Ten Years!

Twelve years ago, after many years working in back-office roles I had finally landed a dream role, as a Portfolio Manager in Stockholm. I was given a free mandate to invest globally with other fund managers, finally I had a role related to equity investing. Just two years later, I resigned, to move back into a back office role.

I had some very good reasons to resign. I wanted to move back to Hong Kong, not only because I loved the city but because there was a special someone, I loved even more than I loved the city. Ten years later as I’m writing this, she is on the sofa here next to me. At the time it was a big decision to leave, as said finally I had made it to the front-office, I was afraid of giving it up. But my gut feeling was telling me life in Hong Kong, instead of Sweden, could be even greater. My gut was right, no regets, these ten years have been amazing. My back-office role those then years ago in Hong Kong would not be investment related. So in that moment of resigning, I was inspired by some early investing bloggers. I wanted to hold on to the investing, somehow, this blog became that outlet.

Ten years ago I launched my blog and a month later my portfolio with the below post:

Early on I decided that this blog would be my journey to become a better investor. Evaluate myself, with high transparency towards you as readers. Back in those days (way before the now crazy Substack era) I was one of very few, who consisently posted my full portfolio. I even for many years made a post explaining every single portfolio change. As a side note, I got slightly less enthusiastic about that approach when I was contacted by a reader who had replicated my whole portfolio and was un-happy due to some execution risk. Everything has it’s pros and cons, but overall I really liked the accountability that came with being transparent with all you readers.

How has my starting portfolio performed?

So the avid reader (with a good memory) knows that I like to evaluate myself in different ways. A favorite of mine was at the end of the year see if all my portfolio changes added value or not (most years it did). So naturally I felt I then now have to ask myself, what if I just kept that very first portfolio I happened to have when the blog started. How would that portfolio have returned compared to my actually portfolio for these past ten years?

So I set out to quickly calculate that, after ten minutes I realized that it’s not going to be so quick of a task. Less than half of the initial holdings are today listed companies. Out of the starting 13 above, one got bought back by the company, four got bought out, one defaulted, one delisted and one stock is currently suspended. So I had to come up with a fair rule for what do I do when a company is bought out? I decided to equally distribute the cash from that company to the remain stocks in my portfolio. So my quick calculation turned in to a multi-hour exercise of re-balancing the portfolio at every event (luckily I have Bloomberg which made it possible to fairly easy include at least all dividends into the calculation).

A lot more could be said about the methodology to calculate the above. I’m not going to deep dive into this, it was just a fun excercise to see how did it go. As we can see there are a few heroes of the portfolio, BYD mainly, which by itself more than doubled the full portfolio. This is a combination of that BYD went up more than 7x in this timeframe but also as other stuff was acquired in 2019-2020, some of that money was recycled into BYD before the stock had gone up very much. NetEase has also done really well up 376% in 10 years. Overall it’s the larger companies that kept performing and while some of my smaller companies did well in the sense that they were acquired, that money needed to find new homes to keep compounding. A wrote a whole post long time ago about the Coffee can approach to investing and I think this is a good example of just that. In such a portfolio in the end only a few stocks will drive the whole return, the ending portfolio is basically a bet on BYD, NetEase and to some degree Trip (changed name from Ctrip).

My actual return then?

So the above portfolio did +165.5% over 10 years, including dividends not too bad I think. That compares with Hang Seng at meakly +24%, MSCI World, Ex-USA +80%, MSCI World +226% and finally the US monsters Nasdaq at +477%. As you know I’m focusing on Healthcare investing (on my new Substack) and the phase of sharing with all you readers how it’s going is not really a big part of my investing journey anymore. For curious people I do share sometimes on X.

At a 10 year celebration I will make an exception and show my full 10 year return:

This is a +255% return over these 10 years, which comes out to a CAGR of 13.5%, luckily better than my starting portfolio . The drawdown recently has been pretty brutal, but as my 10 year track-record shows, it’s no longer my first rodeo and I started investing in 2004, so I have really accumulated a number of rodeos by now. At least there are some benefits of approaching getting old.

As I nowadays focus on Healthcare investing, my approach has shifted since beginning of 2025, the above portfolio now consists of three buckets: 50% Healthcare related stocks, 40% Non-Healthcare and 10% Opportunistic. I will not bore you with the detailed breakdown of all portfolios but so far Healthcare is outperforming the other portfolios, further strengthening my thesis that I’m a decent Healthcare-sector investor.

Contemplating on these 10 years

It’s with some sense of acheivement I’m writing this blogpost. I remember when I started the blog, thinking, it will probably take me a good 10 years to prove if I’m a decently good investor or not. I had just come off 2 years evaluating other fund-managers and investing teams. Yes you could make a quite good educated guess after a 5 year track record, but to be statistically fairly confident you needed 10 years. Or otherwise deep down quite deeply into how their returns were generated, as in a 5 year track-record, hitting just one real big winner could create a great track record for those 5 years. Also you kind of want to see how someone performs through a cycle. The US market hasn’t really had a very deep bear-market, but we all had the Covid shock and later Europe and Hong Kong has performed real bad, the markets I was mostly allocated to. So I think I pass all my own tests, 10 year track-record, invested through a bull/bear/bull market cycle and came out alive with out-performance at the end. I’m satisified, but I know I could have done a bit better if this was my full time job. Now it’s evening and weekends basically and there hasn’t been enough time to really stay on top of all holdings.

