Some very good career advise for graduates
A really weird ICO story from FTAplhaville
Did Nike make the “marketing gangster move” of the decade with its Kapernik ad ?
A great in-depth view from Forbes into Amazon and Jeff Bezos
A good reminder: Don’t make (investment) decisions when you are tired
Another good reminder: Emerging Market stocks are really volatile
Want to see Elon Musk smoke a joint ? Watch this and other stuff here:
SIAS is an Italian motorway operator that I bought at the height of the “Euro crisis” in 2012 and sold 2 year later with a nice profit of more than 100% including a special dividend.
Looking at the long-term chart, selling in mid 2014 was not such a bad decision at least for the next 3 years (although in general my timing skills are clearly far below average):
It took more than 3 years to surpass this level but then interestingly the stock more than doubled within a few months.
Looking at the aggregated numbers we can see an interesting pattern:
A good overview of event driven investing
Some links related to current and upcoming Spin-offs
A good overview of current issues in the Turkish Banking sector
The UK Value Investor looks at SaaS company Sage Plc,
Uber is going vertical towards Mobility as a Service (MaaS)
Depending on where one reads, Waymo, Google’s Self driving unit is either a fantastic success or “people absolutely hate it”
Liqtech could be an interesting “punt” on changing regulation for the shipping industry
In my initial post for Dom Security, I lined out why the Commercial Lock business is very attractive in my opinion. As a result, most businesses enjoy nice margins.
Kaba, the Swiss company was always the number 3 with some distance to market leader Assa Abbloy and allegion.
However in 2015 Kaba finally managed to merge with he German family owned Dorma in order become a much larger and diversified Group. In theory Dorma was a great fit for Kaba as they were specializing more in building access systems which should compliment Kaba’s locking systems nicely.
Looking at the stock price, investors liked the merger until end of last year:
Has China’s tech bubble already exploded ?
Fred Wilson on the first mover (dis-)advantage
The “Chickenshit Club” seems to be a very interesting book as well as “Lying for Money”
The New Yorker has a great feature on Paul Singer (Elliott)
A very interesting and detailed portrait of TripAdvisor
What a surprise: Elon Musk “is excited to stay as CEO of a public listed company”
As I mentioned in the comments a few days ago, I sold my complete Metro position at around 12,30 EUR /share. Including a 0,70 EUR dividend, this translates into a -26,6% loss and is a new entry into my “flop 10” list.
So what went wrong ?
Looking back at my initial post, my original idea was to buy the “ugly” part of old Metro which was supposed to be Ceconomy. This was clearly influenced by missing out on Uniper when it spun off from E.On, which was a similar ugly duck but performed very well.
One observation that I made back then was the following:
Looking at the stock chart we can see that Metro didn’t create a lot of shareholder value over the last 20 years.
When the split actually happened, Ceconomy traded far above the level that I thought would be interesting:
FTAlphaville compares Turkey to Thailand and Malaysia in the 90s Asian crisis
The Canada Goose stock looks VERY expensive
Some good insights into short selling from Glenn Chan
Bill Gates recommends to read the book “Capitalism without Capital”
A deeper look into Alibaba’s “numbers salad”
Bronte’s John Hempton tires to understand why Bayer shareholders didn’t stick around after a wave of lawsuits seems to hit newly acquired Monsanto
Off topic: rest in Peace Aretha Franklin
Tesla / Elon Musk
Elon Musk’s “Tesla is somehow going private” Tweet has triggered a lot of comments and discussions (good coverage on FT Alphaville).
For me the main take-away of this story is two fold:
One the one hand, listed equity markets are not the best place to raise equity capital once you are listed. It is OK to raise equity once when you IPO but after that, a company should only pay dividends and buy back stock. Part of the reason that Tesla is shorted so much is the expectation that they will need to raise equity which clearly shows the dilemma of public equity markets these days. Personally, I do think we will see more “Softbank style” large private vehicles which will specialize in providing capital to growing companies and save them the troubles of public equity markets until the company is mature enough. Unfortunately this will lead to the shift of a large part of value creation away from public markets and out of the reach of many “Normal” investors.
Prof. Damodaran on the “Tesla going private” story
Interesting interview with the CEO of Spotify Daniel Ek
Junior Mining companies have been bad investments over the last 20 years
Maybe the loss aversion bias is less important than previously believed ?
GMO still likes emerging market stocks
How low can the Turkish Lira go ?
Some decent tips for aspiring fund managers
John Hemptan from Bronte likes small business accounting software company Xero
David Einhorn still has a very bad time (Greenlight Q2 report)
The power of indices: Example Siebert Financial
10 very smart insights from a Venture Capital veteran
Big City real estate markets seem to run out of steam
33 “hacks” from Ryan Holiday on how to be a happy & productive person
value and opportunity 