Performance review 2024 – Comment “Extrapolate the past at your own peril”

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2024 overview
There is no way around it: 2024 was a in absolute terms AND relative terms really bad. The Value & Opportunity portfolio lost -2,5 % (including dividends, no taxes, AOC fund as of 30.09.2023) against +4,9% for the Benchmark (Eurostoxx50 (25%), Eurostoxx small 200 (25%), DAX (30%), MDAX (20%), all performance indices including Dividends). 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 2024:

Partners Fund TGV:  4,8%
Profitlich/Schmidlin: +9,0%

Over the 14 years from 12/31/2010 to 12/31/2024, the portfolio gained +387% against +168% for the Benchmark (before taxes). In CAGR numbers this translates into 12% p.a. for the portfolio vs. 7,3% p.a. for the Benchmark.  

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Some links 1/2025

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A very entertaining “future 10 year asset allocator” review from AQR’s Cliff Assness

Short seller Hindenburg once again swings out against Carvana

An interesting and inspiring story about a family that produces cymbals since 400 years

A decent list of 2025 top picks from UK investors/Bloggers

An interesting paper on how food demand seems to change with GLP-1 drug intake

“Big potato” is now controlling the US French fries market

A great post on what happened in the AI/LLM space in 2024

My 23 (+1) stocks for 2025

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Following an annual tradition since 2013, by the end of the year, I review my portfolio by writing/updating very short summaries for each individual position.  17 of the 23 positions from last year are still in the portfolio and I have added 6 new positions. That turnover has been mostly driven by reviews (Admiral, ABO Energy), or the price target had been reached (DEME) and by finding new ideas. A more comprehensive Performance review will follow in early January 2025.

A short user guide:
My preferred style of investing is a bottom up approach, focusing on 20-30 small/midcap stocks that in my opinion have a good return/risk profile over the next 3-5 (or more) years. Many of these stocks are not household names and are unlikely to make spectacular gains in any single year. Many of them look interesting only after the second or third glance and are rather boring, which is exactly what I am looking for. So if you are looking for a “Hot stock for 2025”, this post won’t help you much.

And always remember: THIS IS NOT INVESTMENT ADVICE. PLEASE DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH.

As last year, I have created a portfolio overview chart based on holding periods which I proudly present here:

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Some links 21/2024

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Highlight: If you read only one thing this week then Wintergem’s deep dive on Moats (and the apllication on Adyen) is a MUST READ

Richard Beddard with a nice check up on UK Tech company Rasperry Pi

The newest AI models seem to be capabable of lying to their supervisors

If you like non-nonsense, down to earth finance talk, this podcast episode from Todd Wennings Flyover Stock blog/podcast is great.

Some US Small cap ideas from Royce

The Dungeon Investing substack with a first look into Square Enix (Very good Substack for everything related to gaming)

DB_Silver_Fox Substack on Carl Zeiss Meditec

14th Anniversery of Value & Opportunity Blog

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Every year on December 15th, the blog celebrates another anniversary, because on that day in December 2010, the blog went live for the first time.

As always there will be a separate performance portfolio review in the beginning of January.  After a short break, I had to do a new “Panic Series” post due to the result of the US election.

With the rather “mixed” performance of my portfolio this year and the many headwinds, the motivation to write clearly has suffered a little bit, but having seen these situations before, of course I will continue to blog with the clear goal to become the longest running financial blog on the planet. In the subcategory of non-paywal financial blogs with a transparent investment portfolio, I would guess there are not many challengers.

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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 more Q3 Updates – Energiekontor, Fuchs, Eurokai, Hermle & Laurent Perrier

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Energiekontor

Energiekontor has been one of my worst performing stocks in 2024, the performance was much worse than the borader renewable peer group. To be honest, I am not sure why the stock performed so bad. On part of the explanation is clearly that the overall political shift to the righ (Trump, Germany etc.) might be bad for renewables, which explains the overall bad performance to some extent. It didn’t help either that they announced a 2024 profit warning some days ago.

However, they didn’t adjust the mid term guidance (2028) and it seems that the profit warning was clearly just a short term timing issue with a required approval of a purchaser for a large UK wind farm. So next year could look very nice especially for the developer segment.

Despite the political uncertainty, I still think that Energiekontor is one of the best bets in the sector. Here is a table I did some weeks ago showing that Energiekontor, among a European peer group, is both the cheapest and the least leveraged player:

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A few quick Q3 updates – EVS, Eurokai, Amadeus Fire, DCC, ATD & ABO Energy

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Readers know that I am a very slow investor, nevertheless some noteworthy news from the porfolio for Q3 in no particular order;

EVS Broadcast

Just a few days ago, EVS held their investor day, the presentation can be found here. Business performance has been very good, they predict now that they will reach the upper end of the revised target. They also announced a (small) share buy back program. ZThe investor presentation contains a lot of interesting information, especially about the competitive landscape and how they want to gain market share. Overall I think they are executing extremely well and management eem to have a clear gorwth path ahead of them. As this is a European small cap, the stock of course did exactly nothing. According to TIKR analysts expect 3,03 EUR EPS for 2024 but only 2,56 for 2025. Yes, 2025 is not an event year but I think that analysts might be too negative. I have been buying and it is now very close to a full position.

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Some links 19/2024

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The race is on to develop the perfect tires for EVs

The AI “revolution” needs a lot of Energy and it is not clear where that should come from

Great round-up of recent research on the “Low-vol strategy”

Looking at this research from KOI, assuming a 10% growth rate for more than a couple of years is really aggressive

A good summary of the insane Microstrategy story (so far)

As always, Ben Evan’s big annual presentation is worth looking into

Augustusville is “bottom-fishing in sick man’s land”

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

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