Category Archives: Anlage Philosophie

Listed Venture Capital part 3 – The “Tale of the two Vostoks” & UK Vehicles

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Background:

Back in the good old days (2018) when Venture and Growth investing were still sexy, I looked into the world of “listed Venture Capital”:

Part 1: HOW TO INVEST INTO VENTURE CAPITAL – LISTED VEHICLES (PART 1)
Part 2: HOW TO INVEST INTO VENTURE CAPITAL PART 2: AUGMENTUM, VOSTOK & OTHERS

Inititally I bought into Kinnevik, Vostok New Ventures (renamed to VNV) and Vostok Emerging Finance (now VEF), however, I sold both Kinnevik and later VNV (at smallish profits) and only held onto VEF. This is how the Group has performed since then (november 2018) (Prices in local currency only, no dividends/Spin-offs):

Listed VC

Unfortunately I could not find continuous comparison charts for VNV and VEF, but almost all of the stocks at first struggled in 2019, only to go bonkers in late 2021 and then crumble in 2022.

Initially I cursed myself for selling too early , but now it looks super smart to only keep one that is a “winner”.

The tale of the two “Vostoks”: Why so different ?

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Value & Opportunity 12th Anniversary

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12 years

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. (Edit: and again this should have gone out yesterday….).

As always there will be a separate performance portfolio review in the beginning of January.  In human years, 12 is still early teenage years, in “Whisky years”, 12 years is already a decent age. However, in Blogging time, 12 years rather feels like being the Grandfather of stock blogging. A lot of the fellow stock bloggers from back then have vanished or moved to social media. Interestingly there is now a new wave of bloggers mostly on Substack.

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DCC Plc (ISIN IE0002424939) – Extremely unsexy Business meets sexy Track Record at a super sexy Valuation

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Disclaimer: This is not investment advice. PLEASE DO YOUR ON RESEARCH !!

As this post has become quite long, here is the Elevator pitch:

DCC Ltd, a 4,3 bn market cap UK listed, Ireland based company at a first look like a very boring, unremarkable collection of very boring distribution businesses. A second (or third) glance however, reveals a very stable , well managed distribution company that has been compounding EPS at double digit growth rates for the last 28 years and can be bought for a very modest valuation of ~10x earnings. The company clearly faces some challenges but this might be more than outweighed by very good capital allocation, company culture and growth opportunities.

  1. History

DCC has a very interesting history. It was founded actually as some kind of Venture Capital company in 1976 in Ireland and was led for 32 ears by founder Jim Flavin. After turning into an operating company, DCC went public in 1994. Over the years they acquired a lot of businesses, many of those where distribution businesses from oil majors but also in other areas such as health care and technology components.

What I find extremely impressive is their track record since they listed in 1994 and is available in each annual report:

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Panic Journal 5 – Ukraine/Russia edition: Is Europe really Toast, Energy Silver Bullets and the Weather

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It’s time after exactly 3 months for some new ramblings on Energy, Europe and of course the weather and other stuff.

Bad news everywhere:

The last few weeks felt like a new catastrophe is happening every week or so. Italian elections, the British Pound trading like a Shitcoin, Putin threatening the West with Nuclear Weapons, Energy prices for retail customers skyrocketing, potential Blackouts being a real issue in Europe this winter, steel and fertilizer companies shutting down in Europe, creating supply chain issues down the chain and in addition, rumors about regime change in China and/or preparations for an attack on Taiwan are surfacing every day.

I have been listening to some US podcasts and there seems to be consensus on that Europe is Toast. Even a comparison to the “Arab Spring” was made with the dire prediction that Governments will topple like Domino tiles. I don’t want to sound arrogant but one word of advice to my American readers: European countries are actually all Democracies and if people don’t like their leaders they will elect new ones.

The FT was just running an article about the coming Deindustrialization of Germany with the example of BASF threatening to “leave” Germany and Billionaire Ray Dalio thinks that Europeans are not working hard enough.

