Tagesarchiv

 ECP | Luxemburg, 18.09.2020 What if we were to tell you that this large cap company operating in the cement industry has grown its revenue two and a half times in last five years and has EBITDA margins of +30 percent? Exactly, even we did not believe our senses at first. We are talking about Anhui Conch, a Chinese cement manufacturer. It is hard to digest a hyper growth cement manufacturer when we have grown accustomed to mature, low margin and …

 ECP | Luxemburg, 11.09.2020 We hear that several large asset managers are throwing the towel on value investing. One example is Nordea merging its Nordea European Value Fund into the Nordea European Stars Equity Fund. I have been co-manager of Nordea European Value Fund between 2002 and 2014 so I can state with a certain level of confidence I have some understanding of the underlying investment strategy and process of this Fund. I also understand the receiving fund targets large-cap …

 ECP | Luxemburg, 04.09.2020 “People calculate too much and think too little”- Charlie Munger (Vice Chair at Berkshire Hathaway). Our confession – When we look at a stock trading at 182x current year’s normalised earnings, our imagination hits its limits and we end up doing lots of calculations. In order to understand the exuberance around certain IT names, we thought of revisiting the concept of “Expectation Investing”. In a book published by Rappaport and Mauboussin in 2003, the authors suggest that investors should …

 ECP | Luxemburg, 28.08.2020 Referring to the telephonic conversation with the boss of a large US cruise line operator at the onset of Covid-19, the CEO of Tui (Anglo-German tours and travels operator) says “Shared pain is halved pain”. Fair enough, when the giants in the sector are bleeding then the entire value chain would bleed equally, if not more. But what if a company which had historically derived its income from a volatile segment of a sector has over …

 ECP | Luxemburg, 21.08.2020 One of the attractions of European equity markets is their valuation gap compared to the US. According to Bloomberg, S&P 500 currently trades at a forward price earnings ratio of 23.2 times versus only 19.2 times for the Europe Stoxx 600. The valuation gap between the US and the old Continent has increased over the last years and is at a record high. However I believe it would be a little too simplistic to reduce the “Why Europe” argumentation …

 ECP | Luxemburg, 14.08.2020 Think of an automotive supplier and the first thought that comes to mind is a “component pusher”. Given the relative small size of these players in comparison to global OEMs and the transactional nature of their relationships in this mature industry it is obvious to term them as price takers, which is partially true, especially if one compares the profitability of some of these players to that of OEMs.  Wilson Kia Onn Wong in his book …

 ECP | Luxemburg, 31.07.2020 Following from our thoughts and discussion in our Friday Morning Coffee Nr 106, wherein we presented our Quality-Value framework and discussed one of our investments, the Belgian diaper producer Ontex; today we thought of revisiting our rationale and putting it into perspective after the company published its quarterly earnings results. We show here the same chart that we presented back then, and point to the change in the trend of the Quality score since the beginning …

ECP | Luxemburg, 24.07.2020 I must admit that I felt a little nervous over the last weekend while following the EU summit. In the past, I have strongly argued that we should leave politics to the politicians and focus on finding and investing in good businesses. However this EU summit was of outmost importance for Europe. It was the moment for European leaders to stand up and show that the European Union is alive and well and that there is …

 ECP | Luxemburg, 26.06.2020 The current mood in the equity markets reminds us sometimes of the song by the Clash : “Should I stay or should I go now? If I go, there will be trouble. And if I stay it will be double. So come on and let me know …”. While still down 14% since the beginning of the year as of Wednesday this week, Stoxx 600 has rallied an impressive 28% since the through on March 18th. …

 ECP | Luxemburg, 19.06.2020 We have been writing in previous morning coffees about our investment in the Swedish confectionary producer Cloetta. Cloetta has a strong portfolio of leading local brands in confectionery, chocolate products, nuts, pastilles, chewing gum and pick & mix concepts. The company produced 106,000 tonnes of candy in 2019 – our favourite sin. While the main markets are in the Nordics and in the Netherlands, some brands like Läkerol and Sportlife are well-known across Europe.

 ECP | Luxemburg, 29.05.2020 It may have gone unnoticed with many investors: value has actually started to perform better than growth recently. In Europe, MSCI Europe Value showed almost double the performance of MSCI Europe Growth over the last 2 weeks, that is 9.03% against 4.6%. In the US, we see the same picture with Russell Value being up 9.4% against 4.2% for Russell Growth since the 15th of May. It is clear 2 weeks of better performance for value …

 ECP | Luxemburg, 22.05.2020 Value investing and Covid-19 crisis did not mix well. Value has indeed been underperforming growth going into the market correction this year, continued to underperform during the crisis and still underperformed in the subsequent rebound. This is summarized in the below graph from JPMorgan. Fortunately enough, investing is not about looking into the rear mirror. And here we remain convinced that the odds of an imminent rebound of value stocks are increasing.

 ECP | Luxemburg, 15.05.2020 As value investors, we continue to have a tough time in the stock markets. The underperformance of value stocks has reached new extremes and is now like the levels seen before the Internet bubble burst. A limited number of companies have taken the leadership and represent currently an unprecedent level of the stock market capitalization.

 ECP | Luxemburg, 08.05.2020 On the surface, market commentators may easily come to the conclusion that there is a growing gap between the real economy and the stock markets. The economic impact of the crisis is being felt more painfully day by day. Unemployment in the US is rising from 4% to 16% with more than 20 million jobs destroyed in April alone. IMF states that the global economic outlook has continued to worsen since mid-April and is now forecasting that developing …

 ECP | Luxemburg, 24.04.2020 We have been asked over the last days on how we exploit the current weakness in the oil price. For the ones believing in a swift oil price recovery, a simple and easily implementable trade is going long an oil ETF. We have two concerns with this strategy. First, as value investors we focus on earning power, namely the capacity of our investment to generate discretionary free cash flow. Unfortunately, a commodity does not generate cash flows …