The usual ecclectic list of stock write-ups from Capital Employed
If you are a CFO and you want to raise money through a share placement, you better pay attention to the weather
A fantastic “Tour de Force” ride from Prof Damodaran across Chip companies and AI
The seven page memo, that resulted in a 105 mn seed funding round for Mistral.ai (without a product)
6M Portolio Update from the Augustusville blog
A short write-up on Fox Factory, a suspension specialist from Royce
And on we go. With this post, I have passed the 50% threshold, so I am very optimistic to finish this before year end. This time, two stocks qualified for the preliminary watch list. Let’s go:
136. Norbit
Norbit is a 305 mn EUR market cap company has three distinct segment of which “Oceans delivers tailored technology to global maritime markets, Connectivity provides wireless solutions for identification, monitoring and tracking, while PIR offers R&D services, proprietary products and contract manufacturing.”
The company IPOed in 2019, and contrary to the 2020 IPO vintages, the share price has done quite well:
Verdad thinks that systematically shorting one day options could generate Alpha
Chemical companies are facing big fines for PFaS/ Forever Chemicals in the US (Hello Bayer !!!)
Already a few weeks old, but Prof. Damodarans post on what makes banks risky and the sequel on how to value bank stocks ar both worth reading
Clarke Square Capital thinks that now is the time for Lastminute.com to shine
Marc Andreesen (not surprisingly) thinks that AI will save the world
Ben Thompson is a big fan of the new Apple Vision Pro
This has become a quite long and somehow rambling post. If you look for “actionable investment advice”, then you don’t need to read this.
Background: Handelsbankon on the blog since 2015
One of the great things of an Investment Blog/Journal is that one can easily revisit everything that one has written years ago when I want to look at a stock again.
Handelsbanken is a stock that I have covered quite often since 2015. Initially, I compared Handelsbanken to Deutsche Bank in 2015, claiming that Handelsbanken is a much better run “quality bank” compared to Deutsche Bank and that Deutsche Bank, despite the much cheaper valuation, most likely the worse investment. This is how Handelsbanken has performed against Deutsch Bank and the European Banking index.
Great stock write up collection from Capital Employed
A new study seems to show that correctly identified sin stocks (Alcohol, Tobacco, Gambling) have positive alpha
Swen Lorenz shares some experiences from an investor trip to Turkey
An interesting deep dive into LSE after the Refinitiv take over from Marathoner
A good intro into the economics of “Big Gaming”
How will “Uncle Carl” Icahn’s endgame look like for IEP after the Hindenburg “attack” ?
Despite the “advice” of many financial pundits, writing covered calls is destroying value in the mid- and longterm
With a small delay, a few thoughts on the “strategic review process” at Logistec, a stock I had written up and added to my portfolio two months ago.
Govro has already published an excellent post about the situation in his Wintergem Blog here. He estimates that a sale at ~9xEV EBITDA could result in an offer of CAD 76 per share. However, he points out that this is just the start of a process and it could well be that there will be no sale at the end, especially as due to the high interest rates, the infrastructure sector is not super hot at the moment.
The Logistec share price has increased from around 43 CAD per share before the announcement to around 60 CAD at the time of writing. Funnily enough, this is almost exactly half way between the “undisturbed price” and Govro’s sale price estimate.
Correcting a mistake: Extra Asset
Disclaimer: This is not investment advice. PLEASE DO YOU OWN RESEARCH !!!
Some days ago, I made the case for a significant increase in demand for insulation in Europe for the next several years. In this post, I want to dig a little bit deeper into the main listed players and which I find more interesting. In general, even only for the German speaking region there are many companies that offer insulation, among them very large, diversified groups such as BASF, Dow Chemical and St. Gobain.
However, the following listed companies are those who do the majority of sales in insulation to my knowledge:
Kingspan, Irleand/UK
Rockwool, Denmark
Recticel, Belgium
Steico, Germany
Sto SE, Germany
Sto, Rockwool and Recticel are already in my portfolio with relatively small weights.
Before jumping into the companies, I have compiled a table with a few KPIs that i find interesting. One quick coment upfront: As Recticel is undergoing a signifcant transformation, their numbers are curently not comparable.
Disclaimer: This is not Investment advice. PLEASE DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH !!
Summary:
If you would ask me about the most boring stock of my generally very boring portfolio, I would possibly name Schaffner Group. I had bought a first position back in 2021 during my “All Swiss Stocks” series.
However, I have never written a more detailed write-up despit my annual summaries (2021/2022 , 2022/2023), maybe becasue I always got bored when I started writing about it ? Over time I added to the position and after the most recent 6 months numbers, I decided to increase into a full position. Time to explain the investment case a little bit better.
And on we go, after a small break, with a fresh batch of 15 randomly selected Norwegian stocks. This time, the random number generator selected a wide variety of businesses compared to the ususal “Fsih & Ships”. 3 stocks made it onto the watch list, one of them had been in my portfolio in the past. Enjoy !!
121. HAV Group AS
HAV Group is a 32 mn EUR market cap supplier to the maritime industry. Looking at the website, they seem to focus on at least optically on “Green” technologies, for instance electric ships and hydrogen solutions.
That all sounds very good on paper and for 2021 has translated into decent profits, but 2022 looks very different, with declining sales and disappearing profits. Q4 2022 was especially bad with an EBIT margin of -16%.
Looking at the chart, we can see that the timing of the IPO in March 2021 seems to have been perfect….for those who were selling:
Disclaimer: As I am an investor and not a Building & Construction specialist, this post might contain a lot of wrong or even misleading information. All I can say is that I do this on a “best effort” basis. DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH !!!!
Time flies. Already more than 7 Months ago, I introduced my “Freedom insulation” basket. Since then I had pruned the basket, mainly because of the contraction in the construction industry and currently I only hold Rockwool (1,1%), Sto (1%) and Recticel (0,6%). Back then, the underlying case for insulation was a very high level one, this time I want to dig a little deeper and substantiate it if possible.
Regulatory background:
Just a few weeks ago, the EU Parlament passed a quite impactful law, basically requiring the “energetic renovation” (and insulation) of old buildings within the next 4-10 years. The most important part is that for each EU country, the worst 15% of buildings must be thoroughly renovated by 2027 (commercial) and 2030 (residential), with even stricter rules after another 3 years.
As this is Europe, the details of this law now need to be discussed with each and every member country and for sure, there will be excemtoptions and delays, but the direction is clear: There will be a strong push towards renovations which in turn will require a lot of insulation. Naturally, with the Green Party in charge, Germany has passed already some laws that require property owners to do something quickly, like for instance baning Oil and gas heating from 2024
What happened to insulation stocks since then ?
Interestingly, this hasn’t helped insulation stocks at all, as the stock charts below show. Over 1 year, insulation stocks significantly underperformed the broad construction index, since my post in September performance was on average “in line” (yellow is Steico):
value and opportunity 