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All Norwegian Shares part 1 – Nr. 1-15

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Good bye Denmark, hello Norway !!
As with previous series (Germany, Switzerland & Denmark) I will tackle the  Norwegian shares in random order. The main reason for this is that I find this funnier compared to working down the list in Alphabetic order. The first batch of 15 stocks has resulted in two watch list candidates. Let’s go !

  1. Kahoot!

Kahoot! is 1,1 bn EUR market cap former “growth darling” that was part of many “naive Tech investor” portfolios. Kahoot! is an online learning platform that addresses both, private customers as well as the corporate learning market. As many other Tech companies the financial report is a gibberish of Non-GAAP adjusted numbers. On a GAAP level, the company is loss making and cash seems to be shrinking. At 7x P/S this still looks much to expensive. “Pass”.

2. AF Gruppen

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All Danish part 16 – Nr. 151-160

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And on we go relentlessly. Another 10 randomly selected Danish stocks, with only 16 more to go. This time, 3 of them made it onto the preliminary watch list. Enjoy !!

151. Nordea

Nordea is a 36 bn EUR market cap “full service” bank and asset manager active in the Nordics. As many other Scandinavian financial institutions, Nordea is doing quite well compared to its European peers, managing ROEs of around 7-11% over the past 10 years.

The longer term share price development is nevertheless quite disappointing, showing little to no value creation:

Nordea

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Royal Unibrew (ISIN DK0060634707) – A High Quality Beverage Compounder at a reasonable price ?

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Disclaimer: This is not investment advice. PLEASE DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH !!!!

The company:

Royal Unibrew logo

Royal Unibrew is a Danish Beverage company that I “discovered” during my journey through all Danish shares some weeks ago (too expensive back then but “watch”). I had also seen them some months ago in the Profitlich&Schmidlin portfolio.

The company is mostly active in Scandinavia and the Baltics where they have offerings in all areas (including a contribution agreement with Pepsi), whereas in some countries (France, Germany, Italy), they are running a focused niche strategy. Despite the name, Beer is only around 35% of their offerings (as of 2021), the other 65% are mostly non-alcoholic drinks from soft drinks to water and energy drinks.

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Exmar – Update Q3 numbers: “Thank you for the Tango” & SELL

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Exmar was a special situation that I entered in August, following a surprising significant asset sale (a LNG liquification platform called “Tango”)

Yesterday evening, Exmar reported Q3 numbers including the final numbers on the ENI transaction. A few points that I found important:

  • Cash proceeds for the ENI transaction were slightly higher (+13 mn) compared to my base case
  • Net cash at company level however was -23 mn lower than I had calculated
  • Interestingly, Exmar only reported net cash at Group level, not gross cash at Holding level
  • The remaining core LPG business seems to do quite well, with sales up ~6% and EBIT up ~50%
  • They didn’t provide explicit number on how much they earn with the remaining regasification unit that is operating since August. The earnings of the “infrastructure” segment are really hard to read
  • Next week, there will be an extraordinary shareholder meeting declaring a 0,95 EUR dividend per share

The share price has done quite well. At the time of writing, Exmar traded at 10,20 EUR per share, an increase of almost exactly 1/3 vs. when I entered the position and even better in relative terms:

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Hypoport AG Part 1: : Great Business but experiencing a “Wile E. Coyote moment” ?

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Background:

Hypoport logo

Hypoport has been one of the sore points in my investing history. I have been looking at this company several times, quite intensively in 2013 but never “pulled the trigger”. Hypoport has been a “FinTech” before this expression has been used. The business is not so easy to explain and comprises 4 different segments with several companies within these segments.

Recently, the share price of the company has been hammered after they gave a profit warning, despite having decreased already -75% from their peak before that profit warning. Time to look at Hypoport again.

Business:

  1. Loan platform “Europace”

This is clearly the flagship product of Hypoport although it doesn’t seem to be well understood or known. Europace is a B2B market place that gathers different mortgage offerings and combines these offerings combined with other useful tools to professional advisers who then actually make the deal with retail customers.

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