Quick updates SFS Group & Jensen Group
SFS Group 2024 numbers
Portfolio company SFS published 2024 numbers last week. Intitially, the stock reacted very negatively, dropping ~-9% only to recover fully by the time of writing:
Quick update Thermador & Some thoughts on Defence stocks
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:
Some links 06/2025
Highly Recommended: Rob Vinall’s 2024 letter is out
Paul Singer is a very rare Podcast guest. So if he appears, do listen/watch. A true “living legend”.
Heat waves and droughts are really bad for GDP in the mid- to long term
Flyover Stocks with a great post on how capital cycles work (Examples Bourbon & Home building)
Maynard Payton with an interesting write-up of BIG Technologies, a UK based “fallen Angel” IPO
The new Mauboussin Paper “Probabilities and Payoffs” is worth reading
An interesting article on a busted Austrian Private Equity deal and the pitfalls of “adjusted EBITDA”
Quick updates: EVS Broadcast, Sixt and Amadeus Fire
EVS Broadcast
EVS Broadcast reported 2024 numbers this week. After raising their 2024 guidance 2 times during the year, they came out at the upper und of the projected range. The Highlight page speaks for itself:
Some links 05/2025
Recommended: Wexboy with his 2024 portfolio & performance review
A great video explaining the East 72 Dynasty portfolio with a lot of interesting “family owned” companies
Some deep thoughts from the Brooklyn Investor on the “Broken Markets” theme
Nat Bullard’s annual presentation is a must for anyone interested in the energy sector
An interesting analysis that shows that “real assets” were not good hedges against inflation following Covid
Fantastic post why you should never rely on Bullshxt Earnings errrr Adjusted EBITDA
Royce Funds Microcap 2024 review with some summaries of US microcaps
Collector’s Corner 2: Robertet SA
This is not investment advice. PLEASE DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH.
Finally, after more than 18 months, I found a second candidate for my “Collector’s Corner” bucket after Laurent Perrier. Just as a reminder, the purpose of this bucker is as follows:
So here is the management summary and the write-up (which is a little bit “thinner” than usual.
Management summary
Robertet, is a 175 years old, 1,8 bn EUR market cap French company, owned and run by the Maubert family in the 4th and 5th generation that is active in natural flavors and fragrances. Although much smaller than its larger peers, Robertet is the leading player in natural/organic ingredients which they source globally.
The company has grown EPS by >10% for the last 5,10 and 20 years. Although not cheap (~19x 2024 EPS), the stock is in my opinion nevertheless attractive as there seems to be a good fundamental tailwind and the business is very stable and diversified with decent margins. I therefore decided to add it to my “Collector’s Corner” bucket next to Laurent Perrier with a 2% allocation.
Some links 04/2025
Some deep thoughts on the relationship between material wealth and happiness
You can challenge any of Prof. Damodaran’s assumptions on Nvidia, but compared to the many clowns and scumbags that pose as stock analysts these days, his logic and level of transparency is just awesome. Well done Professor !!!
Nice wite-up on conglomerate Jardine Matheson from Emerging Value
Some interesting stats on UK take-over premiums from Klement on Investing
For anyone interested in the insurance industry, the Swiss Re Sigma reports are a great resaource
Interesting Sharescope article on small cap premium and a few UK Trust ideas
Philipe Luchesi with a new Video discussing Laurent Perrier (French, Youtube offers translation in subtitles)
Book rewiew: “Gambling Man – The Wild Ride of Japan’s Masayoshi Son”
Content:
This was clearly one of my “must read” books in 2024. The author, Lionel Barber, is the former editor of the financial times and as such clearly has access to people who might have otherwise not spoken to a more unknown journalists.
The book goes back to Masa-son’s very humble roots as part of the Korean minority in Japan which clearly was not an easy childhood. His father earned the first money by breeding pigs in their garden in a “slummy” area in their hometown. The father seems to have been quite an entrepreneurial character himself, moving into “loan sharhing” and then into Pachinko, low scale gambling game very popular in Japan. Similar to Masa later, his father used risky leverage and often risked it all to win. In any case, the family got decently rich with these gambling halls.
Some thoughts on DeepSeek- The Black Swan for MAG7 or something else ?
For various reasons, I was able to spend much more time on this topic since Sunday than I would usually have. On Sunday morning, the topic somehow picked my interested and I have been trying to understand as a Non-Expert what is going on here.
For full disclosure: I have no positions in any of the MAG7 stocks, but that might make me equally biased than someone who has mortgaged his family home to invest in NVDIA.
On Sunday Morning, I initially used mostly Twitter, but during the day this was overflooded with MAGA Crap. Twitter is still a good place at an early stage for “virally developing situations”, bit it gets washed with (AI written) turd pretty quickly.
The DeepSeek topic is interesting on many dimensions. Here are some facts (taken from Wikipedia, but confirmed by other sources):
Some links 03/2025
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
