Good post from 25iq on how to value subscription based businesses
Don’t miss: Barry Ritholtz interviews Ed Thorp
By coincidence I also found this interview with Ed Thorp’s initial partner Jay Regan
Some thoughts on Mining stocks from Forager
What’s next for the Asset Management industry ?
Patience is a potentially big competitive advantage for investors
Vomiting (among others) is a big problem for Robo taxis
A few days ago, Amazon famously announced to take over Whole Foods Market for 42 USD per share (representing a premium of around 27%).
Markets enthusiastically welcomed this move from Amazon, with the Amazon share jumping almost 4% or ~13 bn USD, which coincidently was almost equal to the deal amount.
Whole Foods itself was “under siege” from activist investor Jana which had built up a 9% stake in the company. Just 2 days before the takeover, Whole Foods CEO called Jana “greedy bastards” indicating that he was not happy having such a shareholder.
An enthusiastic analysis of Trupanion (h/t valueinvestingworld)
A two part series on the decline of the American Mall: Part 1 & Part 2
Compagnie Lebon from France looks potentially interesting
Midyear review from Clarkstreet Value with some interesting Special Situations
Forager Funds likes Australian company CTI
Interesting thoughts on Google and monopoly power
Summer reading list from Market Folly
Perfomance 6M 2017:
In the first 6 months of 2017, the blog portfolio gained +16,0% (including dividends, no taxes) against 9,28% for the Benchmark (Eurostoxx50 (Perf.Ind) (25%), Eurostoxx small 200 (25%), DAX (30%), MDAX (20%)). Since inception, the score is now +174,6% vs. 89,4% for the benchmark. The full details (and graph) as always on the performance page.
Some other funds that I follow have performed as follows in 6M 2017:
Partners Fund TGV: +10,88%
Profitlich/Schmidlin: +6,04%
Squad European Convictions +17,65%
Squad Aguja +9,48%
Ennismore European Smaller Cos 1,87% (in EUR)
Frankfurter Aktienfonds für Stiftungen +10,24%
Evermore Global Value +2,22%
Greiff Special Situation +8,55%
A lot has happened over the last few weeks for my 4 largest special situation investments:
Actelion / Idorsia
The original Actelion idea was very simple: Buy an M&A target at a small discount which is relatively safe and get something (the Idorsia spin-off) extra which no one seemed to have noticed.
Although the case played out exactly as I thought and Idorsia even seems to be worth more than I assumed, I only made around +4% on it. Not bad for around 5 months but not great either.
Looking back I think I made 3 mistakes:
DISCLAIMER: THIS IS NOT INVESTMENT ADVICE. PLEASE DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH !!!!!
Management summary:
The battle for Whole Foods might just have started
Where are we in the Potash price cycle ?
Interesting feature about short sellor Andrew Left (Citron)
Tim Ferris Ted Talk on Stoicism
Why any Blockchain technology needs Governance, too .
Good post on four less known but very influential “Heroes of Investing”
One of the biggest and highest profile Spin-offs in Europe this year is clearly the separation of Swedish SCA (“Svenka Cellulosa Aktiebolget”) into an “integrated forest product group” which keeps the SCA name and a consumer product entity named “Essity”.
SCA communicated this already more than two years ago and starting this week, June 12th the spin-off is actually executed, with every SCA shareholder receiving one Essity share per SCA share.
This is the follow-up post on the intitial Tripadvisor post from last week.
So where is the upside ?
After “bashing” them in the first post, the question is: Is there an upside and if yes where ?
CEO & Capital management
With Steve Kaufer, the CEO, one of the founders is still on board. His salary is rather modest but he got plenty of options awarded in the previous years. According to Bloomberg, he received option in the original value of ~33 mn USD in 2014 to 2016. He owns shares in an amount of 17 mn USD, which is not huge but still not insignificant.
In his 2016 letter to the shareholders he writes the following:
Market folly has a great collection of pitches from the London Value Investor conference
A good summary why most investors these days hate banks
Wexboy with a very nice write-up on a company called Applegreen
The unstoppable rise of the QR code in China
Interesting thoughts about the carnage in retail stocks and a follow-up post
Wow, my blog has been included in the “50 Of The Best Investing Blogs On The Planet”
value and opportunity 