Category Archives: Anlage Philosophie

Performance review 9M 2018 – Comment “Anti Buffett or Beyond Buffett ?”

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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:

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Another return of the Watch Series: FitBit (FIT) – dead horse or exciting pivot ?

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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:

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My personal “GFC” story – 10 lessons hopefully learned

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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

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SIAS SpA – Collateral damage ?

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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):

sias

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:

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DormaKaba (ISIN CH0011795959): Cheap enough after a -30% drop ?

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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:

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Metro AG – Post mortem

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As I mentioned in the comments a few days ago, I sold my complete Metro position at around 12,30 EUR /share. Including a 0,70 EUR dividend, this translates into a -26,6% loss and is a new entry into my “flop 10” list.

So what went wrong ?

Looking back at my initial post, my original idea was to buy the “ugly” part of old Metro which was supposed to be Ceconomy. This was clearly influenced by missing out on Uniper when it spun off from E.On, which was a similar ugly duck but performed very well.

One observation that I made back then was the following:

Looking at the stock chart we can see that Metro didn’t create a lot of shareholder value over the last 20 years.

When the split actually happened, Ceconomy traded far above the level that I thought would be interesting:

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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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