Book review: “Great by Choice” – Jim Collins

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“Great by Choice” seems to be the most recent book (2011) from management “guru” Jim Collins. Similar to “Built to last” he focuses on companies that have achieved great success. However in “Great by Choice” he includes a certain twist: He looks at 8 pairs of competing companies which more or less had the same starting point, but where one of them became super successful and the other not.

He then tries to work out why the successful ones were successful. The pairs are as follows:

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Some links

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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

 

 

Travel series (5): Flight Centre – “Outsider” Company or off line Dinosaur ?

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This is part 2 of the Flight Centre analysis after the book review last week.

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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”.

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Some links

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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

Performance review Q1 2017 – Strategy update “Money Management”

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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%

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Travel series (4): Flight Centre Group – Book review “Family Village Tribe: The Evolution of Flight Centre”

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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.

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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.

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Topdanmark A/S – A “Cannibal” soon to be set on a dividend diet ?

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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:

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Book review: “A Blueprint for Better Banking: Svenska Handelsbanken and a proven model for post-crash banking “

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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:

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