A couple of Slide Decks from a Ben Graham Value Conference
John Hempton (Bronte) is short Mattel
Ben Thompson on the Future of (American) Television
A good summary on the major Fintech trends
The E-Scooter market is doing pretty well in year 2
sProf. Damodaran on how to value Uber
The fascinating story on how a 1000 USD painting became a 450 mn painting within a few years
Background:
Having this blog is nice because I can look back at what my original ssumptions were. I bought Van Lanschot in 2013, almost 5 1/2 years ago.
This was how I “valued” Van Lanschot back then:
Valuation:
A simple, “Berkowitz style” valuation would be: Book value
With ~0.51 times book value, Van Lanschot is one of the cheapest banks in Europe. Even Greek Banks like Piraeus Bank trade higher. The current valuation is on a level with „quality banks“ like Unicredit, Espirito Santo and Credito Bergamesco.
Interestingly, the P/B multiple for listed Private banks is a lot higher. Swiss competitors Julius Baer, EFG and Banq Privee de Rothschild for instance trade on multiples between 1.1-2.0 times book, a clear premium to „normal“ banks.
So with a “normal” result, one could argue for a valuation somewhere at 1.5 x book value. Clearly, this will be a long way, one should not expect exploding profits in the next quarters. But in a time period of 3-5 years, I could imagine that the stock can triple if the turn-around is succesful. Also, when people finally realize that not every Dutch homeowner will go broke, there might be a re-rating of Dutch financial stocks in general. But this might also take time.
It would be easy to come up with a much more complicated valuation method, but I like to keep it simple. If there are no big holes in the balance sheet and costs are kept under control, equity is at a safe level, then book value should be achievable for any bank.
Jeff Bezos’ letters to Amazon shareholders are the Berkshire letters of the Digital Age
According to its IPO prospectus, Uber isn’t so sure about these self driving taxi fleets
John Kingham (UK Valueinvestor) likes Rightmove
Paladin with an update of their Innogy case and TomTom (German)
Great article from Forbes on Venture Capital all star Andreesen Horowitz (A16Z)
A great story on Rich Barton, the founder of Expedia, Glassdoor and Zillow
Don’t miss: Rob Vinall sharing his thought on the importance of management:
In the first Quarter 2019, the Value & Opportunity portfolio gained 8,3% (including dividends, no taxes) against 11.9% for the Benchmark (Eurostoxx50 (Perf.Ind) (25%), Eurostoxx small 200 (25%), DAX (30%), MDAX (20%)).
Links to previous Performance reviews can be found on the Performance Page of the blog.
Some other funds that I follow have performed as follows in Q1 2019:
Partners Fund TGV: 10.63% *
Profitlich/Schmidlin: +8,45%
Squad European Convictions +6,44%
Ennismore European Smaller Cos +6.09% (in EUR)
Frankfurter Aktienfonds für Stiftungen +0,37%
Evermore Global Value +6,54% (USD)
Greiff Special Situation +2,56%
Squad Aguja Special Situation +6,56%
*Since inception (01.01.2011), this translates into +173,2% vs. 86,4% for the Benchmark.
Q1 2019 transactions
Good analysis from the UK Value Investor why Interserve was taken over by its creditors.
Lyft, the new hot ride sharing IPO is to a large extent actually an insurance company
Interesting thoughts on Aviation Economics by Greenwood
Deep thoughts on Banks, Fintechs, Open Banking etc.
Naspers is (somehow) spinning of its Internet assets
FTAlphaville with a great post on cloud software stocks
Clark Street Value looks at Howard Hughes and Oncomed Pharmaceuticals
A nice take down on Taleb’s book “Antifragile”
Your brain on stocks looks like a very interesting new blog
Amazon’s secret weapon ? 150 Phd economists…..
YetAnotherValueBlog thinks KKR is too cheap
Zillow watch ou, Facebook seems to aim for the real estate market
Why (cheap) low growth stocks can be actually quite risky
Although I usually stay away from “self-improvement”” books, I bought the book as it has been recommended in a blog. In short, this is one of the best books I have read for a long time.
DISCLAIMER: This is not investment advice. Please do you own research !!!!!
Background:
Some readers of my blog might remember KAS Bank. I bought the stock in August 2012 and then sold it with a decent profit in MArch 2015 because I had not paid attention to the pension liabilities.
Looking at the stock chart, the decision to sell in 2015 was a good (and lucky) one:
Disclaimer: This is not investment advice. DO YOU OWN RESEARCH !!!!
The company
Zur Rose AG is a Swiss company that specializes in selling / distributing pharmaceuticals. The core business is Swiss distribution business where they distribute pharmaceuticals to Doctors, as in some parts of Switzerland, Doctors canboth, prescribe and sell pills. In 2012, Zur Rose made a smart/lucky buy: For only 25 mn EUR, they bought German based online Pharmacy Doc Morris from Celesio, a German Pharmaceuticals wholeseller that got later acquired by McKesson (I owned the stock as special situation)
Warren Buffett now has abandoned book value officially as measure for Berkshire’s success
Damodaran is looking at the mess at KraftHeinz
Bill Gurley on the success of digital market places plus a checklist of what makes digital marketplaces interesting
Broyhill Investment’s 2018 letter
Deep thoughts on value chains (Walmart, Amazon, Google, Microsoft) from Ben Thompson
An interesting stock pitch on Nintendo
UK Fintech Revolut seems to be a tough place to work at
value and opportunity 