System1 (or under its old name Braijuicer) is a good example for a stock where it didn’t pay off to hold if we look at the chart:
I had looked briefly at them when Ben from Wertart bought them in early 2016 but back then didn’t take the time understand what the company was all about. After the huge drop I decided to have a deeper lok at the company.
The business
DISCLAIMER
This is not investment advice. Please do your own research and don’t follow any anonymous bloggers.
Let’s continue with this nice “anti Buffett” stock from my post last week.
The people / founders
FitBit’s original founders from 2007, James Park and Eric Friedman are still on board.
Interestingly, although both ar only 41 years old, FitBit was the third company they founded together.
The other companies were Windup Labs, a photo sharing company they sold in 2005 and Epesi, a B2B software company that didn’t work out.
Performance 9M 2018:
In the first 6 months of 2018, the Value & Opportunity portfolio gained +3,38% (including dividends, no taxes) against -2,2% for the Benchmark (Eurostoxx50 (Perf.Ind) (25%), Eurostoxx small 200 (25%), DAX (30%), MDAX (20%)).
Some other funds that I follow have performed as follows in Q1 2018:
Partners Fund TGV: +6,95%
Profitlich/Schmidlin: -0,21%
Squad European Convictions +1,97%
Ennismore European Smaller Cos +2,16% (in EUR)
Frankfurter Aktienfonds für Stiftungen -4,42%
Evermore Global Value -1,59% (in USD)
Greiff Special Situation -1.91%
Squad Aguja Special Situation -3,86%
Paladin One +1,5%
Performance attribution:
The top 3 performers on a weighted basis were for 9M 2018 were:
Watches again…..
Although I wrote a lot about Watch companies over the past few years (Swatch part 1, Swatch part 2, Hengdeli, Fossil part 1, Fossil part 2, Movado, Richemont), no investment came out of it. However I had a lot of fun researching these companies so it was time well spent.
When I initiated the series in 3 years ago, Smart Watches were a big thing and especially the Apple Watch was perceived to be the “Swiss Watch” killer, which, as we know now didn’t happen as they seem to coexist quite well.
Besides Smart Watches, Fitness Trackers were the “hot shit” and especially VC backed FitBit that IPOed in 2015 was taking oer the world.
This chart shows Fitbit against Fossil (blue) and Richemont (green) and we can clearly see who had staying power and who not:
Personal experience 2007-2009
There are a lot of articles currently about the “Great Financial Crisis” which culminated exactly 10 years ago when Lehman Brothers collapsed on September 15th 2008. There is still a lot of discussion around who is to blame for this, however most of this is nonsense as Barry Ritholz nicely summarized here.
My personal story is relatively short but quite lucky: Due to my “day job” back then, I saw many early warning signs in 2007. Although I had no idea how deep the crisis would be, I got mostly out of the stock market by the end of the year 2007.
This was maybe my only successful timing action I ever managed to do with some success. I even made some decent money with shorting that I had just discovered back then and a was on track to positive performance in 2008 when I was caught in the mother of all short squeezes, the famous “Porsche Volkswagen corner” which cost me more than -10% portfolio performance.
Nevertheless especially the years following the crisis taught me some important lessons which I wanted to share:
My 10 lessons (hopefully) learned
SIAS is an Italian motorway operator that I bought at the height of the “Euro crisis” in 2012 and sold 2 year later with a nice profit of more than 100% including a special dividend.
Looking at the long-term chart, selling in mid 2014 was not such a bad decision at least for the next 3 years (although in general my timing skills are clearly far below average):
It took more than 3 years to surpass this level but then interestingly the stock more than doubled within a few months.
Looking at the aggregated numbers we can see an interesting pattern:
In my initial post for Dom Security, I lined out why the Commercial Lock business is very attractive in my opinion. As a result, most businesses enjoy nice margins.
Kaba, the Swiss company was always the number 3 with some distance to market leader Assa Abbloy and allegion.
However in 2015 Kaba finally managed to merge with he German family owned Dorma in order become a much larger and diversified Group. In theory Dorma was a great fit for Kaba as they were specializing more in building access systems which should compliment Kaba’s locking systems nicely.
Looking at the stock price, investors liked the merger until end of last year:
