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Navel gazing Alert: How to improve my investment process by incorporating “Momentum”

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Management summary:

“Navel gazing” alert: This post doesn’t contain any actionable investment ideas but rather explores how I can enrich my own investment process in the future by incoprorating some measures of Stock price and fundamental momentum.

Excursion: My secret hobby

First I have to admit that for a few months now, I do have a secret hobby: I am watching on a regular basis a Wikifolio (Wikifolio is a German/Austrian platform where everyone can set up a “fund” and other investors can participate) from an Austrian trader with the name Richard “”Ritschy” Dobensberger.

Not only has he managed to attract 160 mn EUR in investments into his portfolio but he has averaged 33% CAGR over the last 13 years, resulting in an overall performance of around 4000% which is really really remarkable and puts him into the top of any trader I know.

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Some links 13/2025

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Rob Vinall has sent another “Postcard from Around the World”

Larry Swedrow shows (once again) that most active funds underperform their Benchmarks

Great article on the virtues of investing into “Controlled” companies

Interesting first part of an “Airport deep dive” series with many interesting details

Nice deep dive into UK’s Games Workshop from the Stoa Capital substack

Timely FT article on the foolishness of taking Private Equity IRRs seriously 

Edelweiss Capital with a deep dive into fraudulent Intercompany accounting (Pescanova & Wirecard)

Some links 08/2025

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If you have 2 hours to spare and want to know more about AI LLMs than 99,8% of your peers, then this video from Andrej Karpathy is what you should watch

Maynard Payton on Filtronic, one of the very few winners on the UK AIM Market

BYD shocked competitors with Super-duper fast charging some days ago. And it’s being rolled out in April.

The Private jet market is doing very well

Smoking Mariuana really seems to impact consumer behaviour. I wonder how that would interplay with Ozempic.

The Behind the Balancesheet Substack with a nice summary of a recent Value & growth conference in New York

The “Dividend anomaly” could be quite easily exploited

Quick update Thermador & Some thoughts on Defence stocks

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Thermador 2024 numbers

Thermador released 2024 numbers last Friday. The most positive part of the release is the fact that Thermador manages to put everything you need to know on two pages without any BS. The numbers were clearly not good, with sales down -13,5% in 2024 and profit down -23,3%:

On the positive side, Thermador seems to continue to look for acquisition targets:

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Some links 03/2025

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Ben Evan’s “State of AI” presentation is a must read

Despite lackluster performance, David Einhorn’s Q4 letter is worth reading

Annual letter time: Partners Fund 2024 letter, Rubicon Stockpicker 2024 letter, Compound Interest 2024 letter

An interesting new Subtack called “Building Things that last” has just launched with a few great posts

For me, the story of the week: Chinese LLM Deepseek seems to be (almost) on par with the OpenAI &Co at a much lower cost. Maybe it’s just Chinese propaganda, maybe it’s not.

A very detailed Nvidia short case including an (expert) assessment of Deepseek

The “Behind the Balance Sheet” Substack and Podcast are both worth the time

Some links 20/2024

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Clubbing or “the big night out” seems to be a thing of the past. On the other hand, Guiness has to be rationed in the UK due to sudden popularity with GenZ

Interesting FT “Big read” about Orsted, the Off Shore Wind pioneer (search result)

For now, the “Endowment Model” of investing mostly in Alternative Assets seems to be a losers game due to high fees

What a surprise – Retail Stock traders on Twitter on average are doing very poorly according to an analysis done by AI

Good “post mortem” analysis of UK Insurer DirectLine after the Aviva take-over offer

Sixt competitor Hertz has some dirty tricks up it’s sleeve when it comes to bond issuance (FT, Google search result)

Private Equity is going retail mainly because institutional investors seem to be tapped out

Some links 18/2024

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Alluvial Capital with an interesting Colombian “sum of the parts plus catalyst” Cement company

A great deep dive into the much improved technology of Desalination from Tomas Pueyo

Some good lessons from watching and commenting on markets for 37 years

A very nice article explaining the three main contributors to the current success of LLM Gen AI models

It’s always worth listening whenever Prof Damodaran is on a podcast. His (critial) post on “Sustainability is equally worth reading.

Great write-up on French research company Ipsos

Part 1 of a very promising deep dive into the issue that Private Market IRRs do not equal investment perfomance

Some links 17/2024

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Must read (for Oak barrel afficionados): Wintergem’s deep dive into TFF and the oak barrel market

Local Indian Whisky seems to become a thing in India

A very deep dive into HAL Trust in the latest East 72 Dynasty Trust investor letter

Air Street Capital’s “State of AI 2024 report” has been released

Some interesting charts why the current “American stocks are the only game in town” period might soon be over

John Hempton with a rare long pitch on Brambles, the Aussie Pallet maker

A deeper look into the problems brewing under the surface in the Private Equity industry

All Belgian Shares – The Grand Final

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As promised last time, this is the summary post for the “All Belgian Shares” series. If you click this link you will see all 10 posts as Blog search results.

In the end, I put 28 stocks onto my larger watchlist.

As my watch list got honestly too long and unproductive, I started to manage my watchlist more systematically so that I can hopefully prioritize things better in the future. The main feature of my new watchlist design are 2 main inputs:

  1. A Quality score between 0 (shitty) and 9 (perfect) based initially on a high level assessment of factors that I find relevant
  2. A rudimentary caclulated fair value and a resulting upside potential

In a later post, I will this explain a little bit more in depth, but here is the result for the 28 Belgian shares that I will continue to track in one way or the other:

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Performance review 6M 2024 – Comment: “How do you know if your horse is dead ?”

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In the first 6 months of 2024, the Value & Opportunity portfolio gained  +1,4% (including dividends, no taxes) against a gain of +2,2% for the Benchmark (Eurostoxx50 (25%), EuroStoxx small 200 (25%), DAX (30%), MDAX (20%), all TR indices).

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 the first 6M 2024:

Partners Fund TGV: +6,9%
Profitlich/Schmidlin: +5,4%
Squad European Convictions: 5,5%
Frankfurter Aktienfonds für Stiftungen: -0,9%
Squad Aguja Special Situation: +3,8%
Paladin One: +3,0%
Gehlen & Bräutigam: +4,3%

Performance review:

Some Performance reviews are more fun to write, some less so. This one is clearly in the second category.

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