Richard Branson’s must read book list (70 books) (h/t valueinvestingworld)
For fans of Contingent Value Rights (CVR), Innocoll might be worth a look
How PE funds “pump up” their returns. Howard Marks with more thoughts about the use of these “subscription lines” in PE funds.
Facebook behaves like an old school monopoly
A detailed analysis of H&M the Swedish clothing retailer
Why price setting at online retailers these days is similar to High Frequency Trading
Disclaimer: This is not investment advice. PLEASE DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH !!!
Background:
This investment is not an original idea, but rather a “me too” investment. Ben from Wertart has a very good write up from November last year, so I spare myself to go into too much historic description.
Just the short version: Kanam Grundinvest is one of several formerly open real estate funds in Germany which have been put into liquidation. The major difference to almost all other funds is that in the Kanam case investors actually didn’t lose any money over the lifetime of the fund as the real estate seems to have been relatively high quality. As of December 31st 2016, the fund has sold 95% of its real estate and is now effectively a cash box with some remaining real estate exposure.
So let’s focus on what has changed since Ben wrote his post:
“Great by Choice” seems to be the most recent book (2011) from management “guru” Jim Collins. Similar to “Built to last” he focuses on companies that have achieved great success. However in “Great by Choice” he includes a certain twist: He looks at 8 pairs of competing companies which more or less had the same starting point, but where one of them became super successful and the other not.
He then tries to work out why the successful ones were successful. The pairs are as follows:
Don’t miss: Jeff Bezos’ 2016 letter to Amazon share holders
A great collection of business/investing book reviews from Abnormal Returns
An interesting write up on German “Amazon for animal feed” company Zooplus
Good idea: Write down everything what you have learned about investing in simple sentences
A good collection of articles about Blockchain technology
On the virtues of writing for investors
This is part 2 of the Flight Centre analysis after the book review last week.
The “old” business model
The Australian based company is a classic “travel agency”, both, running physical agencies as well as offering airline tickets and tours over web sites.
A traditional travel agency usually works like this: They offer flights from preferred airline partners and hotels or packages also mostly from certain partner companies. Traditionally you would go into a travel agency and ask if they can recommend you a destination, then you would be offered some colorful catalogues where they list the offered hotels (with prices mostly depending on the official “star system”) and then gladly sell you the “Bundle”.
Intelligent thoughts on second and third order effects of electrical / fully autonomous cars. However with regard to car insurance it seems there are some unexpected side effetcs of this trend.
The Brooklyn investor has a look at the Jamie Dimons letter to JPM shareholders
Horzon Kinetics with some interesting observation on Index ETFs
Alpha Vulture on Italien Real Estate Funds. By coincidence also Ben from Wertart covers two of those vehicles in more detail.
Why Softbank bought Fortress (with a lot of stuff about “alternative” asset managers)
A pretty wide and deep view on what matters with regard to Brexit
Perfomance Q1 2017:
In Q1 2017, the blog portfolio gained +9,03% (including dividends, no taxes) against 7,77% for the Benchmark (Eurostoxx50 (Perf.Ind) (25%), Eurostoxx small 200 (25%), DAX (30%), MDAX (20%)). Since inception, the score is now +156,8% vs. 74,7% for the benchmark. The full details (and graph) as always on the performance page.
Some other funds that I follow have performed as follows in Q1 2017:
Partners Fund TGV: +10,88%
Profitlich/Schmidlin: +5,56%
Squad European Convictions +8,81%
Ennismore European Smaller Cos 2,04% (in EUR)
Frankfurter Aktienfonds für Stiftungen +5,06%
Evermore Global Value +7,03%
Greiff Special Situation +4,13%
Flight Centre, the Australian based travel company is a company which is on 2 to do lists of mine: The Australian list as well the travel series list. By chance I discovered that there is a book about Flight Centre. I decided to kick-off the analysis with this book review as part 1 of a Flight Centre analysis.
The book covers the complete story of Flight Centre and its founders from the start in 1973 until 2013 and was written by an “insider”, a former employee who worked as head of the UK operations.
David Einhorn wants to create a new share class for General Motors. Plus the unavoidable slide deck.
Sears seems to be Eddie Lampert’s Waterloo
LNG bunkering’s time still has yet to come
The “Global stockpicking” blog’s first year review
An interesting reply to John Hempton’s post “When to average down”
Good overview about the current state of the mechanical watch market
Topdanmark – The Danish Cannibal
Topdanmark, a local Danish Insurance company has been on my extended “to do” list for a long time for 2 reasons: It is the second most profitable European insurance company after Admiral (based on ROE) and as Charlie Munger would call it a “true Cannibal”.
Those are some selected numbers from Topdanmark over the last 18 years:
value and opportunity 