Category Archives: Compounders

Not aMUSEd: The UK “Portal Pain Basket” (Mony Group, Autotrader & Rightmove)

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

I actually started to write this post before the newest hype about “Muse”, the new AI Agent from META, really went mainstream. I decided to leave the old part and then update it instead of completely changing it.

As my DCC investment ends its “natural life” and I have begun to unwind it, I decided to have a look at a group of beaten up UK stocks that one could summarize as “Comparison portals” or “Two sided online market places”: : Mony Group (Insurance), Autotrader (cars) and Rightmove (real estate).

As the post became quite long, I also picked a track to keep you entertained while your LLM assistant is summarizing the post for you:

Green Day – Basket Case

Green Day – Basket Case [Official Music Video] (4K Upgrade)

Here a quick summary for each company: 

Mony Group SE

Mony Group, the former Moneysupermarket Group is a UK focused comparison portal where people go to compare quotes for Insurance policies, loans, broadband tariffs, electricity contracts. in addition they offer a referral shopping app/system that offers Cashbacks (discounts).

This is from the 6M Investor presentation with the distribution of sales::

We can see that insurance is over half and that they have disinvested travel related offerings in 2025.

This TIKR Screenshot shows us that Mony’s stock was not a very good investment over the past 10 years:

However the share price seems to have stabilized to a certain extent and the stock is cheap. The business as such is very profitable and has been growing low single digits for the past 3 years or so.

Other than the next two companies, Mony is only the number two comparison portal in the UK, pretty far behind a site called “Compare the Market” but bigger than “go.Compare” and “Confused” which used to belong to Admiral.

One important detail is that Italian Marketplace company Moltiply (former Mutui Online) is the largest shareholder with ~12% and they have been adding as recently as in June 2026.

Multiply has been collecting comparison marketplaces steadily, like Verivox in Germany or the non-UK sites from Admiral.

Autotrader

Autotrader is THE leading UK online car portal where both auto dealers and private customers are buying and selling mostly used cars. It used to be a print magazine but successfully transformed into THE dominant online market place in the UK.

It is supposed to have a market share of 75-80% in the UK. Over the last 10 years, it has not done much especially after it got hit by “SAASocalypse” fears:

The stock is a little bit more expensive than Money Group, but almost absurdly profitable.

What is worth mentioning is that Autotrader has already started and committed to a massive share repurchase program:

One additional threat for Autotrade is that Amazon seems to be going for a piece of Autotraders cake and wants to enter the market still in 2026.

In the US, where Amazon is already in the market, success so far seems to be mixed at best. It reminds me a little bit about the auto tire business where Amazon started some years ago but didn’t succeed either.

Rightmove

What Autotrader is to cars, Rightmove is to real estate with the only exception that Brits are really obsessed about real estate. Almost any (friendly) Brit I know is using far too much time scrolling through right move listings.

Rightmove is the most profitable of the three and also the most expensive at 15x next year P/E.

In 2024, REA, the “rightmove of Australia” tried to take over Rightmove at a final offer of 7,80 GBP/share but wasn’t successful.

Interestingly, earnings are up between 20-30% depending on which line you look at since then, but the stock is trading at a deep discount to that take-over bid.

The AI Threat:

Looking at 1 year charts we can see that especially Autotrader and Rightmove were hit by AI fears, Moneysupermarket a little bit less so:

The 5 year chart shows that Moneysupermarket started to struggle earlier, in 2024:

While we are having fun with charts, we can compare Autotrader and Rightmove with Sage, the listed UK Accounting Software company:

Interestingly, Sage has recovered most of its losses in the last 12 months, wile Autotrader and Rightmove so far have not.

Now to our last Chart comparison. This time Rightmove with Scout24 from Germany and REA from Australia which shows that across geographies, the stock market is really sceptical vs. portals and that this is not only a UK thing:

So the Billion Dollar question here is clearly: Will AI (and especially agents) disrupt the “Two sided marketplace” model and if yes, how fast will this happen ?

