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 a big “THANK YOU” to all readers who still keep reading the stuff.
As always there will be a separate performance portfolio review in the beginning of January.
The top 10 posts in 2025 were the following (based on WordPress, LTM)
You didn’t ask for it but you get it nevertheless: Some random thoughts on various aspects of Artificial Intelligence. Spoiler: No actionable insights (I think).
Gemini 3.0. vs. Nvidia
Google Gemini 3.0 seems to be a really good model. I am currently using it with my prompts and it seems a little bit better but not that much. NotebookLM seems to have improved a lot.
However, according to various sources, the model was trained and runs exclusively on Google TPU chips. The Nvidia Bulls keep saying that Nvidia has such a large advantage including their software, that those ultrafat margins will persist for many years as there is no alternative. I am not so sure about this.
This is the EBIT margin development of NVIDIA since 2002:
Wise Plc
Just a few days after my writeup, Wise published 6M numbers. On the positive side, with regard to Transfer volume, new customers and deposits, Wise grew strongly between 18-37% as we can see in this chart:
However, Profit before tax and margins went down:
Investment Disclaimer: This is not investment advice. PLEASE DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH !!!!
AI Disclaimer: This post has been written entirely “by hand”. I do use LLMs as a research assistant but not for generating any parts of this post.
Introduction:
Wise Plc has been on my to do list for some time. A long time ago, part of my professional duty was to monitor and execute (large) international payments and I was always perplexed how slow and cumbersome the process was even for large Financial Institutions. Back then we made the joke that it would be much faster to travel by plane with the cash in a suitcase instead of wiring it through the SWIFT system.
The final push to look deeper into it came when Wise moved into the “Top 10” of my newly created watchlist.
Initially I planned to write a shorter post as a couple of really good write-ups already exist (see appendix), but I had so much fun looking into Wise that I decided to give it the “full treatment” however with a stronger focus on business model, competition and uniqueness.
Here is “the full monty” in PDF form.
Who is Andrej Karpathy ? Born in Slovakia and despite only 38 years young/old, he is already an AI “Veteran” having initially studied under AI Godfather Geoff Hinton in Canada, did internships at Google Brain and DeepMind, Co-founded OpenAI, was leading AI at Tesla, went back to OpenAi and now is focusing on teaching AI to everyone who would listen.
Since I discovered his Youtube educational Videos, I am following him because when he speaks about something, there is always a lot to learn.
Yesterday, he did a 2 hour interview with maybe the best current “AI Podcaster” Dwarkesh Patel. Those two hours are quite dense and I had to use Gemini in parallel to understand some of the stuff, but at least on my Twitter timeline, it raised quite a “storm in the teacup” among AI “experts.
Here are some of his main talking points (as far as I understood them):
In the first 9 months of 2025, the Value & Opportunity portfolio gained +6,6% (including dividends, no taxes) against a gain of +16,7% for the Benchmark (Eurostoxx50 (25%), EuroStoxx small 200 (25%), DAX (30%), MDAX (20%), all TR indices).
Links to previous Performance reviews can be found on the Performance Page of the blog.
Performance review:
After two relatively good monhts in June and July, August and Septmeber once again were underperforming months and I am now 100% sure that this will be the third underperforming year in a row.
Again, some stocks did really badly (Fuchs, STEF, AOC Fund) whereas the winners were not winning enough to match benchmark performance.
As mentioned before, the good thing is that I don’t have to care about unhappy external investors and/or paying subscribers. As I have indicated in the last review, I have been adjusting my approach and improving my investment “infrastructure” but it would be foolish to expect a short term rebound in relative performance in the current market environment. For next year, I am currently considerung to switch to 6M Performance reporting.
Previous Episodes of the Private Equity (Mini) Series:
Private Equity Mini Series (1): My IRR is not your Performance
Private Equity Mini series (2) – What kind of “Alpha” can you expect from Private Equity as a Retail Investor compared to public stocks ?
Private Equity Mini Series (3): Listed Private Asset Managers (KKR, Apollo & Co)
Private Equity Mini series (4) : “Investing like a “billionaire” for retail investors in the UK stock market via PE Trusts
Private Equity Mini Series (5): Trade Republic offers Private Equity for the masses (ELTIFs) -“Nice try, but hell no”
Time Machine: Y2K
Some of the older readers of my blog might have active memories about the year 2000. There was the so-called “2YK Scare” in the late 1990ies, the fear that computer systems (and planes) would crash when the year 2000 would start. Of course it didn’t happen, the Dot.com bubble got pumped up once more and the rest is history.
