Category Archives: Bilanzanalyse

The “All German Shares Series” – Intro

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Background:

My roots as an investor are domestic German stocks. For the first 10-15 years of my investing “career” I would only look at German stocks (with minor exceptions during the Dot.com boom), only after some time I moved on to a more international focus. Even at the beginning of this blog in December 2010, the majority of our shares back then were still German.

These days, I only have a relatively small domestic stock allocation left (P. Hartmann, Draeger, Innogy) and mostly screen for international stocks.

One interesting thing happened in the meantime: I kind of lost my comprehensive knowledge about German shares. A lot of companies have newly been listed or disappeared and somehow I never ket track of what was happening. Also I didn’t follow the good ones very closely.

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My 10 Cents on the WeWork IPO – The “AWS of Commercial Real Estate” or a “Double Hype” ?

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WeWork as the AWS of Commercial Real Estate

A lot has been written in the past few days about the upcoming WeWork IPO. I had linked to a few articles on Saturday and FTAlphaville has some pretty sarcastic but good coverage as well.

Yesterday then the always brilliant Stratechery came out with in interesting post. Ben Thompson thinks that WeWork could develop into something like AWS (for real estate) which now is repsonsible for most of Amazon’s profits. But he clearly acknowledges there are a lot of governance issues etc. etc.  The “WeWork is like AWS” story is nothing new and is mostly pushed by WeWork itself and combined with what they think is the adressable market (hint: all commercial real estate globally) could justify almost any valuation.

WeWork’s actual product: Open Plan offices (for start-ups and wannabes)

What I have been missing in the whole discussion so far is a look at WeWork’s actual product which in my opinion is the following:

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Quick updates: Vostok New Ventures, Majestic Wine and Cars.com

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Another headline for this post could have been “The good, the (not so) bad and the (very) ugly…

Let’s start with “the ugly” right away: Cars.com

Yesterday was a pretty bad day anyway but Cars.com decided that it is a good day to tell investors that a potential sale of the company will not materialize. The whole bidding process has been described in details by the company. In summary, 29 parties looked at the company but no “actionable” bid could be obtained. This alone might not have triggered the -36% share price reaction taht happened yesterday,

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Update Handelsbanken – HOLD

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Handelsbanken Update:

2018 was on the surface a solid year for Handelsbanken. According to the 2018 annual report, operating profit increased by +5% and net income by +8%, top line by +5%. ROE was 12,8% which is below my assumed 15% but still a remarkably good number for a large bank.

Just looking at the bottom line, the first quarter of Handelsbanken looks great:  Net income up +19%, operating profit up +18%. However top line only grew at +4% (vs. Q1 2018).

However this is solely a function of the fact that the bank reversed their provision into the Oktogonen pension fund for employees which they clearly state in the quarterly report:

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Online Travel Updates (Expedia, Booking, Tripadvisor, Trivago & AirBNB / Google)

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Expedia 

I invested into Expedia in February 2018 after the stock had become cheap enough. The idea was that a stock in a secular growth sector (online travel) should do well in the long run. After pretty decent fulll year 2018 numbers, with double digit increases in both, top and bottom, line, the first quarter 2019 showed a clear slowdown. Topline growth slowed to ~4%. Excluding Trivago which is still shrinking, topline sales would have grown +6%. Underlying profitability has improved although the first quarter is always the weakest one.

What I found interesting is the fact that Expedia performed better than Booking com. Here is a stock price comparison (including Tripadvisor  and Trivago):

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Deutsche Familienversicherung AG: Europe’s leading Insurtech or “Lipstick” on an ordinary Insurance company ?

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Deutsche Familenversicherung AG (DFV) IPOed end of last year and claims to be the first stock listed “Insuretech” in Europe. The IPO was only successful at the second attempt but still they made it. In their investor presentation they even call themselves “Europe’s leading Insurtech” which is a pretty bold claim.

Excursion: What does Insurtech /Fintech mean ? And what does digital mean ?

There is clearly not general valid definition of Fintech /insurtech, but looking at the Fintech space, one would characterize these companies as technology driven companies that use technology to do things faster, cheaper and better than thier “ordinary” competitors.

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Zur Rose AG (ISIN: CH0042615283) – Loss making failed IPO or long term growth opportunity ?

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

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The company

Zur Rose AG is a Swiss company that specializes in selling / distributing pharmaceuticals. The core business is Swiss distribution business where they distribute pharmaceuticals to Doctors, as in some parts of Switzerland, Doctors canboth, prescribe and sell pills. In 2012, Zur Rose made a smart/lucky buy: For only 25 mn EUR, they bought German based online Pharmacy Doc Morris from Celesio, a German Pharmaceuticals wholeseller that got later acquired by McKesson (I owned the stock as special situation)

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April SA – Potential buyout offer from CVC: Interesting Special Situation ?

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Disclaimer: This is not investment advice. Please do your own research. 

April SA is an “Old friend” on this blog. I owned the stock in the past and last time I looked at them when a rumour came up that the company is for sale in late October.

This is what I said back then:

April had shown actually pretty decent growth in Q3 and I actually considered buying some shares but maybe this is not so sustainable and the founder wants to sell before it is getting worse again ? Who knows…

My fundamental assessment of April is that they have a strong core business (French Broker) but have over extended themselves internationally and the founder, Bruno Rousset, who stepped down in 2014, does not have the energy anymore to turn this around himself.

Well, things have progressed. There had been a “beauty contest” with PE bidders and it looks now that PE shop CVC is highly interested in buying the stake of the founder and majority owner. This is from a piece of news released by April SA and  CVC end of December:

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2018 Performance review – Outlook 2019

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In 2018, the Value & Opportunity portfolio lost -11,3%* (including dividends, no taxes) against –15.4 % for the Benchmark (Eurostoxx50 (Perf.Ind) (25%), Eurostoxx small 200 (25%), DAX (30%), MDAX (20%)).

Links to previous Performance reviews can be found on the Performance Page of the blog.

Some other funds that I follow have performed as follows in 2018:

Partners Fund TGV: +1,74% *
Profitlich/Schmidlin: -8,27%
Squad European Convictions -9,75%
Ennismore European Smaller Cos +2,65% (in EUR)
Frankfurter Aktienfonds für Stiftungen -13,72%
Evermore Global Value  -20.92% (USD)
Greiff Special Situation -7,02%
Squad Aguja Special Situation -11,7%

*TGV Partners as of 15.12.2018, to be updated

Since inception (01.01.2011), this translates into +152,6% or +14,0% p.a. vs. 66,6% or 6,0% p.a. for the Benchmark.

Current portfolio / Portfolio transactions

The current portfolio can be seen as always on the portfolio page. I have already mentioned the 2018 transactions in the “My 22+1 stocks for 2019” post.

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My 22 (+1) investments for 2019

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Edit: I actually forgot to include Expedia…..

This post has become now a small tradition at the end of December and is also very helpful for me to review my holdings.

The summaries of the previous years can be found here:

My 21 investments for 2018
My 27 investments for 2017
My 27 investments for 2016
My 28 investments for 2015
My 24 investments for 2014
My 22 investments for 2013

From the 21 stocks of last year, 4 have left the portfolio:

Silver Chef and Metro were clear mistakes from my side and I exited them as discussed with significant losses. IGE & XAO was a much more positive case. The company received a buy-out offer from Schneider SA and I exited at 138 EUR per share. DOM Security finally was merged into the main shareholder company SFPI. Luckily, I could sell 40% of my holdings at 75 EUR/ share.

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