Author Archives: memyselfandi007

Some links 03/2025

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Ben Evan’s “State of AI” presentation is a must read

Despite lackluster performance, David Einhorn’s Q4 letter is worth reading

Annual letter time: Partners Fund 2024 letter, Rubicon Stockpicker 2024 letter, Compound Interest 2024 letter

An interesting new Subtack called “Building Things that last” has just launched with a few great posts

For me, the story of the week: Chinese LLM Deepseek seems to be (almost) on par with the OpenAI &Co at a much lower cost. Maybe it’s just Chinese propaganda, maybe it’s not.

A very detailed Nvidia short case including an (expert) assessment of Deepseek

The “Behind the Balance Sheet” Substack and Podcast are both worth the time

Jensen-Group (ISIN BE0003858751) – Hidden European Champion at a “Dirt Cheap” price

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

As mentioned in the Performance review, I had already build up a new position in late 2024 in a new stock. This time I will try something new: I will only post a few sections of the write-up and only those who send me an email will receive the full version (for free of course).. The reason for this is that I am really interested how many of the readers are actally reading the full document. The bonus song of course is included in this post at the end.

      0. Investment meme

For some strange reason, I felt the urge to start the pitch with this rather “German humor” meme:

  1. Elevator pitch:

Jensen-Group, a company originally from Denmark, now listed in Belgium, is a 420 mn EUR market cap “hidden champion” that is the world market leader in “Heavy laundry” equipment and automation. The company is run in third generation by the Jensen family which still controls 40% of the shares.

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Some links 02/2025

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Nice year end review from the “no deep dives” Substack with some interesting positions

Wintergem Substack with an update on Hingham Savings Bank

Famous short activist Hindenburg announced to stop operating

Are Cannabis spiked drinks really replacing alcohol in the US ?

I had linked to the study last time, here is a summary of how Ozempic/Wegovy seem to change people’s eating habits

Fascinating story about the development of the Video Game “Star Citizen” that might cross the 1 bn USD budget soon

FT Alphaville on how overvalued the USD actually is (Hint: a lot)

Performance review 2024 – Comment “Extrapolate the past at your own peril”

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2024 overview
There is no way around it: 2024 was a in absolute terms AND relative terms really bad. The Value & Opportunity portfolio lost -2,5 % (including dividends, no taxes, AOC fund as of 30.09.2023) against +4,9% for the Benchmark (Eurostoxx50 (25%), Eurostoxx small 200 (25%), DAX (30%), MDAX (20%), all performance indices including Dividends). 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 2024:

Partners Fund TGV:  4,8%
Profitlich/Schmidlin: +9,0%

Over the 14 years from 12/31/2010 to 12/31/2024, the portfolio gained +387% against +168% for the Benchmark (before taxes). In CAGR numbers this translates into 12% p.a. for the portfolio vs. 7,3% p.a. for the Benchmark.  

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Some links 1/2025

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A very entertaining “future 10 year asset allocator” review from AQR’s Cliff Assness

Short seller Hindenburg once again swings out against Carvana

An interesting and inspiring story about a family that produces cymbals since 400 years

A decent list of 2025 top picks from UK investors/Bloggers

An interesting paper on how food demand seems to change with GLP-1 drug intake

“Big potato” is now controlling the US French fries market

A great post on what happened in the AI/LLM space in 2024

My 23 (+1) stocks for 2025

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Following an annual tradition since 2013, by the end of the year, I review my portfolio by writing/updating very short summaries for each individual position.  17 of the 23 positions from last year are still in the portfolio and I have added 6 new positions. That turnover has been mostly driven by reviews (Admiral, ABO Energy), or the price target had been reached (DEME) and by finding new ideas. A more comprehensive Performance review will follow in early January 2025.

A short user guide:
My preferred style of investing is a bottom up approach, focusing on 20-30 small/midcap stocks that in my opinion have a good return/risk profile over the next 3-5 (or more) years. Many of these stocks are not household names and are unlikely to make spectacular gains in any single year. Many of them look interesting only after the second or third glance and are rather boring, which is exactly what I am looking for. So if you are looking for a “Hot stock for 2025”, this post won’t help you much.

And always remember: THIS IS NOT INVESTMENT ADVICE. PLEASE DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH.

As last year, I have created a portfolio overview chart based on holding periods which I proudly present here:

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Some links 21/2024

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Highlight: If you read only one thing this week then Wintergem’s deep dive on Moats (and the apllication on Adyen) is a MUST READ

Richard Beddard with a nice check up on UK Tech company Rasperry Pi

The newest AI models seem to be capabable of lying to their supervisors

If you like non-nonsense, down to earth finance talk, this podcast episode from Todd Wennings Flyover Stock blog/podcast is great.

Some US Small cap ideas from Royce

The Dungeon Investing substack with a first look into Square Enix (Very good Substack for everything related to gaming)

DB_Silver_Fox Substack on Carl Zeiss Meditec

14th Anniversery of Value & Opportunity Blog

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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 there will be a separate performance portfolio review in the beginning of January.  After a short break, I had to do a new “Panic Series” post due to the result of the US election.

With the rather “mixed” performance of my portfolio this year and the many headwinds, the motivation to write clearly has suffered a little bit, but having seen these situations before, of course I will continue to blog with the clear goal to become the longest running financial blog on the planet. In the subcategory of non-paywal financial blogs with a transparent investment portfolio, I would guess there are not many challengers.

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Some links 20/2024

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Clubbing or “the big night out” seems to be a thing of the past. On the other hand, Guiness has to be rationed in the UK due to sudden popularity with GenZ

Interesting FT “Big read” about Orsted, the Off Shore Wind pioneer (search result)

For now, the “Endowment Model” of investing mostly in Alternative Assets seems to be a losers game due to high fees

What a surprise – Retail Stock traders on Twitter on average are doing very poorly according to an analysis done by AI

Good “post mortem” analysis of UK Insurer DirectLine after the Aviva take-over offer

Sixt competitor Hertz has some dirty tricks up it’s sleeve when it comes to bond issuance (FT, Google search result)

Private Equity is going retail mainly because institutional investors seem to be tapped out

Some more Q3 Updates – Energiekontor, Fuchs, Eurokai, Hermle & Laurent Perrier

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Energiekontor

Energiekontor has been one of my worst performing stocks in 2024, the performance was much worse than the borader renewable peer group. To be honest, I am not sure why the stock performed so bad. On part of the explanation is clearly that the overall political shift to the righ (Trump, Germany etc.) might be bad for renewables, which explains the overall bad performance to some extent. It didn’t help either that they announced a 2024 profit warning some days ago.

However, they didn’t adjust the mid term guidance (2028) and it seems that the profit warning was clearly just a short term timing issue with a required approval of a purchaser for a large UK wind farm. So next year could look very nice especially for the developer segment.

Despite the political uncertainty, I still think that Energiekontor is one of the best bets in the sector. Here is a table I did some weeks ago showing that Energiekontor, among a European peer group, is both the cheapest and the least leveraged player:

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