – Trump II: “There will be blood”
  3. Wise Plc – The “Costco of Currency transfers” ?
  4. My 23 (+1) stocks for 2025
  5. Private Equity Mini Series (5): Trade Republic offers Private Equity for the masses (ELTIFs) -“Nice try, but hell no”
  6. Fraport (ISIN: DE0005773303) – An essential Infrastructure play geared up to “fly away” ?
  7. Performance review Q2 2025 – Comment: “Just keep going or reflect & adapt ?”
  8. Navel gazing Alert: How to improve my investment process by incorporating “Momentum”
  9. Private Equity Mini series (2) – What kind of “Alpha” can you expect from Private Equity as a Retail Investor compared to public stocks ?
  10. Domo Arigato Mr. Roboto – Using AI Chatbots for an initial Stock Quality scoring

Blogging highlights 2025:

In 2025 I focused on my “Private Equity Mini Series” which I had quite a lot of fun to write. There will be at least one more part to it.

In addition, I also posted a lot about how I have been trying to slowly “rewire” my investment process by incorporating price momentum and using more AI tools for analysis.

Unfortunately I didn’t make another “All stocks series”, but I have lined up a big one for next year.

Statistics:

Overall, views are at around 250k for this year, which -10% vs. 2024. Maybe 3 years of relative underperformance are taking its toll ? However, Subscribers on WordPress are stil up slightly by 2% or so.

Once again, the Substack which I run parallel (with 1:1 posts) has been growing strongly and almost doubling in subscribers (from a low base). Overall, now roughly ¼ subscribe via Substack, ¾ via WordPress.

As I mentioned last year , the power of Substack (and why most likely most financial blogs are created there) is clearly the “recommendation engine” which is quite powerful.

TwiX:

I do post links to my post but try to engage as little as possible in order not get sucked into this black hole. Bluesky is pretty slow/empty. Net-net, both platforms are more detractors than value generators for me.

The year ahead: Changes coming

For the last 15 years, my general set-up was quite stable. I had a day job that was rather time consuming and had relatively little time to write my blog. I did squeeze in the time whenever possible, but it was clearly a stretch especially considering my family duties.

Now however, quite (or very) surprisingly, my employer made me “an offer that I couldn’t refuse”. When this will be published, I will have only a few working days left before my Corporate Career will end for the foreseeable future and most likely for good.

So far I haven’t had that much time to plan out what to do going forward. I will most likely do some consulting or advisory work but one thing is clear: I will have (much) more time to write for the blog and this is something I am looking very much forward to.

One topic that you will now read more often is clearly retirement planning, derisking etc. because this has suddenly become a little bit more urgent for me as well. But don’t worry, there will be stock write-ups as well. Of course.

I have lined up one “All stocks” post in a slightly different format as I hae been making heavy use of my AI Scoring prompts that work quite well especially with Gemini 3.0. So stay tuned.

Bonus Track:

To pay respect to the upcoming changes, David Bowie’s iconic song “Changes” is (of course) the natural choice

david bowie – changes

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