Category Archives: Anlage Philosophie

Criteo SA (NASDAQ: Cheap AdTech Champion or evil Online Stalker ?

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The company:

Criteo Logo

Criteo is one of the few Non-US success stories in the Tech sector. Criteo was founded in France in 2005 and quickly became one of the leading “Adtech” companies in the world. Criteo successfully IPOed 2013 on the NAsdaq and quickly reached a market cap of more than 3 bn USD.

The business:

Criteo is an “Adtech” company. What it does is the following: It is primarily  a tech version of the classical Advertising Agencies: Clients use Criteo to maximise the value of their online ad dollars spent which should turn into as many clicks and sales dollars as possible.

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Metro AG – Update & Playing the Devil’s Advocate

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Metro, the spin-off stock I bought last year, doesn’t look very good at the moment. The stock priced tanked significantly over the last weeks and the stock is now a proud member of “V&O Flop 10“:

metro upd

When a stock price moves like this, the fist thought is always: I need to do something, either to sell, or more often, to buy more. This was for instance one of the mistakes I made with Silver Chef, where I Increased my position at least temporary.

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Saga PLC (ISIN GB00BLT1Y088) – High Quality Travel / Insurance Hybrid ?

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The company:

Saga Plc is a UK company that combines two business that I have looked at quite often: Insurance and Travel.

Saga has its origin as a Seaside Hotel in England and then became a travel company before then moving into insurance in the 1980s. Saga caters specifically for the “over 50” market and claims to be the “leading provider” to people over 50 in the uK.

After a PE financed management buyout in 2007, he company was IPOed in May 2014 at a price of 185 pence / share.

Looking at the stock chart, IPO investors at first saw a decent outperformance before things went south this year:

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Homework: Electrica SA update

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Electrica is the only remaining “Emerging Market” stock in my portfolio. I bought the stock in December 2014 and now after 3 year and some months it maybe time to assess how the situation looks against my initial expectations.

Including dividends, the stock is up ~18% in total since then, in my portfolio however the stock is flat because I bought more of Electrica at higher prices. Compared to a +53% performance of the portfolio in the same period, the stock is clearly a underperformer and the question is clearly if I should keep the stock.

My initial thesis relied on the following assumptions:

  • the stock was cheap for a grid company with guaranteed returns on invested capital
  • Romania was supposed to grow significantly and Electrica as well
  • As a former Government owned company, I expected significant cost savings potential
  • I had expected After Tax / After minority Earnings of around 442 mn RON in 2017

What happened ?

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The Value and Opportunity “All Time Flop 10”

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During my Silver Chef “Post mortem” some days ago, I decided to look at the 10 biggest losses I made since I started the blog in order to check if I have actually learned from mistakes.

These were the (by absolute performance) 10 worst investments in the 7+ years of Value and Opportunity:

10. Medtronic -18,93% (2011)

Medtronic was one of the initial portfolio investments. I kicked them out in August 2011 as I was not very comfortable owning US large caps and I never deeply looked into the company myself. Medtronic since then outperformed the S&P 5000 IN USD terms (~17,1% p.a. vs. 15.3%) or ~ 233% in EUR terms. This is slightly better than my portfolio which made around 215% in the same period.

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The return of the Travel Series (9): Expedia (EXPE) – Cheaper than I thought

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Disclaimer: This is not investment advise !!! Do your own research !!!!
The guy who wrote this post just lost a lot of money with his Silver Chef position. You might even consider shorting his recommendations 😉

Background:

When I looked at Expedia almost exactly one year ago as part of my 2017 Travel Series my key take negative aways were as follows:

– CEO has super high salary (90 mn USD in 2015)
– top line growth, operating profit stagnant
– expensive acquisitions in 2015/2016, number of shares and debt increased significantly
– reported growth numbers not adjusted for acquisitions in investor presentation
– lots of share options

Additionally, the stock looked expensive:

At 119 USD per share, Bloomberg tells me that they have a trailing P/E of 54, an expected 2017 P/E of 22,3 and an EV/EBITDA of ~16. This means that a lot of growth is already priced in.

As we can see in the chart, the stock became at first even more expensive before dropping back to a level of around 100 USD / share:

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Boiron SA (ISIN FR0000061129) – Boring enough to invest ?

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It’s no secret that I like French family run companies. TFF Group, G. Perrier, Installux, Dom Security are just the main examples of these kind of companies.

boironlogo_notag_blue

Boiron SA is a French company which Bloomberg lists as “Specialty Pharmaceutical” company. Although “Specialty Pharma” is not exactly what they do. in fact, Boiron SA ist the only listed company that I know that exclusively produces and sells Homeopathic “pharmaceutical” products. The call themselves “World leader” of this field.

A few words on Homeopathy

From Wikipedia:

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Softbank & Swiss Re – is Masa Son just losing it ?

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As I have covered Softbank just recently (part 1, part 2 ) and as I consider Insurance companies to be somehow in my circle of competence, the news that Softbank wants to acquire 30% of Swiss Re for 10 bn USD of course sparked my interest.

The big question of course is: Why on earth would Masa Son do that ?

Looking at his vision statements, his vision is a connected world via the internet of things, lots of robots, smart AIs and a lot of computing power. So he is buying chip makers (ARM; Nvidia), data companies like Uber, mobile phone companies, robotic companies etc. So far so good, somehow this could fit together.

But a Reinsurance company ? WTF is that ?

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Landis & Gyr (ISIN CH0371153492): Potentially interesting “Forced IPO” Special Situation ?

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Background

logo

Landis & Gyr, the Swiss based company was on my research “to do” list for some time. Why ? Because it looked very much like a “forced IPO” special situation when in Summer 2017 then almost bankrupt Japanese Conglomerate Toshiba decided to sell Landis & Gyr which was deemed to be one of their crown jewels.

Toshiba itself had bought Landis & Gyr in 2011 for around 2 bn USD from a Private Equity Seller (Bayard) who in turn had bought Landis & Gyr from KKR (via DEMAG), another PE shop in 2004. Back then, Landis & GYr had around 390 mn EUR in sales and it was rumoured that the purchase price was quite low at around 100 mn EUR (those were the days…..).

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