Category Archives: Fundamentalanalyse

Panic Journal – Trump II: “There will be blood”

Quick Summary:

This post contains additional random musings about the current situation, plus an updated “portfolio check” at the end. So feel free to jump to the end if you are only interested in the portfolio check.

Background:

At the end of 2024, I wrote a first post about what might happen following both a Donald Trump win in the US election and a breakup of the German coalition. My takeaway was that maybe US stocks weren’t the great deal they were supposed to be.

Since then, two major developments have changed:

  1. The promised 7–10% US growth has turned into an almost certain recession.
  2. The outcome of the German election has been slightly better than initially feared.

All of this has led to a significant outperformance of European large-cap stocks, especially in Q1.


Trump / US

I have absolutely no idea where this is all headed. But one thing is certain: uncertainty. Especially regarding the future direction of the US government, uncertainty has increased significantly.

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Samse Group (ISIN FR0000060071) – A Hidden French Compounder that is as exciting as watching Paint dry ?

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

As in the past, due to the bad WordPress editor, I’ll post a summary here and attach the full write-up as PDF.

After teasing a new position in the Nabaltec “Post Mortem”, I proudly present the next (hopefully) super boring company for my boring portfolio.

SAMSE SA is a French company that distributes building materials to “professional” customers like contractors, craftsmen etc. It also has a smaller “Direct to consumer” DYI store segment, which represents around 20% of sales. Samse is active only in France and No. 2 after Saint Gobain, which, however is much bigger even only in this specific sector (2000 outlets vs. 350).

Here is an overview of relevant “KPIs” at a share price of 190 EUR (time of writing):

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Italmobiliare (ISIN IT0005253205) – Buying “Italy’s Finest” for only 50 Cents on the Euro ?

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

What better day to publish a post about an Italian company than Ferragosto, the Italian Public Holiday where virtually any Italian family is somewhere close to a beach and Italian offices only are staffed with the most junior person to take up the telefone in order to say: “No one here, please call next week/next month”.

With Italmobiliare, I fell deeply into a rabbit hole, which lead to a quite extensive analysis. Due to some problems with the WordPress editor, I wrote it with a different Editor and have attached the PDF with the full version. In the blog post I’ll focus on the executive summary, the Pro’s and Con’s and the return expectations. The rest of the gory details can be read in the attached PDF document.

Executive summary:

Italmobiliare (IM) is an Italian Holding company with a market cap of ~1 bn EUR that underwent 2 pivots in its 40 year history as a listed company. The first pivot, in the 1990s, from conglomerate to Cement (Italcementi) and then once again in 2017 after a 2 bn sale to Heidelberger into an Italy focused, “Quality-growth small/mid cap PE” style investment company.

What makes the company very attractive to me, is a very interesting portfolio (including at least two potential “Super Star” holdings), decent value creation, good strategy/transparency  and especially a 50% Discount to NAV

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All Swiss Shares Series Part 5 – Nr. 41 – 50

Another 10 randomly selected Swiss shares. This time, two share made it into the watch list.

41. WISeKey AG

WISekey is a 102 mn CHF market cap Cybersecurity firm that went public in 2016. The company made some headlines pre IPO as Kevin Spacey was one of the investors. The first quoted price has been 12 CHF/share, in the meantime, the stock lost -90%. The company investor presentation manages to have 27 pages without a single hard number.

The company claims to be in the midst of Blockchain, IOT and AI. However Sales have been shrinking and losses are at a level of 2x sales. “Pass”.

42. Banque Cantonal de Jura SA

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Just Eat Takeaway.com (JET) Update – “The attack of the 10 minute delivery services”

Intro/Background:

JustEat Takeaway.com (JET) is one of my riskier bets as I outlined in my initial post from January. In a nutshell, the thesis was that JET has reached a dominating position in running a food delivery market place in many countries (among them Germany, UK, Canada etc.), has got an extra kick from Covid-19 lock downs and will begin to make money soon, similar to their home market Netherlands. Within JET’s business, Germany clearly looked like the most promising market as it is a big and growing market and they are the only player left.

