Paul Hartmann AG (DE0007474041) – Back to my (boring) roots
The company:
Paul Hartmann AG is a 200 year old German company active in the healthcare sector, This is how they describe themselves:
Category Archives: Anlage Philosophie
Criteo SA (NASDAQ: Cheap AdTech Champion or evil Online Stalker ?
The company:
Criteo is one of the few Non-US success stories in the Tech sector. Criteo was founded in France in 2005 and quickly became one of the leading “Adtech” companies in the world. Criteo successfully IPOed 2013 on the NAsdaq and quickly reached a market cap of more than 3 bn USD.
The business:
Criteo is an “Adtech” company. What it does is the following: It is primarily a tech version of the classical Advertising Agencies: Clients use Criteo to maximise the value of their online ad dollars spent which should turn into as many clicks and sales dollars as possible.
Metro AG – Update & Playing the Devil’s Advocate
Metro, the spin-off stock I bought last year, doesn’t look very good at the moment. The stock priced tanked significantly over the last weeks and the stock is now a proud member of “V&O Flop 10“:
When a stock price moves like this, the fist thought is always: I need to do something, either to sell, or more often, to buy more. This was for instance one of the mistakes I made with Silver Chef, where I Increased my position at least temporary.
Saga PLC (ISIN GB00BLT1Y088) – High Quality Travel / Insurance Hybrid ?
The company:
Saga Plc is a UK company that combines two business that I have looked at quite often: Insurance and Travel.
Saga has its origin as a Seaside Hotel in England and then became a travel company before then moving into insurance in the 1980s. Saga caters specifically for the “over 50” market and claims to be the “leading provider” to people over 50 in the uK.
After a PE financed management buyout in 2007, he company was IPOed in May 2014 at a price of 185 pence / share.
Looking at the stock chart, IPO investors at first saw a decent outperformance before things went south this year:
Homework: Electrica SA update
Electrica is the only remaining “Emerging Market” stock in my portfolio. I bought the stock in December 2014 and now after 3 year and some months it maybe time to assess how the situation looks against my initial expectations.
Including dividends, the stock is up ~18% in total since then, in my portfolio however the stock is flat because I bought more of Electrica at higher prices. Compared to a +53% performance of the portfolio in the same period, the stock is clearly a underperformer and the question is clearly if I should keep the stock.
My initial thesis relied on the following assumptions:
- the stock was cheap for a grid company with guaranteed returns on invested capital
- Romania was supposed to grow significantly and Electrica as well
- As a former Government owned company, I expected significant cost savings potential
- I had expected After Tax / After minority Earnings of around 442 mn RON in 2017
What happened ?
The Value and Opportunity “All Time Flop 10”
During my Silver Chef “Post mortem” some days ago, I decided to look at the 10 biggest losses I made since I started the blog in order to check if I have actually learned from mistakes.
These were the (by absolute performance) 10 worst investments in the 7+ years of Value and Opportunity:
10. Medtronic -18,93% (2011)
Medtronic was one of the initial portfolio investments. I kicked them out in August 2011 as I was not very comfortable owning US large caps and I never deeply looked into the company myself. Medtronic since then outperformed the S&P 5000 IN USD terms (~17,1% p.a. vs. 15.3%) or ~ 233% in EUR terms. This is slightly better than my portfolio which made around 215% in the same period.
Silver Chef Update & “post mortem”
A few days ago, Silver Chef came out with their half-year update. There is the glossy half-year 2018 Investor Presentation and the 2018 half-year report.
Looking at the stock price, the market clearly didn’t like the news very much:
So what happened ?
