Category Archives: Value Stocks

Performance review 9M 2024 – Comment: “How to train patience during periods of underperformance”

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In the first 9 months of 2024, the Value & Opportunity portfolio lost -0,4% (including dividends, no taxes) against a gain of +6,8% 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 9M 2024 (values taken from public websites, no guarantees for correctness):

Partners Fund TGV: +7,5%
Profitlich/Schmidlin: +9,6%
Squad European Convictions: 6,8%
Frankfurter Aktienfonds für Stiftungen: 1,8%
Squad Aguja Special Situation: +10,8%
Paladin One: -1,5%
Gehlen & Bräutigam: +5,4%

Performance review:

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

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Agfa Gevaert (ISIN BE0003755692) -An Ugly Duck with some Golden Eggs in its nest ?

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

Intro

Agfa-Gevaert was on my research list for some time now. Fellow blogger Undervalued Shares than triggered my renewed interest with their post from a few days ago and one of my best “Special situations” ideas ever was a Belgian company (Sapec).

I’ll try to summarize the part of the post that deals with Agfa:

  • Active Ownership, a relatively new but successful German activist fund (Stada) has build up a position (~14%] and board membership (actually the Chairman) in Agfa Gevaert, the traditional German-Belgian film / imaging company
  • Despite having some interesting assets, Agfa didn’t create shareholder value over a long time
  • opaque reporting and a 1 bn EUR pension liability made it unattractive to stock market investors
  • In 2020, Agfa managed to sell part of its Healthcare IT segment for 975 mn EUR
  • Initially, the stock went up to ~5 EUR based on the first info on the sale but hasn’t fully recovered yet

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All German Shares part 22 (Nr. 451-475)

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Another batch of 25 randomly selected German stocks. This time I identified 5 candidates for my watch list amongst them.

451. Biofrontera AG

BioFrontera is a 151 mn EUR market cap specialty pharma company in the field of dermatology (skin cancer). The company actually has a product in the market and shows decent grows, especially in Germany and the US. The company is still loss making in the first 9M 2019, but the loss narrowed significantly. The “Corona Crash” pushed the stock price back to before sales went up:

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FBD Holdings Plc- Welcome back to Ireland !!!

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Disclaimer: This is not investment advise. Please do your own research !!!

Background:

FBD is a local Irish Insurance company that I first wrote about in early 2015 when the stock look cheap. Luckily I didn’t invest back then as 7 months later FBD got already in trouble mainly due to under reserving plus another few skeletons in the closet. A month later, Prem Watsa came to the rescue with a slightly unusual deal structure.

What caught my eye now again (thanks to a friend mentioning the stock) is the relatively weak share price combined with super strong 2019 results and no bounce back from the Covid-19 crisis levels:

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All German Shares Part 13 (Nr. 226-250)

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Another week, another 25er batch of “fresh” German companies. Again, there is a lot of “Garbage” but also some interesting “watch” positions. One of the candidates is German Startups Group which, in the meantime made it into my portfolio. I publish the “All German stock” Series with a certain time lag and if time allows, I dive deeper into stocks that really interest me a lot. So It can happen that I decide to invest prior to actually publishing the respective post…

226. SAP AG 

With 147 bn EUR the most valuable listed German company, leader in enterprise software with a steady increase in valuation over the last years:

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Metro Bank Plc – Terminal decline or Deep Value opportunity ?

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Warning: This is not investment advice. The author recently had a very disappointing track record so you might want to stay away as far as possible from this stock. DO YOUR OWN research.

Some three and a half year ago I briefly looked at Metro Bank, then the much hyped “Apple of Banking” and I didn’t like it that much. My summary back then was as follows:

Fundamentally, I do think that at the current share prIce the stock is already very “richly” valued as I don’t see a sustainable business model to earn the required returns on equity in the long run.I see a large risk that Metro Bank is rather a “one-trick pony” which worked well once but most likely not a second time.

At some point in time in the future this could even turn out to be an interesting short opportunity when growth is slowing and defaults start catching up.

In the meantime a couple of things happened:

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My 20 Investments for 2020

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My “resident blog troll” might interpret this post as “The 20 Stocks to stay away from in 2020” due to the underwhelming 2019 performance, but these are the stocks that are in my blog portfolio in the beginning of 2020.  Every reader can do whatever he wants with that list, either ignore it, go short or whatever.

I do a brief recap of each investment case including a short outlook from a portfolio perspective.

The summaries of the previous years can be found here:

My 22(+1) Investments for 2019
My 21 investments for 2018
My 27 investments for 2017
My 27 investments for 2016
My 28 investments for 2015
My 24 investments for 2014
My 22 investments for 2013

1. Miko (4,1% weight)

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All German Shares – Part 11 (Nr. 176-200)

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New year, same series. This time the 25 stocks contain 5 watch list candidates. At 200 stocks I have managed now to cover already 25% of the universe.

176. Puma SE

Puma SE, the iconic German sportswear brand founded by the brother of Adi Dassler (Adidas) is a very interesting case. The now 10 bn EUR market company was one of the real hot growth stocks in the 90ies early 2000s, then nothing happened for a long time as we can see in the chart:

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