Let’s start with the not so good news: EVS Broadcast, as in Q1, came out with a slightly disappointing 6M press release:
Sales down yoy, EBIT down more and EPS down quite significantly:
However, on the positive side, orders are up and they confirmed the guidance they gave in Q1 for 2025. SO 2025 is pretty “backloaded” with regard to sales and profits, however EVS does have normally quite good visibility mid-year on what’s going to happen until year end.
I want to point out two interesting details from the press release. The CEO said the following:
As I mentioned in my 2025 Q2 Performance review, my central investing tool is now a dynamic watchlist that prioritizes Companies based on Quality, Valuation and Momentum.
Now how to approach the quality of a company in an efficient way ?
The main issue here is that I will not be able to do a “full stack” analysis for each and every company I come across. But I want to have at least a quick “starting point” which I could use to decide if it makes sense to dig deeper or not.
I defined 10 criteria that give me a first insight on how a company could fit to my “Beuteschama” or not. If I would want to check these criteria manually, I would need to use several sources, such as TIKR, some stock websites, the companies’’s IR website and the annual and quarterly reports. A process that on average takes me at least 60-90 minutes to get to a conclusion.
So I decided to try out LLMs in order to “outsource” this first step screening and scoring.
“Navel gazing” alert: This post doesn’t contain any actionable investment ideas but rather explores how I can enrich my own investment process in the future by incoprorating some measures of Stock price and fundamental momentum.
Excursion: My secret hobby
First I have to admit that for a few months now, I do have a secret hobby: I am watching on a regular basis a Wikifolio (Wikifolio is a German/Austrian platform where everyone can set up a “fund” and other investors can participate) from an Austrian trader with the name Richard “”Ritschy” Dobensberger.
Not only has he managed to attract 160 mn EUR in investments into his portfolio but he has averaged 33% CAGR over the last 13 years, resulting in an overall performance of around 4000% which is really really remarkable and puts him into the top of any trader I know.
“For the financial year 2025, FUCHS now expects sales and EBIT on previous year’s level (financial year 2024: Sales at €3,525 million, EBIT at €434 million). The previous outlook for 2025 expected sales at around €3.7 billion and EBIT at around €460 million. Consensus for the financial year 2025 stands at €3,660 million for sales and at €459 million for EBIT.”
In the first 6 months of 2025, the Value & Opportunity portfolio gained +5,8% (including dividends, no taxes) against a gain of +15,6% 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:
As mentioned in Q1, in relative terms 2025 turned out to be a tough year. Despite my traditional overweight in European stocks, I didn’t have enough exposure to performing sectors (Financials, Defense) but instead too much exposure to weak sectors like Oil/Energy related (ATD, DCC), Alcohol (TFF) or construction (Thermador, Samse etc.). I also had no expsoure to takeovers or buy outs.
The only positive news is that June was a relatively good month, in relative terms the best month since December 2023 and the first few days in July looked quite good as well.
After part 2 of the Private Equity Mini series a few days ago, I wanted to focus on how to access the asset class as a private investor via the “normal” capital markets.
Currently, the PE industry and the broader “Private Asset” industry is massively trying to lure private investors into its Fund offering via a variety of “NEW” and usually structured instruments, such as “ELTIFS” in Europe or lobbying hard in the US to get access to private investors.
In the past, Private Assets, including its subgroups like Buyout, Venture, Growth, Infrastructure and Private Credit were “exclusive” to larger institutional investors and Ultra High Net Worth individuals.
These days, with declining commitments from those traditional investors, the PE industry now tries to access the vast pools of money that smaller, private investors collectively own.
Often you hear the pitch that now is the time to “democratize” the asset class, which is an expression that should make the targeted investors extremely nervous. I had linked to the excellent Bain PE report already in one of the link collections.
A key slide of the report is the one that shows that for the Buy-out category, 2024 was the first year ever with declining AuM:
This is an investment idea that I have “borrowed” from my friend Jonathan Neuscheler from Abilitato. Therefore I highly recommend to read what he has written first. And this is also the reason why this write-up is rather short.
In short, I think Fraport is an interesting turn-around/deleveraging story with a near term catalyst in form of the resintatement of the dividend in 2026. Relative to its peers, Fraport trades at a significant discount which could disappear if things go according to plan which adds to the potential upside.
Here is the write-up (don’t worry, only 9 pages incl. pictures):
For various reasons, I was able to spend much more time on this topic since Sunday than I would usually have. On Sunday morning, the topic somehow picked my interested and I have been trying to understand as a Non-Expert what is going on here.
For full disclosure: I have no positions in any of the MAG7 stocks, but that might make me equally biased than someone who has mortgaged his family home to invest in NVDIA.
On Sunday Morning, I initially used mostly Twitter, but during the day this was overflooded with MAGA Crap. Twitter is still a good place at an early stage for “virally developing situations”, bit it gets washed with (AI written) turd pretty quickly.
The DeepSeek topic is interesting on many dimensions. Here are some facts (taken from Wikipedia, but confirmed by other sources):