Category Archives: Accounting Tricks

Insurance vs. Inflation & Interest rates (Admiral, Sabre, DirectLine) – Part 1

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Spoiler: Readers only looking for “actionable investment advice” might skip this post as this is about the basics. The short summary is: Inflation is not good for P&C insurers.

Background: Inflation is back

Last week, especially UK insurance stocks were rattled by news from Sabre Insurance that inflation was hurting them both, through rising claims but also rising reinsurance costs.

Sabre lost -40% that day Admiral and DirectLine were down double digits. On Monday, DirectLine, another UK direct insurer issued a very cautious Trading Update which again led to further losses. The whole disaster can be seen in this chart:

admiral comps

Inflation and Insurance

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More thoughts on Inflation (Linkers, Pension liabilities, highly indebted Countries)

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As inflation is something that we haven’t seen for a few decades, I am still trying to get my head around this trying to understand how this could influence investments going forward.  In this posts I just wanted to touch three areas: Inflation linked bonds, pension liabilities and highly indebted countries. 

  1. Inflation linkers

When looking for assets that gain or at least compensate for inflation, one should not forget Inflation linked bonds. Per construction, they compensate at least fully for the officially measured inflation.

In addition, Inflation linked bonds function also as an instrument to observe “implied” inflation rates, I.e. the market price of an inflation linked bond contains the investor’s expectation for future inflation rate.

The German agency for debt has a good page (in German) that explains how these securities work. One thing to mention is that most bonds are linked to Eurozone inflation, not German inflation.

Looking at the detail page of the 2033 linker we can see that this bond carries a 0,10% coupon and trades at a yield of -1,73%.  Comparing this with the 2032 fixed rate bond (there is no 2033 fixed rate Bund) that yields around 1%, we can estimate that the difference between the two yields (1-1,73%)= 2,73% is the market’s current estimate for the inflation in the Eurozone for the next 10 years or so. (Remark: in reality, this is more complex, see for instance here, but for this exercise it is good enough).

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All Danish Stocks part 6 – Nr. 51-60

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And another batch of 10 randomly selected Danish shares, this time, none of them made it onto the watch list. We have now covered almost 1/3 of all Danish stocks.

51. Ringkjøbing Landbobank A/S

Ringkjøbing Landbobank is a 3,3 bn EUR market cap bank active only in Denmark, that is surprisingly profitable with a ROE of ~15%. This is reflected in a very good share price performance and a rather high valuation at 20x trailing P/E.

ringbank

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All Danish Shares part 2 – Nr. 11-20

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And on we go with the second post after kicking off last week. Two of the stocks already appeared in the blog some years ago and overall, these ten candidates yielded two “Watch list” candidates.

11. Conferize A/S

Conferize is a 15 mn EUR market cap company that seems to develop software for managing conferences. The company seems to be still “pre revenue”. I do not fully understand why a pre revenue Software company is public, but I’ll happily “pass” without further analysis.

12. Jobindex A/S

Jobindex is a 220 mn EUR market cap company that operates an online Job board which covers all Danish vacancies. The company has been growing nicely until 2018 but then stagnated already in 2019. The chart reflects this to a certain extent, the share price now is similar to the price during the “high growth” phase:

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

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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.

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Short cuts: Hello (again) Magnus And Forced German Stock Delistings (Centrotec)

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Disclaimer: this is not investment research. PLEASE DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH !!!!

Play Magnus Group – Again

I really hesitated if I should keep this private but then decided against it. Believe it or not, I have again bought shares in Play Magnus. After initially buying the stock at around 16,90 NOK per share, I sold the shares at a loss at 14 NOK per share. Buying now again a 2% position at 17 NOK per share looks extremely stupid, but these are the reasons why I still did it:

  • when I bought the shares initially, I knew very little about them and I underestimated the volatility of Norwegian small caps which can easily move+-10% on a single day
  • With the stock falling so quickly and with no news, I was afraid that some people might know more about the Q3 numbers which would be the first quarterly earnings after the IPO

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Grenke fOllow up: Recap & Fundamentals (and why Grenke is actually a stealth insurance broker)

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Disclaimer: This is not investment advice. Please do your own research and never believe anything from  anonymous bloggers !!!!

A first a quick quick recap on what happened since the last post.

Friday’s written statement from Grenke pre press/analyst was actually pretty lame. I think they made clear that the money laundering and Ponzi issue were indeed minor issues but they didn’t shed any more light on the whole CTP issue.

Unfortunately I missed the press/analyst call. From what I have heard there was nothing new.

A quite surprising statement from Grenke on Monday was more substantial. All past M&A transaction with Franchises will be checked by an independent auditor, Grenke AG will have the option to buy the existing non-consolidated franchises and Wolfgan Grenke will (temporarily) step down from the Supervisory Board. It is also mentioned, that in the future, Grenke AG will fund new franchises.

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Grenke – Quick take oN the first statement from W. GRenke

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Disclaimer: There is some real wild speculation in this post which represents an explicit personal opinion from a concerned investor and nothing else. Please don’t take this seriously and please don’t sue me !!!!

Just a very quick update on Mr. Grenke’s release that came 1 hour later than announced (when my index finger already began to hurt from refreshing the home page).

I have copied out only the “juicy” part, highlights are mine:

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Grenke Leasing Short Attack – First analysis

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Background:

Long time readers of my blog know that I covered Grenke a while back and unfortunately invested instead in what I thought was the “Australian Grenke” with a pretty bad outcome.

Now Viceroy Research came out with a blazing short attack on Grenke. Viceroy seems to be the same guy that released the now famous “Zatarra Report” on Wirecard in 2016.

This post is a first attempt to look at the allegations in order to find out if they are true and how severe they potentially could be. At the time of writing, Grenke is down more ~ -20% and close to the lows from March.

1. Non disclosed related party transactions

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Post Mortem analysis: Cars.com, Expedia & Record Plc

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A quick “post mortem” on three stocks that I recently exited: Expedia, Cars.com & Record Plc. All three were disappointing in absolute or relative terms and especially in two cases I really made mistakes.

Expedia:

Some days ago, I sold my Expedia shares with a small ~10% profit, although the stock dropped by almost -30% in one day after the Q3 result announcement.

What happened ? Well, Google travel seems to have taken a big dent out of Expedia’s business. I even wrote about Google travel some months ago but didn’t actually do anything. This was my takeaway back then:

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