Category Archives: What we read

Some links 16/2025

A great deep dive into the messy situation at Vivendi with some fascinating details on French Corporate Governance

Very interesting FT Alphaville deep dive on highly secretive PC Gaming platform Valve/Steam

Clarke Square Capital pitch on Grupa Pracuj, a classified player from Poland

Partners Fund (formerly known as TGV Partners) with its 10 year anniversary letter to investors

Accountants might be safe for a while from being replaced by an LLM (Twitter thread)

An optimistic report on Spain as a country

The Private Equity industry keeps innovating: They now invented “Continuation vehicles Squared” that invest into….other Continuation Vehicles.

Some (deep) thoughts on the current AI Datacenter Capex boom

Some links 15/2025

Must read: The FT has a fantastic (free) article on the regulatory Shenanigans that Apollo, KKR & Co play with their Life Insurance operations

As an equity analyst competing against AI, the best strategy to stay relevant seems to be to look where little information is available on the web

The DB_Silver_Fox substack with a great write-up on Bossard from Switzerland

The “No deep dives” Substack with an interesting write-up of Belgian company Bekaert

A pretty comprehensive presentation from Drum Hill Partners why Private Investors might want to stay away from Private Equity & Co

Whenever Andrej Karpathy has something to say about AI, you should listen. Programming 3.0 is a great concept.: Slides, Youtube

Great write-up on how Booking.com became the behemoth it is right now

Some links 14/2025

Andrej Karpathy on the opportunities and dangers of the new AI Video generation tools

David Einhorn pitches Lanxess at the Sohn conference

BCG with an interesting report on investment opportunities in Climate Resilience & Adaptation

The Midyear Private Equity report from Bain shows how PE firms have been “liberated from exit options”

The “Patient Capital” Substack with a book review of “The Nvidia Way”

Richard Beddard with short reviews of a few UK contrarian stocks

Outside the US, Value Investing seems to be still working according to Morningstar

Some links 13/2025

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 12/2025

AI “Pioneer” Klarna paddles back on AI use for customer service

Highly recommended: Conversation between Nikolai Tengen and legendary investor Chris Hohn (TCI)

Wintergems has 3 new positions. I do like the Vintage year/Cohort approach a lot.

The “Wonder Stock” Substack has a great write-up on UK smallcap Kitwave

Arranging portfolio companies like players on a football tactic screen is a very nice idea

Robin’s Substack on Misitano & Stracuzzi, a potential “Mini Robertet” from Sicilly 

Behind the Balance Sheet with (among other stuff) a deep dive into the catastrophic Walgreen & Boots take-over

Some links 11/2025

The largest Battery company of the world, CATL, is going public in HongKong

The “Top 40 UK dividend stocks” list is a good starting point for dividend fans

A pretty pessimistic take on the future of Google’s search business from a former employee

Large language models are really hard to understand

For Offshore Wind farms, the so called “wake effect” can be quite relevant

Interesting article on Mytheresa’s CEO and their approach to online luxury shopping

Antti Ilmanen (AQR) with an interesting paper on return expectations

Some links 10/2025

After 60 years running Berkshire, Warren Buffett announced that he will retire by the end of the year.

Verdad thinks that European equities, especially small & micro caps still have potential

Sparkline Capital with a nice overview on how to cluster stocks with regard to tariff exposure

UK’s THG Group has achieved mastery in adjusting its “profit” numbers (FT, search for headline)

Despite all the hype, the ability of robots to “manipulate” real world objects is very limited and will stay so for some time to come (Good luck for those Tesla shareholders who believe in Proximus to save them)

Great interview with John Cleese (Monty Python) about the 50th anniversary of the “Holy Grail”.

Interesting article on BTG Pactual, the Brazilian Bank called “Goldman of the Tropics” (FT Search result)

Some links 09/2025

The Bain Private Equity Report and the corresponding material is a must read for anyone interested in the space (in short: The industry is undergoing a very difficult time)

An interesting overview of listed UK Infrastructure Trusts

KKR thinks that empathic leaders do better

NEDAP, a Dutch tech company looks kind of weird but interesting

A very sobbering look from Apollo into the impacts on tariffs on the US Economy

Thomas Pueyo on why Canada is so sparsely and unevenly populated

Klement on Investing explores why Germans are so bad at (stock) investing

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.

Read more

Some links 07/2025

The Wintergem Substack with a very interesting write-up on Canadian Business Jet Maker Bombardier

Behind the Balance Sheet with a great deep dive into the business of Finance/Investing Substacks

A very interesting article on the influence of Korean retail investors in the most volatile US securities

Lego’s profit margins are in decline (but still very high)

Richard Beddard looks at UK Smallcap Dotdigital

A good overview of the “Private Infrastructure” Asset Class from Larry Swedrow

A decent summary of the current “hangover in Alcohol stocks”

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