Geoff Gannon has been writing a lot this week: The Danger of holding onto great stocks, why you should avoid the value investing crowd and his 4 favourite blogs
Seth Klarmann’s Baupost is holding a lot of Puerto Rico debt
John Kingham looks at five “high yielding” UK stocks
Eddy Elfewnbein’s high quality stock watchlist
David Rubinstein interviews Masayoshi Son (Softbank)
A good overview of the Internet economy in China
Some interesting thought on “Must happen” mean reversion
A friendly reader had mentioned Trisura as a potential Spin-off opportunity in the comments and the stockspinoffinvesting blog mentioned it a few days ago and linked to a Seeking Alpha write-up.
At first sight, Trisura indeed looks interesting:
This is from the listing prospectus:
Invest like Warren Buffett but don’t eat like him
Notes from the “Great Investors Best Ideas” conference
Notes from the Sohn San Francisco conference
Will Google become the next Apple ?
An interesting experiment: “Word mining” of management statements
Shopify: A great business or a “get rich quick scheme” like Herbalife ?
Perfomance 9M 2017:
In the first 9 months of 2017, the blog portfolio gained +18,1% +18,5% (including dividends, no taxes) against 15,1% for the Benchmark (Eurostoxx50 (Perf.Ind) (25%), Eurostoxx small 200 (25%), DAX (30%), MDAX (20%)). Since inception, the score is now +178,2% 179,1% vs. 95,1% for the benchmark. The full details (and graph) as always on the performance page. (adjustments for TGV Partners final 30.09. valuation)
In the third quarter, the portfolio underperformed the benchmark significantly (+1,8% vs. +5,33%). Several of my larger positions did not very well in this quarter.
Disclaimer: It might easily be that If I look back at this post in 10 years and that this marks the peak of the current Venture Capital boom but who knows ?
Let’s start with a quick reflection on how to distinguish Value Investing vs. Venture Capital:
What is Value Investing ?
There are many opinions on what Value Investing actually is. There is “Graham” or “Klarmann” style value investing where one tries to buy existing assets at a discount, or ” Buffett style” where one tries to buy great and “moaty” companies at a discount to future earnings. My personal interpretation is to buy good companies at decent prices (something like a GARP strategy) or misunderstood companies. What all those approaches have in common that one tries to protect the downside by getting a “discount” on some perceived value. With regard to portfolio management, full diversification is rather the exception. In its more extreme version, concentrated value investors concentrate on mostly making sure that they don’t have losers in their portfolio and transact very infrequently.
A very critical article on DaVita Healthcare
How Warren Buffett runs the pension plans of his companies
Whitney Tilson is closing his fund (because of “sustained underperformance”)
The UK Value investor explains why stocks high dividend yields can be dangerous (Stagecoach, Inmarsat)
Ben from Wertart likes DFS furniture
Long and detailed Reuters piece on the “Wild Wild West” nature of Bitcoin exchanges
Business / Background:
Northgate is a UK based company that specialises in what they call “flexible rental” of smaller delivery vans to small businesses. My main interest in Northgate is not that I am so bullish on the UK and this sector, but that this company is somehow similar at least to the GoGetta part of Silverchef and I was looking for a peer company in order to be able to compare some metrics.
On a stand-alone basis, Northgate looks cheap:
Market cap: 570 mn GBP
P/E: 9,3
P/B: 1,1
EV/EBITDA 3,7
Div. Yield 4,1%
A deep dive into the strange new world of initial Coin Offerings
Wexboy with a great round up of all listed stocks that have some relationship with Cryptocurrencies
Why machine learning investment strategies fail (so far)
Don’t miss: Today is the last day to sign up for the free “Venture Deals” online course.
It seems that shareholder activism is slowly coming to Japan
A very interesting attempt to value Teva
The interesting case of Home Capital shareholders rejecting a (second) capital injection from Berkshire
A few days ago, Ashmore issued their 2016/2017 annual numbers and annual report. Ashmore was my first Emerging Market investment three and a half years ago and I think it makes sense to check and update the investment case.
Performance so far was not exciting. Including dividends, I earned around 21,6% over those 3,5 years in GBP, in EUR around 12,7%. Compared to my overall portfolio performance of ~+48% in the same time period, Ashmore was clearly a underperformer.
This is how I justified the potential investment case back then:
Background:
Some of my readers might have noticed that starting in the last year I have become more interested in Bitcoin and Cryptocurrencies. Don’t worry, I will not invest gamble with them but I do think it is important to understand what is going on in this area as this could change many things especially within financial services. As this blog functions primarily as my own diary, I have decided to do a few posts about my own learnings so far.
Bitcoin explained (maybe wrongly) in 10 Points:
value and opportunity 