Clearly, Vibe coding a new AutoTrader or Rightmove or Moneysupermarket is not so hard. However that leaves you with the main task:

  • how to you motivate, both, corporate and retail clients to move over to the new “platform” quickly ?

Or, will people just go to their favorite chatbot and type in: Please look for a new house and buy it for me ?

In my opinion, the audience of the current platforms could be quite sticky, especially in the case of Rightmove, which to my understanding is only partially about buying a new house and partially just entertainment.

And yes, there will be people going directly through agents but an agent in order to deliver the same result as a good comparison site/market place would need to have the same infrastructure, i.e. connections to companies in order to get the required updated information and access to actually do the transactions.

Not aMUSEd – the Update

Now while I was writing the above and also starting to build my positions slowly, the share prices of all three stocks (and its peers) started to go down pretty dramatically, as this chart shows:

There was no individual news for those companies but rather the sudden “insight” that Meta’s launch and early success of its Agentic App “Muse” will be a problem for everyone who currently lives from comparing things online. 

Muse is currently only available in the US and has shot up to the number 1 downloaded App over there. 

In the past few days, among other stocks, also travel related “aggregator” stocks went down significantly because of this:

The question is clearly: How real is that fear of (short term) disruption ?

I think it makes sense to look at a few “hurdles” for the agentic take-over:

  1. Consumer behaviour US vs. RoW

If we look at Mony Group for instance whose main product is insurance comparison: In the UK, more than 80% of insurance policies are closed/renewed through comparison portals. In the US, this business model is quasi non-existent.

To my understanding, Americans might maybe call one other carrier if they feel that their insurance contract is too expensive, but they would never make the effort to compare their insurance portfolio on a regular basis.

In the UK, this is normal, the same here in Germany. Normally, your favourite portal will know all your relevant details and will actively send you better offers before the old contracts expire. One click and you have cheaper insurance.

So for any active comparison portal user, there is very little to gain by using an AI agent, rather the opposite. And this is before the fact that insurance comparison is a regulated business (as insurance is).

  1. Real time capabilities of LLMs

One thing where at least I struggle a lot with LLMs is to make sure that they really use real time information and not some stale training data. Not sure how they solve it with agents, but I guess that that might still be an issue. Especially if you are looking for a used car or a flat to rent, you need to be really quick for the good deals.

Most portals already offer some kind of “alarm” function for interesting objects. I am not sure if and how AI agents can make sure to have access to the newest offers.

  1. Anti-agent measures 

The most interesting aspect in my opinion will be to see if and to what extent the existing owners of “comparison inventory” will allow AI agents onto their platform. Amazon for instance, has already blocked Muse, which is no surprise as Amaon’s Ad model would be jeopardized. 

Amazon is also smart enough, not to let Meta access its inventory and also its ship infrastructure. 

That’s maybe another point here: At least in the business world, Meta is not your partner of choice. Noone likes them, no one trusts them.

So we could go on and on, but I do not think and especially in “comparison crazy” UK, that AI Agents will be a super fast disruptive force that will make the incubents worthless over night.

But, and this is a big BUT: The stock market could act as this is the case for quite some time.

Whenever the overall AI narrative looks good and AI stocks go up, these stocks, that are perceived as AI losers will go down. No matter if the fundamentals shows something or not.

KPI overview:

Here is a quick overview of some KPIs that I looked at, including German real estate portal Scout24 which is similar to Rightmove.

We can see that Mony is really cheap, whereas Rightmove is clearly the most profitable. Autotrader is in between with the biggest “buyback yield”.

Scout 24 is clearly more expensive, most likely because growth has been higher than for the UK players, but that is also a risk if AI Agent adoption happens faster than I assume. For this reason and because I wanted UK exposure, I didn’t include them in the basket (yet).

Multiple compression

For all 3 stocks, valuation multiples have been compressed significantly. Let’s look at Autotrader first, which was only listed in 2015:

The P/E and EV/EBIT multiples are at absolute lows and at around1/2 of the historical mean.

