Don’t miss: Jeff Bezos’ 2016 letter to Amazon share holders
A great collection of business/investing book reviews from Abnormal Returns
An interesting write up on German “Amazon for animal feed” company Zooplus
Good idea: Write down everything what you have learned about investing in simple sentences
A good collection of articles about Blockchain technology
On the virtues of writing for investors
This is part 2 of the Flight Centre analysis after the book review last week.
The “old” business model
The Australian based company is a classic “travel agency”, both, running physical agencies as well as offering airline tickets and tours over web sites.
A traditional travel agency usually works like this: They offer flights from preferred airline partners and hotels or packages also mostly from certain partner companies. Traditionally you would go into a travel agency and ask if they can recommend you a destination, then you would be offered some colorful catalogues where they list the offered hotels (with prices mostly depending on the official “star system”) and then gladly sell you the “Bundle”.
Intelligent thoughts on second and third order effects of electrical / fully autonomous cars. However with regard to car insurance it seems there are some unexpected side effetcs of this trend.
The Brooklyn investor has a look at the Jamie Dimons letter to JPM shareholders
Horzon Kinetics with some interesting observation on Index ETFs
Alpha Vulture on Italien Real Estate Funds. By coincidence also Ben from Wertart covers two of those vehicles in more detail.
Why Softbank bought Fortress (with a lot of stuff about “alternative” asset managers)
A pretty wide and deep view on what matters with regard to Brexit
Perfomance Q1 2017:
In Q1 2017, the blog portfolio gained +9,03% (including dividends, no taxes) against 7,77% for the Benchmark (Eurostoxx50 (Perf.Ind) (25%), Eurostoxx small 200 (25%), DAX (30%), MDAX (20%)). Since inception, the score is now +156,8% vs. 74,7% 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 Q1 2017:
Partners Fund TGV: +10,88%
Profitlich/Schmidlin: +5,56%
Squad European Convictions +8,81%
Ennismore European Smaller Cos 2,04% (in EUR)
Frankfurter Aktienfonds für Stiftungen +5,06%
Evermore Global Value +7,03%
Greiff Special Situation +4,13%
Flight Centre, the Australian based travel company is a company which is on 2 to do lists of mine: The Australian list as well the travel series list. By chance I discovered that there is a book about Flight Centre. I decided to kick-off the analysis with this book review as part 1 of a Flight Centre analysis.
The book covers the complete story of Flight Centre and its founders from the start in 1973 until 2013 and was written by an “insider”, a former employee who worked as head of the UK operations.
David Einhorn wants to create a new share class for General Motors. Plus the unavoidable slide deck.
Sears seems to be Eddie Lampert’s Waterloo
LNG bunkering’s time still has yet to come
The “Global stockpicking” blog’s first year review
An interesting reply to John Hempton’s post “When to average down”
Good overview about the current state of the mechanical watch market
Topdanmark – The Danish Cannibal
Topdanmark, a local Danish Insurance company has been on my extended “to do” list for a long time for 2 reasons: It is the second most profitable European insurance company after Admiral (based on ROE) and as Charlie Munger would call it a “true Cannibal”.
Those are some selected numbers from Topdanmark over the last 18 years:
The author of the book is Nils Kröner, a German who among others worked as consultant at McKinsey, at Barclays and for AKO capital before he became professor.
The book has been written following the big financial crisis and starts with a review about what went wrong in general.
Then he introduces the “7 deadly sins of banking” that contributed in his opinion to the banking crisis which are:
Uber’s self driving cars don’t seem to make much progress
Deep thoughts on the Intel / Mobileye deal and value creation in different industries
Elon Musk’s recommened reading list (h/t marketfolly)
Fairfax 2016 letter and Markel 2016 letter to the shareholders
Prof. Damodaran revisits his (mostly broken) Valeant case
Popular stocks within stock forums perform really (really) badly
Disclaimer: This is not investment advice. please do your own research !!!
Stada is a company I had been looking at many times in the past. A business which in principle is quite good (Generics and OTC drugs) but the company was run by a long time CEO who acted as it was his own company without owning a single share. He paid himself huge salaries, employed his son in a non-sensical but highly paid job, the company afforded itself a huge corporate center and so on. As a result, the company created little to no shareholder value in the 10 years up to mid 2016. As a comparison, the 10 year return of Stada until 03/2016 was only around 1,8% p.a. compared to 7,5 % p.a. for the MSCI Europe health care index, a significant underperformance.
Then however something happened which is still very rare in Germany: A local activist investor (Active Ownership Capital) and some other funds acquired a significant stake in the company and pushed for change.
value and opportunity 