Tagesarchiv

 ECP | Luxemburg, 28.01.2021 The stock-market performance of insurers has been historically tightly linked to the evolution of corporate spreads. In case of economic stress, spreads increase as investors want to be remunerated for the increased risk of corporate defaults. This is bad news for insurers who hold large bond portfolios and are heavily invested in corporates in their quest for yield. So it is not as surprise that the European insurance sector underperformed during the pandemic. But hold on …

 Assenagon | München, 02.02.2021. Das Konzept Faktor-Investing ist – einmal verstanden – relativ intuitiv. Motiviert durch wissenschaftliche Ergebnisse lässt sich die Wertentwicklung von Aktien anhand von Faktoren wie beispielsweise Value erklären. Ein Ziel ist es, systematische Anlagestrategien zu konstruieren, welche eine Outperformance gegenüber der Benchmark generieren. Hierzu werden anhand ausgewählter Kennzahlen Portfolien gebildet, die zu den erwünschten Faktoren hohe Ausprägungen aufweisen und damit von der Benchmark abweichen.

 ECP | Luxemburg, 22.01.2021 In the Asia Pacific Petroleum Conference (APPEC) held in the 4th quarter of last year, an interesting theme came to fore on the long term outlook on the crude oil wherein the participant observed an equal split between the two camps; the ones who believe that the world has already passed the peak oil and the era of the oil market growth is already over versus the ones who see the peak oil in 2030 as mentioned …

 ECP | Luxemburg, 15.01.2021 Back in November, during our brain storming session we came across an interesting investment opportunity in a very challenged sector; shipping. The sector is favourite amongst the distressed value players due to its extremes in magnitude and duration of cyclicality, capital intensity and fragmentation. True to its nature the shipping sector does entice investors every now and then, but by the time analysts complete their due diligence and are done with writing their report, the bubble …

 ECP | Luxemburg, 08.01.2021 Just a couple of days into the new year, we already celebrated this week in Washington the premiere of a new event, called Insurrection Day under the motto : “How to embarrass the biggest Democracy in the World”. We believe this was a sad day not only for the US but also a sad day for all our democracies. “Today is a painful reminder that democracy is fragile.” were the words of president elect Joe Biden …

Degroof Petercam | Brüssel, 20.12.2020. Alexander Roose, CIO Fundamental Equity bei DPAM (Degroof Petercam Asset Management), analysiert in seinem Marktausblick für 2021 die Aussichten für den globalen Aktienmarkt im Umfeld von Corona-Pandemie, US-chinesischem Handelskrieg und  verschärfter Fokussierung auf ESG-Kriterien.

 ECP | Luxemburg, 20.11.2020 A lot is currently being written about the rotation from momentum/growth stocks into value stocks. To us, the extreme value underperformance compared to growth we have seen over the last years can be compared to a rubber band. The more it stretches, the heftier will be the reversal as the situation is more and more unsustainable. November has shown how stretched the rubber band has become during the Coivd-19 crisis. The trigger of a change in …

 ECP | Luxemburg, 27.11.2020 This week we thought of revisiting Friday Morning Coffee Nr. 59 — “The devil wears Prada” that we wrote in May 2019. Back then our musing came forth on the back of our investment into Prada. Just like any other investment case this was not an easy call given the then prevailing circumstances; Sino-China trade war at its peak with the potential for further escalations, talks of repositioning of Global supply chains, market pundits foreseeing death …

 ECP | Luxemburg, 13.11.2020 The beginning of this week has been marked by a violent rotation out of Big Tech and so-called Covid-19 winners into the cyclical and value names. This move was triggered by promising trial results from an experimental Covid-19 vaccine developed by BioNTech and Pfizer. European equities have also started to perform noticeably better than their US peers and continue to recover some lost ground in terms of negative performance year-to-date. Strategists from big investment banks were …

 ECP | Luxemburg, 06.11.2020 As I write this morning coffee on Thursday afternoon, the probability of a blue wave has substantially diminished. While it still looks plausible Biden will become the next President of the United States the Republicans may well keep the majority the of Senate. Markets were quick to adjust to this new scenario by reversing the blue wave trade as Big Tech stocks rallied, and healthcare rebounded.

 ECP | Luxemburg, 30.10.2020 Recently we came across a couple of articles formulating cases either “for” or “against” value investment. True to their style of financial journalism, authors bucketed the entire investable universe based on a few fundamental metrics and ran all sorts of academic analysis based on lowly valued deciles to put forth their respective arguments. But is this all there to value investment? Or Is this how value investors approach investing? We do not think so.

 ECP | Luxemburg, 23.10.2020 According to a study titled “Elections, stock market returns & your savings” by Prithy Serrao from SmartBe Wealth: Democratic presidents were on average better for the stock market than Republicans: 8.3% annualized return in Democratic Presidents compared to 3.6% with a Republican leader. Are we in for a Blue Wave in case of a Biden victory? Less protectionist sabre rattling, strong stimulus measures, and increased green energy spending would certainly help the economy and ultimately support the stock market. …

 ECP | Luxemburg, 16.10.2020 It is not a surprise that interest rates are at rock bottom levels. An already anaemic economic activity has been slowed down further by the pandemic pushing central banks to inject unseen amounts of liquidity into our financial systems. For the moment at least these monetary policies are not leading to inflation and hence to higher rates. This environment is not favourable for value investors as the traditional industries they are investing in are facing headwinds. Financials …

 ECP | Luxemburg, 09.10.2020 Big Tech has had a tremendous run since over the last years against the US broader market. The developed markets outside of the US, especially Europe, have been left behind partly due to the relatively low weight of technology stocks in the market. Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook and the parent company of Google, Alphabet represent 22% of the S&P 500, an unseen concentration on 5 companies. The winner takes it all argument where Big Tech is ruling …

 ECP | Luxemburg, 02.10.2020 It has now become a tradition for me to present the principles of value investing to students in Luxembourg, this year at the Luxembourg School of Business. The course is co-organized by the Luxembourg Value Investing Society ( LVIS ) and is taught by 2 university professors,  Jos van Bommel for finance and Thomas Kaspereit for accounting, and myself. One objective of the course is to confront the academic and the practitioner’s views on value investing. …