Author Archives: memyselfandi007

A few thoughts on the 2017 French election & Risk Management

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Background:

One of the major “geopolitical” events this year will be the French Presidential election. The first round will be held on 23 April 2017. Should no candidate win a majority, a subsequent final election with the top two candidates will be held on 7 May 2017.

Why bother ?

Well, since I have started the blog, French stocks have been one of the cornerstone of my investment strategy. Despite the bad headline news, I found many good and cheap French companies which contributed significantly to the performance. Currently, I have around 28% of my portfolio invested in France in the following stocks (in % of the portfolio):

  • TFF Group (8,0%)
  • Installux (4,1%)
  • G. Perrier (4,4%)
  • IGE & XAO (2,4%)
  • Coface (3,1%)
  • Thermador (2,9%)
  • Dom Security (2,3%)

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Some links (06/2017)

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Charlie Munger speaks at the AGM of the Daily Journal

The “Becoming Warren Buffett” documentary (h/t Monevator)

Current trends in China (h/t marketfolly)

Great annual letter from Longcast Advisors

A great collection of spin-off reading material (Greenblatt, Munger, Klarman)

Google’s self driving car team already cashed out and left. Still no self driving cars on the road but fatal accidents are rising. I guess car insurance will stay for some time. (h/t Abnormal Returns)

Lastminute.com (ISIN NL0010733960) -cheap flights and a cheap stock ?

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Quick Intro:

The idea to look at lastminute.com came from my gocompare post, this is what I wrote back then:

Peter Wood hired the former CEO of lastminute.com, Mathew Crummack.

He seems to be a smart guy, however I haven’t seen anything from him about the future strategy yet. The new CFO of GoCompare ist the old deputy CFO from Esure. So the top managers from Esure seem to have preferred to stay.

I haven’t looked that deeply into LastMinute.com but it seems to do better since he left…(note to myself: check Lastminute.com).

As I have quite a lot of travel related companies on my ToDo list, I decided to start a kind of “mini travel” series, similar to my “Watch series”. As I like to travel myself a lot, I think this should be lots of fun to look into those companies.

The company

lastminute-group-logo

Lastminute.com is a company based in Switzerland which initially went public in 2014 under the (strange) name “Bravofly Rumbo”. They started out as a website to offer cheap flights in Italy and Spain.-

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Hastings Plc (ISIN GB00BYRJH519) – the “next Admiral” or an accident waiting to happen ?

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hastings-image-drop-in

The company

Hastings Plc, a UK-based direct insurance company was IPOed in 2015 at 1,70 GBP per share (IPO prospectus). To call Hastings a “Mini Admiral” is actually very close to the truth.

The company was founded as an underwriting Agency in 1996 by an American called David Gundlach who then sold the company 10 years later. Via a couple of more transformations (MBO etc.) Hastings then was finally brought to the stock exchange. Interestingly, according to some sources, Gundlach had worked at Admiral before so it is no surprise that Hastings looks pretty much like a 1:1 copy Admiral:

They only do direct business, reinsure significant amounts of their premiums and make their money mostly with anciliariy products and fees instead of investment returns like “classical” insurance companies. They only exception is that they don’t run a price comparison website (PCW) but they sell almost all policies via PCWs. Like Admiral, they have branched out into home insurance from

Hastings currently has a market cap of ~1.5 bn GBP and trades at an estimated 17,6 times 2016 earnings.

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A quick look at the Unicredit (deeply discounted) rights issue

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The rights issue

Those who have been reading the blog long enough might remember that Italy in general is a good hunting ground for “interesting” deeply discounted rights issues and especially Unicredit rights issues in the past were very interesting experiences.

So roughly 4 years later, Unicredit has launched another rights issue. Ex date for the subscription right has been Monday, February 6th.

The conditions were as follows:

  • 13 new shares for 5 existing ones
  • a subscription price of 8,09 EUR
  • total volume 13 bn EUR (!!!)
  • subscription rights trade under the ticker UCGAZ

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Actelion (CH0010532478) – Merger arbitrage with a potential Spin-off “Gold Nugget” ?

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Yesterday, Johnson and Johnson announced that they intend to acquire Actelion, the Swiss Biotech company for 280 USD per share.

The stock price jumped to around 272 CHF/USD right after the announcement indicating a relatively high probability of closing. J&J has enough money on their bank account and according to the press, most Actelion shareholders should be happy.

Closing date is targeted as June 30th. So if everything goes according to plan, this would mean ~2,9% yield for 5 months which is not bad but not that great either (as there are always risks) , so why bother ?

However there is an interesting specialty in this case which I didn’t see when I first looked into it. The official announcement contained this potential “golden nugget”:

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