Another event that got less attention was the that back in the year 2000, the now long gone Dresdner Bank issued a Certificate (which is a popular structure in Germany to give retail investors exposure to anything) that was actually a bond linked to the long term returns of an underlying Private Equity Portfolio managed by Swiss PE manager Partners Group. The very same Partners Group that now has teamed up with Deutsche Bank to run an ELTIF.
A few weeks ago, fellow blogger Govro from the Wintergems Substack casually mentioned on Twitter/X that he has now realised his first 100 bagger with Google/Alphabet.
I found this fascinating for several reasons. First, he is the only guy I know who has been holding Google/Alphabet for 20 years. Secondly, I had often pondered investing into Google/Alphabet but always found it too expensive. And thirdly, I never managed to hold a well performing stock for so long.
In addition, I also think that there are a lot of private investors out there, who are not famous, but from which one can learn maybe more than from “Super Stars” like Warren Buffett or Bill Ackman.
Therefore I was highly interested to learn better how he managed to do so and maybe this is kind of interesting for other investors as well.
I sent him a list of questions and he answered them in detail. Below you’ll find the Q&A. The first questions are about his general investment approach, the second half on the Google position.
In any case, I highly recommend to follow his Substack (it’s 100% free).
My summary and learnings follows:
Compared to my approach, I think the main difference is clearly the strong focus on mid term growth, allowing for higher starting PE’s and the nerves to let a position run to 20% (or more) of the portfolio.
So far, I only “copied” two stocks from his portfolio, Bombardier and Logistec, which were great successes. I will clearly pay very high attention to what he is doing in the future.
Here is the detailed Q&A with Govro:
Previous episodes in this series:
Private Equity Mini Series (1): My IRR is not your Performance
Private Equity Mini series (2) – What kind of “Alpha” can you expect from Private Equity as a Retail Investor compared to public stocks ?
Private Equity Mini Series (3): Listed Private Asset Managers (KKR, Apollo & Co)
Private Equity Mini series (4) : “Investing like a “billionaire” for retail investors in the UK stock market via PE Trusts
Management summary:
In this post of the “Private Equity Mini series”, I look a little bit deeper into a Retail Private Equity offering (ELTIF) that has been distributed to 10 mn clients of German Neo Broker Trade Republic since last week (including myself).
There were a lot of articles in the German press trying to explain the product and the associated fees, which in my opinion were mostly wrong. Not surprisingly, as it is extremely difficult to find out what these vehicles actually charge in fees and costs. I’ll therefore concentrate only on the fees and expected returns.
As a spoiler, I do not think that the return expectations of 12-15% p.a. net after fees and costs are anywhere close to reality. I would go as far and even call this “miss selling” as these levels would be “best case” outcomes in my opinion.
Fees and cost based on my estimates will be between 4-7% p.a. (for the deal that I analysed) depending on the performance of the underlying assets and overall returns are dragged further down by the required cash allocation.
I also think that the regulator should here require a full and fair disclosure of Total Expense ratios (including all fees and costs) for different gross return scenarios. For a normal investor, it is close to impossible to gain this information, even for a professional it is hard to estimate based on the provided documentation.
Due to the effort of analyzing the fee structure, I did not have the motivation to look into issues like liquidity windows, early redemption panalties etc. as it just makes things worse for the retail investor.
In the case of the analyzed “Single Manager” EQT Nexus product, the whole purpose of giving private investors access to Private Equity is an actual waste of time, as investors can easily get a very similar exposure with a much better return/risk profile simply by investing into the underlying share of EQT.
In any case, a low cost, diversified Equity ETF will most likely outperform these retail Private Equity structures significantly in the mid- to long term. Although I have analysed only one fee structure, I do think that the main take-aways are applicable to most similar “Semi liquid” structures targeted towards retail investors.
Here is the “full monty” on 18 pages if you are interested in the details.
I have a link for the fee model in the pdf but you can also send me an Email/message if you like to receive it.
EVS Broadcast
Let’s start with the not so good news: EVS Broadcast, as in Q1, came out with a slightly disappointing 6M press release:
Sales down yoy, EBIT down more and EPS down quite significantly:
However, on the positive side, orders are up and they confirmed the guidance they gave in Q1 for 2025. SO 2025 is pretty “backloaded” with regard to sales and profits, however EVS does have normally quite good visibility mid-year on what’s going to happen until year end.
I want to point out two interesting details from the press release. The CEO said the following:
value and opportunity 