This is supported by the assumption that JET’s main competitors (Uber, Deliveroo, DoorDash) are now stock listed and need to stop burning money. The assumption was also, that despite offering own delivery as a feature, in the long run JET will manage to dominate the Market place business model which is more profitable than actually employing drivers.

Since then, the stock hasn’t done that well, despite having released very encouraging top line growth numbers which motivated me to even increase the position from 2% of the portfolio to 3% (at cost).

With today’s closing of the Grubhub deal I think it is worth trying to do a quick update.

What changed

New competitors – It’s getting crowded 

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EurONEXT NV ( ISIN NL0006294274) – Backwater Stock Exchange or “GARP” Brexit Winner ?

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

Official_Euronext_logo

Background:

My initial interest in Euronext came after reading this FT article in February which mentions that the Amsterdam Stock Exchange seems to be a big winner of Brexit, but that in the long run Paris could come out on top as most of the trading in European shares will move “on shore” to the continent.

What I found interesting is that Frankfurt doesn’t seem to be a big winner but that both, Amsterdam and Paris belong to stock listed Euronext NV Group. Personally, a lot of my own small cap investments are listed on Euronext , but so far I really thought that Euronext is more a collection of “back water” exchanges like Dublin. Lisbon or Brussels rather than a more serious competitor to LSE and Deutsche Börse.

Euronext the company

Euronext has a colorful history, among others they merged and de-merged with the NYSE. After going public in 2014, they have been rolling up smaller European stock exchanges, among them Dublin (2017) and Oslo (2019).

Their biggest move is yet to come: After the Merger of LSE and Refinitiv, Euronext agreed to buy Borsa Italiana for ~4,3 bn EUR, the transaction will be executed in the first half of 2021. After the transaction, Italy will be the biggest country by revenues for Euronext.

Multiple fundamental tailwinds

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Just EAT Takeaway.com – Just another roll-up or long term growth opportunity ?

Health Warning: This is not investment advise. PLEASE DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH !!!!!

Introduction

justeat

Just Eat Takeaway.com or “JET” is another of these stocks that popped up from different “high quality” sources. A few friends mentioned the stock, most recently Swen Lorenz featured JET (behind paywall). By coincidence I am also a relatively happy user of their service, especially since the lock downs started.

The company

A good starting point for an analysis is this write-up from a US based 2 bn USD hedgefund called “Catrock” which has invested ~30% of its NAV into JET and not surprisingly is very bullish. therefore I will only describe here what I find important.

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Siemens Energy AG Spin-OFF – ANother Interesting Member of the “Ugly duckling Spin-off Family” ?

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

At first a big “health warning”: My track record with Spin-offs is awful although I dedicated significant efforts into this area. Over the last years, I missed out on several good ones (Uniper, Trisura, Osram) and I unfortunately invested in a few bad ones (Cars.com, Metro). My best spin-off investment so far was Italgas.

Siemens Spin-off history

Siemens itself is an interesting case, as under (soon to be former) CEO Joe Kaeser, and even before, they are one of the few German companies that use spin-offs more or less frequently. Over the years, Siemens has spun off for instance Quimonda (bankrupt), Infineon (has recovered quite well), Osram (taken over by AMS) and Siemens-Gamesa (very volatile but strong performance lately). Overall I would say that on average the Siemens Spin-offs did very well despite being mostly “ugly ducks” at the time of spinning off. Siemens Healthineers in comparison was not an ugly duck (despite the stupid name) and that’s why they actually IPOed it.

Siemens Energy AG Spin-off

This is the latest spin-off from Siemens, spun-off on September 28th with a first price of around 22 EUR, a lot lower than initially expected. As we can see in the chart, the shares dropped at first but now recovered to the initial level in line with Siemens AG and the DAX:

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Panic Journal 6 – After the “Hammer”

At the time of writing, it seems that the worst is over at least for the developing world. Numbers of newly infected persons are shrinking and in the Epicenter, Wuhan, life slowly seems to open up again. Yes, the number of deaths is still rising but this is to be expected as there is at least a 10-14 day delay in deaths compared to new infections.

All in all, it looks that “the hammer” including lock downs seems to have worked for the time being. For me time to think about two areas:

  1. What did I learn in the last few weeks ?
  2. What should I focus on going forward ?

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Update Handelsbanken – HOLD

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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