Category Archives: Anlage Philosophie

Biontech: Checking in once again & using LLMs to value the Pipeline

Posted on by 4 comments

Disclaimer: This is not Investment advice. PLEASE DO YOU OWN RESEARCH:

Management summary (Spoiler):

After selling Biontechs a few years ago, I reviewed Biontech once again by using LLMs to evaluate the development pipeline. Although this was an extremely interesting exercise, it is not an investment for me for the time being.

Background:

Biontech is a company I have owned in the past and written about. It became famous because they were the first to develop a MRNA based vaccine against Covid which they sold worldwide together with Pfizer.

My initial write-up can be found here, a follow up here.

Read more

Alcoholic Update: TFF Group 6M results & Mercosur-EU Trade agreement

Posted on by 4 comments

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

TFF Group 6M numbers

No matter how you put it, TFF Groups 6M release on January 7th was pretty bad.

Sales down ~-25%, net profit down -33%. The only positive aspect is that the operating leverage (i.e. how much more profit declines than sales) is surprisingly modest.

Last year for instance, a -9% decline in sales led to a -40% decline in profits as we can see in the respective report form last year:

Read more

(Under-) Performance review 2025 – Comment: “Mean reversion investing – Banks & Spirits”

Posted on by 9 comments

As this review became a little bit longer (too much time on my hands ?), I decided to publish is as a PDF version. Have fun.

Summary:

There is no way around it: 2025 was another bad year in relative terms (the third in the row). The Value & Opportunity portfolio gained +9,4 % (including dividends, no taxes, AOC fund as of 30.09.2025) against +21,5% for the Benchmark (Eurostoxx50 (25%), Eurostoxx small 200 (25%), DAX (30%), MDAX (20%), all performance indices including Dividends). Links to previous Performance reviews can be found on the Performance Page of the blog.

Over the 15 years from 12/31/2010 to 12/31/2025, the portfolio gained +429% against +225% for the Benchmark (before taxes). In CAGR numbers this translates into 11,7% p.a. for the portfolio vs. 8,2% p.a. for the Benchmark.  

The full monty:

(Under-)Performance review 2025Download

My 23 Investments for 2026

Posted on by 11 comments

Following an annual tradition since 2013, by the end of the year, I review my portfolio by writing/updating very short summaries for each individual position.  17 of the 23 positions from last year are still in the portfolio and I have added 6 new positions. That turnover has been mostly driven by reviews and/or disappointing fundamental developments. 

I sold Fuchs, Amadeus Fire, Hermle, Royal Unibrew, Sto and Energiekontor.

A more comprehensive Performance review will follow in early January 2025.

A short user guide:
My preferred style of investing is a bottom up approach, focusing on 20-30 “Steady Eddy” small/midcap stocks that in my opinion have a good return/risk profile over the next 3-5 (or more) years. Many of these stocks are not household names and are unlikely to make spectacular gains in any single year. Many of them look interesting only after the second or third glance and are rather boring, which is exactly what I am looking for. So if you are looking for a “Hot stock for 2025”, this post won’t help you much. 

At the end of each “short pitch” I summarize my current assessment for the coming year(s).

And always remember: THIS IS NOT INVESTMENT ADVICE. PLEASE DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH.

Read more

15 Year Anniversary of Value & Opportunity

Posted on by 18 comments

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)

Read more

Random ramblings on AI

Posted on by 4 comments

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:

Read more

Wise Plc – The “Costco of Currency transfers” ?

Posted on by 22 comments

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.

Read more

Was this the “Karpathy Moment” for the AI Industry ?

Posted on by 5 comments

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):

Read more

Performance review Q3 2025 – Comment “Keep waiting for that European Economic rebound”

Posted on by 5 comments

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.

Read more

« Older Entries Recent Entries »