Category Archives: Anlage Philosophie

Observations: Tesla, David Einhorn & Turkey

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Tesla / Elon Musk

Elon Musk’s “Tesla is somehow going private” Tweet has triggered a lot of comments and discussions (good coverage on FT Alphaville).

For me the main take-away of this story is two fold:

One the one hand, listed equity markets are not the best place to raise equity capital once you are listed. It is OK to raise equity once when you IPO but after that, a company should only pay dividends and buy back stock. Part of the reason that Tesla is shorted so much is the expectation that they will need to raise equity which clearly shows the dilemma of public equity markets these days. Personally, I do think we will see more “Softbank style” large private vehicles which will specialize in providing capital to growing companies and save them the troubles of public equity markets until the company is mature enough. Unfortunately this will lead to the shift of a large part of value creation away from public markets and out of the reach of many “Normal” investors.

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creditshelf – Hot Fintech disruptor or overpriced hype IPO ?

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Intro: Why am I looking at this ?

Fintech companies these days are hot. Not many days past that not another big deal is announced. Most of the “action” though takes place in the Venture Capital market which is normally closed for most retail investors.

There is clearly a lot of hype in the sector, on the other hand there are more and more really disruptive business models that might do to traditional finance (Insurance, banking, Asset management) what Amazon has done to retail

As financial services is one of my core interests in investing, I think it will pay of to keep an eye on what is happening in Fintech.

Credishelf IPO

CREDITSHELF LOGO FARBE

An exception is the German company Creditshelf, which despite being a pretty early stage startup, has just successfully completed its IPO on July 18th.

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Investment philosophy: How to cope with less time available ?

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For several personal reasons (don’t worry, all of them VERY positive !!), I already have less time and will have even less time for detailed company analysis in the future. So the question for me is: What do I need to do with my portfolio (and the blog)?

A few questions I have been asking myself were:

Should I

  1. have more positions to diversify or should I have less positions to concentrate on the remaining ones ?
  2. allocate more money to other money managers or even start investing into ETFs ?
  3. try to focus on less risky stocks ?
  4. just do shorter company analysis and focus on the essentials ?
  5. or even go back to a more mechanic approach (BOSS Score) ?
  6. focus more on my Circle of competence and skip trying to extend it ?
  7. Or even focus only on  a small universe of the highest quality stocks ?
  8. increase my minimum holding period to slow down turnover ?
  9. Avoid “Higher maintenance” positions like M&A arbitrage etc ?
  10. Do more “shadowing” of investment managers I admire ?
  11. What should I do with the blog ?

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Criteo SA (NASDAQ: Cheap AdTech Champion or evil Online Stalker ?

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The company:

Criteo Logo

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.

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Metro AG – Update & Playing the Devil’s Advocate

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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“:

metro upd

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.

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Saga PLC (ISIN GB00BLT1Y088) – High Quality Travel / Insurance Hybrid ?

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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:

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