David Einhorn’s latest quarterly letter is clearly an expression of his frustration. However I wanted to pick out one passage that blames “ESG Investing” for being responsible for high energy prices:
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Introduction:
At a very first glance, Tekmar Plc, a AIM listed UK company looks like a very interesting “hidden Champion”:
The company is active in a very attractive market: their main business is to provide sub sea protection systems for cables with its biggest entity providing this service to the fast growing off-shore wind farm market.
In addition, Tekmar claims to have 75% market share. the combination of a company providing an essential, relatively small ticket item to a large installation with a dominating market share makes many investors water their mouths I guess.
Even more mouthwatering looks their chart from the 2020 annual report (from August 2020):
Background:
As some of my readers might have noticed, I have been looking deeper into the topic of renewable energy and connected topics such as Climate change, Net Zero targets etc.
My current conclusion is that we might have reached a real “Tipping point” towards a significant increase in “Electrification” which in my opinion is driven by a confluence of several factors:
There remain a lot of challenges, especially the “intermittency” of renewable energy and the current lack of solutions for longer term storage. However, especially in the battery space there is significant progress made. Plus, all the billions now flowing into “Green tech” will create a “Cambrian explosion” of new technologies in a few years time.
My long term readers know that I am relatively sloppy with updates especially when a stock does well. When I have time then I try to look at least briefly into annual reports when they are published .
VEF (formerly Vostok Emerging Finance)
VEF had a pretty decent 2020. Share price went up in 2020 by +37%, although faster than NAV which went up by around 22%. This was however achieved with some volatility:
What I missed is that they dis a share placement in November 2020. As usual, the reporting is very transparent so one can see that 4 out of 12 investments lost value. However the biggest position, Brazilian Creditas was also the best performer. Around 2/3 of the portfolio is now Brazilian Fintech. Their only new investment in 2020 was an Indian mobile payment company which makes it their first Indian investment.
Disclaimer: This is not investment advice. PLEASE DO YOU OWN RESEARCH !!!
Management Summary:
Alimentation Couche-Tard (“CT”) is one of the historically best performing Canadian companies, operating gas stations and convenience stores around the world with a focus on North America.
The company currently looks like a very interesting GARP (growth at a reasonable price) stock. Over the last 10 years, the company showed exceptionally good numbers: 23% EPS CAGR and 10 year average returns on capital >20% (23% ROE, ~20% ROCE). The business model is very resilient, Covid-19 actually led to an increase in margins and profits, both on the convenience store segment as well as in fuel despite declining sales.
As this is the 10 year mark of the portfolio, there will be a two part performance review. This is part 1 for 2020, part 2 for the 10 year period will follow in short time.
In 2020, the Value & Opportunity portfolio gained +27.6% (including dividends, no taxes) against +4,5% for the Benchmark (Eurostoxx50(25%), Eurostoxx small 200 (25%), DAX (30%), MDAX (20%), all performance indices including Dividends).
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 2020:
Partners Fund TGV: +28,2% (15.12.)
Profitlich/Schmidlin: +9.54% (30.12.)
Squad European Convictions (30.12.) +20,4%
Ennismore European Smaller Cos (30.12.) -10.9% (in EUR)
Frankfurter Aktienfonds für Stiftungen (30.12.) +0.83%
Evermore Global Value (30.12.) -7,0% (USD)
Greiff Special Situation (30.12.) +0.2%
Squad Aguja Special Situation (30.12.) +34,8%
Paladin One (30.12.) +30,1%
Again, time flies. Exactly 10 (!!) years ago on December 15th, 2010, I started this blog.
As every year a very special “Thank You” goes to all readers, especially those who actively contribute either by comments or mails. I need to keep on mentioning that the interaction with readers is really driving the motivation to continue the blog in this format.
In this post I will reflect mostly on writing the blog, highlights and lessons over the last 10 years plus my 10 all time favorite book reviews. There will be a 10 Year investment/performance review in the beginning of January 2021.
Some numbers:
| 10 year stat | ||||
| Year | Visits | % Germany | Posts | Comments |
| 2011 | 93,811 | na | 411 | 694 |
| 2012 | 178,485 | 49.82% | 266 | 1,368 |
| 2013 | 325,240 | 43.14% | 168 | 1,243 |
| 2014 | 430,794 | 32.26% | 121 | 1,068 |
| 2015 | 459,992 | 25.94% | 110 | 1,105 |
| 2016 | 521,197 | 28.52% | 113 | 1,645 |
| 2017 | 635,741 | 28.79% | 114 | 1,580 |
| 2018 | 452,267 | 28.57% | 92 | 784 |
| 2019 | 325,169 | 31.56% | 84 | 563 |
| 2020 YTD | 483,824 | 39.03% | 107 | 1,211 |
| Total | 3,906,520 | 1,586 | 11,261 |
All in all, I managed to post ~1600 posts over these 10 years which created close to 4 mn visits. The drop of visits (and comments) in 2018 & 2019 was clearly the result of posting less due to a lack of time from my side.
So why I am still doing this ?
I have covered the current SPAC Mania already in a post in June on Nikola, but since then SPACs only seem to gather more steam.
VC legend Bill Gurley (Banchmark Capital, Uber) has released an interesting post on the three main venues for a company to go public: A “classic” IPO, a simple listing and finally the SPAC.
I’ll try to summarize his post:
Bill Gurley is clearly not an idiot as he most likely is now a billionaire following some very impressive investment successes (Uber) with Benchmark capital. However I do think that his arguments have some serious flaws.
InterActice Corp (IAC) is a company I had on my list for a long time but for whatever reason I never managed to look at them in more detail. Over the past few weeks I read in several quarterly reports of good funds that they had invested, so I decided to look at least a little bit deeper this time.
Founder/ Chairman Barry Diller
InterActive is the creation of Barry Diller, who is now 78 Years old. He had a very interesting career. As a media executive, among other things, he created Fox Network, and mentored media executives such as Michael Eisner (ex CEO of Disney).
He took control of IAC in 1995 and finally bought out “Cable Cowboy” John Malone in 2010. The relationship with Malone was long but not always without issues.
Background:
More than five years ago I wrote about why it could make sense to invest into other actively managed funds even if one considers oneself an active investor. I would summarize the criteria that were important to me as follows:
The interests of the manager should be long term aligned with investors and the manager should possess specific skills to complement the own portfolio as well as to enable some learning.
value and opportunity 