Category Archives: Bilanzanalyse

Insurtech Massacre part 3 – Lemonade & Churn, churn, churn !!

Long time readers know that I have a soft spot for insurance companies. Some weeks ago, I started looking into Insurtech companies and then I looked into Lemonade’s 2021 earnings. Since my first post, Lemonade has lost another 1/3 of its value and is now significantly below its IPO price.

What I like about Lemonade is that they indeed created a “fresh” insurance brand, however the numbers were clearly challenging. My main takeaways from last time were as following:

  • Growth is slowing
  • marketing cost is increasing (per new dollar premium)
  • The business is not really scaling

Already a week ago, Lemonade issued its Q1 earnings. This time, I have compiled a few line items that I find interesting on a quarterly basis in order to analyze things more deeply:

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All Danish Stocks part 6 – Nr. 51-60

And another batch of 10 randomly selected Danish shares, this time, none of them made it onto the watch list. We have now covered almost 1/3 of all Danish stocks.

51. Ringkjøbing Landbobank A/S

Ringkjøbing Landbobank is a 3,3 bn EUR market cap bank active only in Denmark, that is surprisingly profitable with a ROE of ~15%. This is reflected in a very good share price performance and a rather high valuation at 20x trailing P/E.

ringbank

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Protector Forsikring ASA – The Scandinavian “Baby Markel/Berkshire” ?

The company:

Protector Forsikring ASA is a name that came up more often in my “stream”. It is a Norwegian “Challenger” Insurance company founded in 2007 (and IPOed in 2008) that has been growing nicely over the past years and doesn’t look expensive.

The stock price has been quite volatile but recently the stock has reached new highs and long time shareholders should be quite happy:

Protector

The high level financial indicators look very attractive: A relatively Ok valuation with an impressive ROE:

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Gaztransport & Technigaz (GTT) – welcome back !!

Background:

Gaztransport & Technigaz is a company that I had looked at in early 2016 and most of what I have written back then still applies:

Imagine you could invest into a company with the following characteristics:

– Global market leader with 70-90% market share (95% new built)
– Net margins after tax of 50% or more
– business protected by patents
– almost no capital requirement, negative working capital
– a potentially huge growth opportunity
– conservative balance sheet (no debt) and “OK” management

Back then, I found the stock initially too expensive at EUR 34 per share, however I invested then at around 22 EUR but sold after a quick gain at around 31 EUR.

What did happen since then ?

Looking at the chart, I was clearly underestimating the value of the stock by a wide margin as the stock more than tripled until early 2021:

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All Danish Shares part 2 – Nr. 11-20

And on we go with the second post after kicking off last week. Two of the stocks already appeared in the blog some years ago and overall, these ten candidates yielded two “Watch list” candidates.

11. Conferize A/S

Conferize is a 15 mn EUR market cap company that seems to develop software for managing conferences. The company seems to be still “pre revenue”. I do not fully understand why a pre revenue Software company is public, but I’ll happily “pass” without further analysis.

12. Jobindex A/S

Jobindex is a 220 mn EUR market cap company that operates an online Job board which covers all Danish vacancies. The company has been growing nicely until 2018 but then stagnated already in 2019. The chart reflects this to a certain extent, the share price now is similar to the price during the “high growth” phase:

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A first look into the “Insurtech Chainsaw Massacre” – Part 1

The (short) history of Insurtech so far:

Just a few years ago, “Insuretech” was one of the hottest sectors within Fintech and VC. As in other sectors like retailing or travel, “Digital Insurance” companies were supposed to disrupt this old and slow industry. Listening to VCs and founders was mostly about how easy it would be to take market shares and profits from the old Dinosaurs.

Lemonade was the first Insurtech that went public in July 2020 and its 139% increase on the first day clearly set the scene. The share price went up further and peaked in February at around 170 USD.

Of course this triggered a certain feeding frenzy and a couple of other Insurtechs went public either via IPO or SPAC in the following months, like Root, Oscar, Metromile etc.

However, now, roughly 18 months after Lemonades IPO, things look a lot different. Here is an overview of the “Chainsaw massacre” that happened (in the order off going public):

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Nabaltec AG – Boring Old Economy Dinosaur or “Hidden Champion” Electrification beneficiary ?

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

The company:

naba logo

Nabaltec is not a fancy Biotech company as the name might indicate, but a rather “old economy” Specialty Chemical company focusing on Aluminium-oxide based materials, located in the middle of nowhere in my home state Bavaria. This  typical “German Mittelstand” company had its IPO in 2006, and was created 1996  as management buy-out of a production facility from VAW AG. The beginnings of the plant as such seems to have been built in 1938 and looks like this:

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Carvana: The Armchair Investor’s perspective & Could Auto1 become the “German Carvana” ?

Background/Introduction:

For some reason I ran into a “Twitter battle” about Auto1, with the main Bull case being that Auto1 is the German Carvana. In addition, some good investors that I follow have revealed Carvana as a position. 

Time to have an “Armchair investor” look into Carvana. The goal here is two fold:

  1. Understanding if Carvana as such is a good business (and maybe even interesting as investment)
  2. Finding out if Auto1 could indeed is or can become the “German Carvana”

Full disclosure: the guy who is writing this, lost significant money with investing into Cars.com, another US online car company. So as always: PLEASE DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH !!!

The Carvana Business “Bull Case”

important: Just as I was about to finish the post, Rob Vinall has released his 2021 letter to investors with a very convincing pitch for Carvana. I highly recommend to read it first.

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Another return of the Travel Series part 11 – HomeToGo SE: The German AirBnB or the next Trivago ?

Disclaimer: This is not investment advice but my personal (and often unqualified) opinion. PLEASE DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH !!!

Background & Intro

Long term readers of my blog might remember a certain obsession with travel companies over the past few years. Among other posts, the main analysis were these ones:

Part 1 – Lastminute.com
Part 2 – Expedia
Part 3 – Trivago
Part 4 – Flight Centre – book review
Part 5 – Flight Centre
Part 6 – Tripadvisor
Part 7 – Tripadvisor (cont)
Part 8 – GDS (Sabre, Amadeus etc.)
Part 9 – Expedia (cont)
Part 10 – AirBnB

With the exception of a short, mildly successful (and very lucky) speculation in Expedia, I found the sector as “too hard” for me to invest as too many things were moving at the same time:

The more I look into those companies, the more difficult the sector seems to become. There is a lot of fundamental change going on, Which on the one side is good for agile players but on the other hand makes it very difficult to predict anything and extrapolate trends from the past.

As a Value  Investor, unpredictable fast-moving industry changes are difficult. In order to invest in such a sector, there should either be a significant moat and/or fantastic management or a very cheap valuation.

So why now looking again at a travel company ? To be honest, I was motivated by a comment from “Celebrity investor” Philipp “Pip” Kloeckner in my Twitter feed as I introduced HomeToGo as a part of my “Bumsbuden Wikifolio” where I collect German shares that I think are staying away from makes a lot of sense.

Pip commented that he has a very different opinion, which is not surprising, as he is sitting on the Supervisory board and seem to hold around 100k shares that he received for consulting  in the early days of the company.

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