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
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
value and opportunity 