System1 (or under its old name Braijuicer) is a good example for a stock where it didn’t pay off to hold if we look at the chart:
I had looked briefly at them when Ben from Wertart bought them in early 2016 but back then didn’t take the time understand what the company was all about. After the huge drop I decided to have a deeper lok at the company.
The business
Munich now has the second most “Bubbly” real estate market globally
Morgan Housel on endurance and long time horizons
Bill Ackman likes Starbucks and Dan Loeb goes activist on Campbell
Amazon seems to bite into Google’s ad monopoly
Some very smart thoughts on litigation finance and risk appetite
Greenwood Q3 2018 letter
David Einhorn had another miserable quarter
Must read: Rob Vinall’s latest letter (RV Capital 10th anniversary)
An interesting expirement: Trying to analyse the readability of annual reports
The Big Hack: How China “hacked” motherboards by inserting some extra chips
Great story on how difficult it is to break into the Rating oligopoly
Somehow, Oracle seems to struggle in the transition to the cloud
App only banks are becoming a thing
Must read (2): How (and when) 5G will effect us
DISCLAIMER
This is not investment advice. Please do your own research and don’t follow any anonymous bloggers.
Let’s continue with this nice “anti Buffett” stock from my post last week.
The people / founders
FitBit’s original founders from 2007, James Park and Eric Friedman are still on board.
Interestingly, although both ar only 41 years old, FitBit was the third company they founded together.
The other companies were Windup Labs, a photo sharing company they sold in 2005 and Epesi, a B2B software company that didn’t work out.
Performance 9M 2018:
In the first 6 months of 2018, the Value & Opportunity portfolio gained +3,38% (including dividends, no taxes) against -2,2% for the Benchmark (Eurostoxx50 (Perf.Ind) (25%), Eurostoxx small 200 (25%), DAX (30%), MDAX (20%)).
Some other funds that I follow have performed as follows in Q1 2018:
Partners Fund TGV: +6,95%
Profitlich/Schmidlin: -0,21%
Squad European Convictions +1,97%
Ennismore European Smaller Cos +2,16% (in EUR)
Frankfurter Aktienfonds für Stiftungen -4,42%
Evermore Global Value -1,59% (in USD)
Greiff Special Situation -1.91%
Squad Aguja Special Situation -3,86%
Paladin One +1,5%
Performance attribution:
The top 3 performers on a weighted basis were for 9M 2018 were:
The Follie Follie fraud case didn’t come totally unexpected
Overnight share price collapses In Hongkong seem to happen more often these days
Cryptomining company Bitmain is going public including some “special effect” accounting
Ben from Wertart with a good overview of his current positions
Must read: Howard Marks’ new memo “The Seven worst Words in the World”
Old School Value with 3 “boring” stocks (Brady, Robert Half, Yelp)
Good advise from Venture Investor Fred Wilson: Know what you are looking for
Watches again…..
Although I wrote a lot about Watch companies over the past few years (Swatch part 1, Swatch part 2, Hengdeli, Fossil part 1, Fossil part 2, Movado, Richemont), no investment came out of it. However I had a lot of fun researching these companies so it was time well spent.
When I initiated the series in 3 years ago, Smart Watches were a big thing and especially the Apple Watch was perceived to be the “Swiss Watch” killer, which, as we know now didn’t happen as they seem to coexist quite well.
Besides Smart Watches, Fitness Trackers were the “hot shit” and especially VC backed FitBit that IPOed in 2015 was taking oer the world.
This chart shows Fitbit against Fossil (blue) and Richemont (green) and we can clearly see who had staying power and who not:
Prof. Damodaran thinks Apple and Amazon are overvalued. Consequently, he sold Apple and is short Amazon.
Three reasonable priced UK stocks with some “special situation” aspects
A nice write-up on Dollarama
Why you shouldn’t follow (or even ignore) sell side analysts
An interesting overview on Emerging Markets
Scott Galloway on retail, Amazon and why “big Tech needs to be broken up”
Ben Horrowitz explains Blockchain very easily:
Personal experience 2007-2009
There are a lot of articles currently about the “Great Financial Crisis” which culminated exactly 10 years ago when Lehman Brothers collapsed on September 15th 2008. There is still a lot of discussion around who is to blame for this, however most of this is nonsense as Barry Ritholz nicely summarized here.
My personal story is relatively short but quite lucky: Due to my “day job” back then, I saw many early warning signs in 2007. Although I had no idea how deep the crisis would be, I got mostly out of the stock market by the end of the year 2007.
This was maybe my only successful timing action I ever managed to do with some success. I even made some decent money with shorting that I had just discovered back then and a was on track to positive performance in 2008 when I was caught in the mother of all short squeezes, the famous “Porsche Volkswagen corner” which cost me more than -10% portfolio performance.
Nevertheless especially the years following the crisis taught me some important lessons which I wanted to share:
My 10 lessons (hopefully) learned
Many gaming related companies look cheap
The “no jerks” rule seems to work pretty well in selecting investment managers
Ray Dalio is giving away his new book “Big Debt Crisis” for free on his website
Sports Directs founder Mike Ashley bashes his shareholders (see no jerk rule above)
Smart thoughts from Ben Thompson on the “Iphone franchise”
Buffett quote about businesses and inflation
Why being a Value Investor will often make you look stupid
value and opportunity 