For Rightmove, this looks very similar:

Money was never that expensive but is also now historically cheap:

While “mean reversion” is not a good investment case as such in a disruptive environment, it clearly shows that the stocks are at least cheap compared to historical valuations. Not that long ago, investors thought that a P/E of 30x is fair for Rightmove.

The Basket:

As a start, I allocated to each UK stock (Mony, Autotrader, Rightmove) 1% of the portfolio, making it a 3% position overall. As purchase price I assume an average price at ~5% above today’s closing price each.

I will need to decide going forward if I either increase the size per stock a little or add maybe a few other UK stocks to the basket. We’ll see. At the moment I might go to 1,5% per stock and have overall maybe 5 UK stocks in that basket.

My time horizon for this trade is  15-18 months and I am looking for an upside of 30-50% in total (including dividends) if some normalization kicks in.

As the performance of my “basket trades” so far was rather mixed (Freedom Energy basket was OK, freedom insulation less so), please wish me luck on this one.

Summary:

Investing into comparison portals aka 2 sided market places at the moment is clearly a “pain trade”. The risk of getting punched in the face short term is quite high.

On the other hand, many of these businesses are extremely high quality and as cheap as they have been for the last 10 or 15 years

For the UK players, based on what we have seen in other areas, the probability of M&A action is not zero and I am also convinced that especially for the UK, the fear of a quick take over through AI agents (Muse) is overblown.

DCC – Interesting “Special Situation” following KKR potential buyout offer at 58 GBP ?

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

DCC is an investment I made back in December 2022. The investment thesis back then was that it was a successful compounder/serial acquirer that had the opportunity to grow further through its 3 platforms (Energy, Healthcare, Technology).

In the meantime, a lot of unexpected things happened. After issues in the non-Energy segments, DCC is currently transforming itself back into the original Energy distributor and sold already a significant part of its non.Energy businesses. The transformation has progressed well including a share buy back tender but is not finished yet.

Looking at the share price, we can see that not much happened over the last 5 years but that the timing for buying into DCC in Dec 2022 retrospect was quite lucky:

After the recent jump to 58 GBP, I am up 42% in total (in EUR, including dividends) which is not spectacular and rather at the lower end of my expected outcome. However, given the “Pivot” it is still a decent result and mostly attributable to the low entry point and the relevant dividends.

Now fast forward to last week: 

Private Equity behemoth KKR and another energy focused PE called Energy Capital Partners approached DCC and seem to have informally offered to take over DCC at 58 GPB per share which only represents a 15% premium over the average share price for the last few months.

DCC immediately declined the offer as “too low”.

Energy Capital Partners is a pretty large Energy focused US PE/Infrastructure investor that owns a lot of “Energy Transition” businesses. AuM seems to be north of 40 bn USD.

Although KKR did not disclose which fund is bidding, it looks that both KKR and ECP see this as an infrastructure play which makes a lot of sense.

58 GBP per share is clearly a low ball offer and no formal offer has yet been made. Under the applicable Irish laws, KKR has time until June 10th to either submit a formal offer or walk away.

From a shareholder perspective, I assume that maybe a lot of investors have been frustrated that the stock only went sideways for the last 5 years or so and are maybe happy to exit at that level.

The “asset heavy” Infrastructure PE playbook

DCC so far has operated as a relatively capital light distributor, but I think it is relatively easy to pivot them into an Infrastructure like business that usually enjoys significantly lower cost of capital.

In contrast to “normal” Private Equity, Infrastructure Private Equity still enjoys a pretty good time. Many players have raised large funds and are eager to deploy money. Infrastructure is often considered “AI safe” these days.

So I guess there might be a chance that some other players might look very closely at this situation. DCC is a very obvious target and the timing is quite nice from a PE perspective. The refocusising on Energy at DCC is still underway and the results don’t look so “clean” at the moment,

DCCs business model, especially the LPG distribution business has a lot of potential to get easy access to many SME companies and sell them solutions.

Especially the current volatility in fossil energy prices opens up a unique selling opportunity for solutions that offer less exposure like rooftop solar etc. 

