Admiral post mortem & Sto SE 6M results

Posted on by 7 comments

Admiral Post mortem:

A few weeks ago, after the 6M numbers, I sold out of Admiral, after holding it for ~10 years. I already had updated my thesis in 2022 where I “re-undwerwrote” the stock for 3 more years.

So why now selling it just after 2 years ? First, the stock price nicely recovered from 17,5 GBP per share 2 years ago to around 30 GBP when I sold after the earnings announcement. Secondly, it seems that Admiral is really not able to “copy&paste” its formula outside the UK.

Read more

A quick look into the Lineage Cold Storage IPO prospectus

Posted on by 2 comments

As mentioned in my STEF write-up, US Cold Storage company Lineage went public a few days ago and was able to do so quite successfully.

As IPO prospectuses often contain some quite interesting information, I wanted to quickly look through and extract what I find interesting. Especially on a hot day like today, reading a lot about cold storage is quite comforting 😉

Valuation

Let’s look at the new price point we got through the IPO. Unfortunately, Lineage Cold Storage is not yet available in TIKR, so let’s hae a quick look at comps “by hand”:

Read more

All Belgian Shares – The Grand Final

Posted on by 20 comments

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:

Read more

Private Equity Mini Series (1): My IRR is not your Performance

Posted on by 7 comments

These days, more and more offerings for Private Investors are popping up to participate in Private Equity, which until now was mostly exclusive for Institutional investors and very wealthy people. In Europe, the socalled ELTIF II format allows now fund companies to directly target individual investors from as low as a few thousand EUR.

Private Equity in my opinion has its place. The good Private Equity funds are indeed “value investors” that have a decent ability to identify undervalued assets. However, Private Equity Investing also is not directly comparable with investing into public markets.

In particular, any prospective investors should take any returns stated by PE funds with a grain of salt and I want to explain why these “PE IRRs” cannot be directly compared with Stock market performance. This is due to 2 main differences:

Critical point 1: IRR calculation – critical assumption: Reinvestment at the IRR is possible

Read more

Some links 13/2024

Posted on by One comment

TGV Partners 6M letter (Midwich, Fila)

Pernod Ricard is selling its Wine business and an interesting summary on how restaurants price their wine lists

Margins of Asset Managers continue to shrink due to high costs

Interesting and very bullish presentation from Coatue on the “Gen AI Super Cycle”

Very interesting post from Klement on Investing on the optimal size and discance to the coast of Offshore windfarms

Sweetstock investing with a write-up on an Australian Filling station operator called Viva Energy

Emerging Value with a quick look at Swatch Group

All Belgian Shares part 10 – Nr. 181-196

Posted on by 4 comments

This is the last batch of randomly selected Belgian stocks. As in the other “All Shares” series, there wil be a summary post where I will trim down the preliminary watch list to a more manageable short list. This time, 5 companies made it onto the preliminary watch list. So far I haven’t decided on a new country yet.

181. Reibel

This seems to be an almost zero worth shell of a bankrupt company. “Pass”.

182. Oxurion

This 1 mn EUR market cap Biotech company doesn’t look very convincing. “Pass”.

183. Tetrys

This 4 mn market cap company unfortunately has nothing to do with the famous Tetris game but is some kind of real estate development company. “Pass”.

184. Recticel

Read more

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

Posted on by 15 comments

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 fĂŒr Stiftungen: -0,9%
Squad Aguja Special Situation: +3,8%
Paladin One: +3,0%
Gehlen & BrÀutigam: +4,3%

Performance review:

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

Read more

STEF S.A. (ISIN FR0000064271) – An “Ice Cold” Quality Compounder at a “bonkers bargain” price

Posted on by 14 comments

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

As always with my more detailed writeups, I will focus on the general sections in the post and attach the full pdf for anyone interested in the details. And of course the Bonus Sound Track.

  1. Elevator pitch:

STEF SA is a pretty unique listed French company that runs a “temperature controlled” agrifood supply chain and logistics business across 8 European countries. Majority owned by its Directors and Employees (~72%) the company has compounded book value, earnings and dividends by 12% p.a. over the past 22 years with little or no impact from any of the big crises (GFC, Euro, Covid, Ukraine) that hit Europe in the meantime.

This business trades at an incredible low 8x trailing P/E which in my opinion, considering the track record, their growth opportunities and the “essential infrastructure” character is a “bonkers bargain”.

Some shorter term headwinds exist (interest rates, French politics, agrifood inflation), but in the mid- to long term the set.up for very decent shareholder return is excellent, with very limited fundamental downside, 

  1. Introduction:

I have looked superficially at STEF from time to time but for some reason, I never went deeper but kept it on my watch list. Only recently, when I scored my watchlist more systematically, STEF came out as pretty attractive. In addition, the current political tensions in France motivated me to dig deeper.

  1. The Company & The business

3.1. What Problem does STEF solve ?

STEF is active in “temperature controlled” storage and transport of food from the manufacturers to either wholesalers, retailers or restaurants. Many food items are perishable and the warmer the environment, the faster these items will go bad. In many cases, going bad can effect severe health problems for the ultimate end customer. STEF, with its triukcs and especially warehouses helps to keep food cool and fresh without incurring too high costs for this service.

Read more

All Belgian Shares part 9 – Nr. 161-180

Posted on by 2 comments

And on we go with another 20 randomly selected Belgian Stocks. This time 3 made it onto the preliminary watch list. One word on accessing the Expert MArket: So far it seems that none of the regular Brokers that I use offers access to the Expert MArket. From what I have seen, only a few Belgium based Brokers offer this. I would be interested if anyone has expereince trading the Expert market. Thank you !!!

161. Aliaxis (Expert Market)

This Expert Market stock trades quite regularly and, according to Euronext “is a global leader in advanced piping systems for building, infrastructure, industrial and agriculture applications.”

TIKR says the market cap is 2,7 bn EUR. They actually publish reports. 2023 was weaker than 2022, but the company is quite profitable and the valuation looks quite cheap based on these numbers with a single digit P/E:

Read more

Some links 12/2024

Posted on by Leave a comment

Very interesting article on non-bank “Private Credit” that fueled the recent Private Equity Boom and its structural issues

Joachim Klement with a very interesting statistic on PE funds and the success of “late” investments

Potentially big if true: SDK claims breakthrough in solid state battery technology (FT, search result)

Interesting opinion: The output of ChatGPT &Co is essentially BS

A fantastic post by Noahopinion on why so many “viral charts” are essentially BS, too (and what to look for)

John Kingham does a deep dive on Diageo as a potential Dividend Growth stock

M. Mauboussin on the rising concentration on the US stock market

« Older Entries Recent Entries »