Author Archives: memyselfandi007

A first look into the “Insurtech Chainsaw Massacre” – Part 1

Posted on by 3 comments

The (short) history of Insurtech so far:

Just a few years ago, “Insuretech” was one of the hottest sectors within Fintech and VC. As in other sectors like retailing or travel, “Digital Insurance” companies were supposed to disrupt this old and slow industry. Listening to VCs and founders was mostly about how easy it would be to take market shares and profits from the old Dinosaurs.

Lemonade was the first Insurtech that went public in July 2020 and its 139% increase on the first day clearly set the scene. The share price went up further and peaked in February at around 170 USD.

Of course this triggered a certain feeding frenzy and a couple of other Insurtechs went public either via IPO or SPAC in the following months, like Root, Oscar, Metromile etc.

However, now, roughly 18 months after Lemonades IPO, things look a lot different. Here is an overview of the “Chainsaw massacre” that happened (in the order off going public):

Read more

All Danish Stocks Part 1 – Nr. 1-10

Posted on by 14 comments

As indicated in the last post of the “All Swiss Stocks series”, the next country I have targeted is Denmark. As always, I will look at the stocks in a random order. According to the Nasdaq OmX Nordic website, Denmark currently has 183 listed companies, spread over 2 segments, Nasdaq Copenhagen and the Nasdaq First North Growth Segment.

One decent feature of the Nasdaq OMX Nordic website is that they have very good summaries for each company (in cooperation with Morning Star) which makes this way of research quite efficient.

In addition, I have subscribed to TIKR.com which makes it easier to look at historic financials.

In this first installment, 2 out of 10 candidates are going onto the preliminary watch list. As always, comments are highly welcome !!!

1. Tryg A/S

Tryg is a 14.4 bn EUR market cap insurance company active mostly in Denmark, Sweden and Norway and is one of the largest Non-life insurance companies in the Nordics.

Read more

Some Links

Posted on by Leave a comment

Interesting feature about “NFT Investor” MetaKovan

Good article on successful stock bloggers (Jeremy  Raper)

The Monevator on Decentralized Finance (DeFi)

Great article from “legend” Charles D. Ellis about his personal investment highlights

OAM 2021 letter to investors with a Bull case for Asia (China, India)

Great post from Neckar on David Tepper (Appalosa)

Marc Rubinstein on Swiss Private Banking and UBS

Nabaltec AG – Boring Old Economy Dinosaur or “Hidden Champion” Electrification beneficiary ?

Posted on by 37 comments

Disclaimer: This is not investment advice. PLEASE DO YOU OWN RESEARCH !!!!

The company:

naba logo

Nabaltec is not a fancy Biotech company as the name might indicate, but a rather “old economy” Specialty Chemical company focusing on Aluminium-oxide based materials, located in the middle of nowhere in my home state Bavaria. This  typical “German Mittelstand” company had its IPO in 2006, and was created 1996  as management buy-out of a production facility from VAW AG. The beginnings of the plant as such seems to have been built in 1938 and looks like this:

Read more

Carvana: The Armchair Investor’s perspective & Could Auto1 become the “German Carvana” ?

Posted on by 30 comments

Background/Introduction:

For some reason I ran into a “Twitter battle” about Auto1, with the main Bull case being that Auto1 is the German Carvana. In addition, some good investors that I follow have revealed Carvana as a position. 

Time to have an “Armchair investor” look into Carvana. The goal here is two fold:

  1. Understanding if Carvana as such is a good business (and maybe even interesting as investment)
  2. Finding out if Auto1 could indeed is or can become the “German Carvana”

Full disclosure: the guy who is writing this, lost significant money with investing into Cars.com, another US online car company. So as always: PLEASE DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH !!!

The Carvana Business “Bull Case”

important: Just as I was about to finish the post, Rob Vinall has released his 2021 letter to investors with a very convincing pitch for Carvana. I highly recommend to read it first.

Read more

Another return of the Travel Series part 11 – HomeToGo SE: The German AirBnB or the next Trivago ?

Posted on by 2 comments

Disclaimer: This is not investment advice but my personal (and often unqualified) opinion. PLEASE DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH !!!

Background & Intro

Long term readers of my blog might remember a certain obsession with travel companies over the past few years. Among other posts, the main analysis were these ones:

Part 1 – Lastminute.com
Part 2 – Expedia
Part 3 – Trivago
Part 4 – Flight Centre – book review
Part 5 – Flight Centre
Part 6 – Tripadvisor
Part 7 – Tripadvisor (cont)
Part 8 – GDS (Sabre, Amadeus etc.)
Part 9 – Expedia (cont)
Part 10 – AirBnB

With the exception of a short, mildly successful (and very lucky) speculation in Expedia, I found the sector as “too hard” for me to invest as too many things were moving at the same time:

The more I look into those companies, the more difficult the sector seems to become. There is a lot of fundamental change going on, Which on the one side is good for agile players but on the other hand makes it very difficult to predict anything and extrapolate trends from the past.

As a Value  Investor, unpredictable fast-moving industry changes are difficult. In order to invest in such a sector, there should either be a significant moat and/or fantastic management or a very cheap valuation.

So why now looking again at a travel company ? To be honest, I was motivated by a comment from “Celebrity investor” Philipp “Pip” Kloeckner in my Twitter feed as I introduced HomeToGo as a part of my “Bumsbuden Wikifolio” where I collect German shares that I think are staying away from makes a lot of sense.

Pip commented that he has a very different opinion, which is not surprising, as he is sitting on the Supervisory board and seem to hold around 100k shares that he received for consulting  in the early days of the company.

Read more

Some links

Posted on by Leave a comment

TGV Truffle had a great year, annual letter to be found here (Zooplus, Aareal, Talgo)

TGV Rubicon annual letter 2021 (Aumann, Hostelworld, Ceconomy)

Good write-up on French “Hidden Champion” Pharmagest Interactive

Interestingly, Norway has become the forerunner for heat pumps

An in-depth look into the Activision-Blizzard acquisition by Microsoft

Some deep thoughts about long term implications of company capital allocation for investors

Scott Galloway with an interesting perspective on the Elisabeth Holmes/Theranos trial

BioNTech Update: What to do now ?

Posted on by 11 comments

Disclaimer: This is not investment advice. PLEASE DO YOU OWN RESEARCH !!!

What a difference a year can make. Less than a year ago, I tried to enlarge my circle of incompetence by looking at BioNTech. This was my summary back then:

I have to admit that some “fear of regret” plays a role here. i would deeply regret not to have invested if this becomes an even bigger success. Therefore I decided to invest “only” 2% of the portfolio into BioNTech within my “Long term growth bucket” at around 98 EUR/share, reflecting the inherent risk at this stage.

My game plan would be to hold this at least 2-3 years and only consider to sell if the stock drops for no reason by more than -50% or goes up by more than +100%.

I expect very positive results both, for 2021 and 2022, however after than, vaccine sales will clearly go down and then it needs to be seen how the cancer pipeline works out or if they can come up with more vaccines.

If initial pipeline would become more concrete and the valuation still makes sense, I might increase the position in 2 or 3 years from now. In between, the position will motivate me to learn more about mRNA and Biotech in general, which is a nice side effect.

In between the stock did hit a peak of ~390 EUR in August 2021, I.e. almost quadrupling from the level that I bought before falling back sharply to a level EUR 150 at the time of writing

I did actually sell 30% of my position at prices between 270-300 at the end of July, getting back my invested money (before taxes).

The big question is: What to do now ? 

Read more

« Older Entries Recent Entries »