According to TIKR, DCC’s Net debt to EBITDA ratio is only around 1,2x. The company is valued at around 7xEV/EBITDA. The typical infrastructure playbook would be to make the company more “asset heavy”. Due to the low gearing, this could be financed by more leverage. A typical “asset owning” infrastructure company with longer term contracts can be easily levered 4-5x Net debt/EBITDA, 

In DCC’s case, with around 900 mn in EBITDA, increasing the leverage ratio to 4x would allow them to issue almost 3 bn in debt which could finance a lot of assets. Those assets then will automatically increase EBITDA,

A stabilized infrastructure like company can then be sold at much higher multiples, usually at 12-15x EV/EBITDA. So the value creation potential for a good Infrastructure PE shop is significant. 

Just for fun I did a high level calculation how that exercise would look from this perspective (I just took the current numbers from TIKR, before further disposals):

A potential IRR of above 20% p.a. is highly attractive for an Infrastructure fund and as I have written before, PE’s have some more levers to “juice up” the IRR and earn even higher performance fees.

Is DCC now an interesting special situation play ?

There is clearly the risk that DCC might reject even higher offers, but I do think the 58 GBP low ball offer provides a decent “floor” for the stock (“Anchoring effect”).

For one, DCC should expect some positive operational tailwinds. Volatile and high energy prices in the past have been good for DCC’s energy business. As we can see every day “at the pump”, distributors like normal Petrol stations immediately increase prices although they often have inventories for some weeks/months and often drop prices much slower.

Looking back to the last energy price shock in 2022, we can see that this was DCC’s best year, especially for the energy business:

Although there is no guarantee that the same will apply to 2026, there is a high likelihood that 2026 will look good for DCC from an operational perspective.

In addition, I do expect that the transformation will be more or less completed in the 2026 calendar year. 

So all in all, 2026 seems to look pretty good for DCC. I think this also explains the timing of KKR and ECP, as they don’t want to wait until this improvement shows in the results of DCC.

Even in case, DCC gets sold relatively quickly at 58 GBP per share, one would still get the Dividend that will be recorded end of may.

Quick handicapping exercise:

Overall, I would see the probabilities as follows until the end of the year::

25% probability of no deal with 55 GBP as the outcome (plus dividend, currently estimated at 2,10 GBP/share)

15% of a deal at 58 GBP (plus dividend)

60% probability of a better deal. My guess here would be 70 GBP plus Dividend

This is the quick and dirty calculation:

So based on my assumptions, my probability weighted expected return is around 16% until year end. This looks attractive to me, as in my opinion, the downside is very limited.

Of course, all the assumptions can be challenged and changed.

Summary:

So in total I see the following situation here:

  • The bid of 58 GBP is clearly too low
  • DCC’s short term operational results are supported by increasing energy prices
  • in addition, the full effect of the transformation “back to energy” will materialize in the following quarter
  • Other Infrastructure funds might also be interested in DCC

So even if the bid from KKR would not be successful, I do think that the share price has much more upside than downside potential at the moment.

From that perspective, I decided not to sell any DCC shares but rather increase my position by ~1,5 % of total portfolio value at around 57,50 GBP per share.

Wise Plc – The “Costco of Currency transfers” ?

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

AI Disclaimer: This post has been written entirely “by hand”. I do use LLMs as a research assistant but not for generating any parts of this post.

Introduction:

Wise Plc has been on my to do list for some time. A long time ago, part of my professional duty was to monitor and execute (large) international payments and I was always perplexed how slow and cumbersome the process was even for large Financial Institutions. Back then we made the joke that it would be much faster to travel by plane with the cash in a suitcase instead of wiring it through the SWIFT system.

The final push to look deeper into it came when Wise moved into the “Top 10” of my newly created watchlist.

Initially I planned to write a shorter post as a couple of really good write-ups already exist (see appendix), but I had so much fun looking into Wise that I decided to give it the “full treatment” however with a stronger focus on business model, competition and uniqueness.

Here is “the full monty” in PDF form.

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