A few things stand out:

• My call that the Electric Vehicle industry while be huge somewhere early 2020’s, this was not a consensus bet back in 2016. I wrote a lot about this, put my money where my mouth was and made quite a bit of money from it. Lesson learned would be that I actually missed the really large leg up when everyone piled into this theme, I had already sold and had no EV related stocks at all anymore. I basically missed the last double.
• I noticed that people don’t have the attention span to really remember who wrote what (I’m the same). So you become for them, the guy that pitched the stock they remember. For me a few stock pitches stand out for which I have been closely linked to: Greatview Aseptic, Dream International and above all else Modern Dental Group. It’s funny how over 10 years you look at so many companies, some you hold for a few years, and a rare few like Modern Dental become you become very closely related with. I’m quite proud that out of the many many troublesome frankly bad micro/small caps listed in Hong Kong, I managed to find maybe one of the top 20 such small caps to hold. Back in 2018 though, I hesitated if I should even invest at HK$1.2: “I have been somewhat torn if this is a good enough case to invest in or not. I do love a good turn-around (maybe I like them a bit too much). ” Everything is much easier with hindsight and I had no idea at the time what a strong company Modern Dental would become, but I’m proud I held on, it has not been easy and many of not most have doubted me.
• Sometimes you just get real lucky or unlucky. Lucky – Researching vaccine companies (Valneva) in the autumn of 2019. Unlucky – Your largest holding a Chinese payments company (Pax Global) get their warehouse raided by FBI – nothing ever came out of this raid by the stock never recovered and lost 50% on that day.
• More companies than you think get bought out, at least with the investmentstyle I have. It’s really the only new conclusion I draw from writing this post. As you saw from my original portfolio half got acquired. Some of my very best investments also got acquired, Swedish Match, L’occitane, Vinda and ZimVie, all stocks I held for a long time and wrote quite a bit about on this blog. It didn’t hit me until now how much of my returns have been generated from companies being acquired. Something I need to think a bit more on..

Contemplating on 2025

2025 was a strange year for me both personally and investing wise. My portfolio was up close to +40% at the mid-year mark and then everything started to go downhill. In my day job, around the same time as my portfolio peaked I had to start in a new role, basically to save me from being fired. Keeping my job was ideal from an income perspective, but really not ideal from an investing perspective. I have been real busy to get up and running in my new role. It’s been a real challenge the past 7-8 months to find time and energy for investing. This meant that my ambitions to keep this blog running and talking about the 40% Non-Healthcare ideas, which would fit here, just went out the window. Looking at my Post tab in WordPress there are a few meak attempts from my side to write something to share with you guys, they are still early drafts. There simply wasn’t time and even more so, I did not have the energy to write. Now I have got more comfortable in my role and there is energy again, but priority will still be on my Healthy Stock Picks and not this blog. So no promises this time, let’s see if I can squeek something new out. I have got very good feedback from friends and readers on that TINA for China post which is over a year old now, I’m happy I got that one out to you all, as it was quite spot on and I should have probably listened more to my own advice.

All-in-all, was a great but very challenging year, on multiple fronts. I’m looking forward to 2026 which seems to be more challenging in the markets, but I also feel there are so much more opportunities (finally), especially among small-caps, so much stuff is cheap again.

Contemplating on 2026

This year has continued as last ended, nothing is working, well barely nothing at least. In my portfolio and the stocks I have on my long watchlist, it’s feel already like we entered a bear market. The markets feels extremely flow driven and flows are chasing the AI valuechain and perhaps some small pockets like Japan/Korea. I’m not in those pockets, so it’s pretty horrendous, although on index level it doesn’t look that bad. Like I said it’s not my first rodeo and I try to do my best to zig-zag, but it is pretty brutal how things just sell-off with no mercy, even if it’s cheap already, it keeps getting cheaper.

And then AI..

I know, everyone needs to say their piece about AI. I guess what I want to say is, I don’t know really what AI means for blogs like this and my Healthy Stock Picks Substack. When I finally emerged from under the load of my new job, my friend pushed me to get an account with Claude. I have to say I’m really impressed. I have been working on building good prompts and for the first time properly learn how to incorporate AI in my investing process, it helps so much. Yes sometimes it hallucinates, and yes sometimes it does get stuff wrong, but mainly it short-cuts work that took me weeks, months to do in the past. Now it’s one evening with Claude to get there. I keep sharing the material I produce with a small group of friends, I don’t really know what to do with the material I produce. I find a lot of that material as interesting as my old blog posts that took me months to research. But you all have access to Claude yourself, so you don’t need me to send you “my AI-slop”, or do you? Somehow I do feel it’s relevant to share some of that material as I’m know able to draw much faster conclusions if an investment is worthwhile or not.

I’m playing with the idea to share very short pitches written by myself, focusing on key-points of the investment thesis. And then just attach Claude answers which backs up all my short statements with lengthy backgrounds. In this type of format I would be able to churn out a massive amount of material compared to in the past, but I don’t know if it would be valuable to others. I just know the Claude material I generate is very valuable to myself. What do you think?

Thank you all who followed me on this journey, maybe since halfway, maybe since Covid and for a few of you, since almost the very beginning!

Cheerio!