Category: Portfolio update

Ten Years!

globalstockpicking 11 Comments

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!

2024 coming to an end

globalstockpicking 6 Comments

I hope you had some relaxing holidays and can look back at 2024 as a successful year! After a long radio silence from me during 2024 I’m back with a post. With so much great material on Substack nowadays (it really exploded compared to what was available back in 2016 when I started this) I spent quite a bit of time during 2024 pondering if I should keep this blog alive or not, and if yes, in what format. More on that later.

Firstly I want to go back to one of the few posts made during 2024 Year of the Dragon – HK Stock Picking. This was my call to invest in the Hong Kong market just as we entered the year of the dragon in Jan 2024. How did it go, was it a good call in general? Did the stocks I recommended perform well? The short answers to those two questions would be, yes and definitely yes.

I use the Hang Seng index as the representative for if Hong Kong was a good market to allocate money to. The index is up 18% year to date, but my blog post was a call to action when the HSI had fallen in January, so from my blog post date the Hang Seng is up a whopping 25%, not bad at all – that is in USD also, which is not bad compared to pesky EUR returns :). So how did the stocks I recommended back in January do then? Do I have any stock picking skills in Hong Kong? Well with a small sigh of relief, on average, they did actually do better.

Stocks recommended in January 2024 post

Some comments of these holdings

The first stock is also my last real stock picking post back in May this year, L’occitane which after a quite lengthy process was bought out at pretty good premium. I’m surprised we have not seen a re-listing of Sol de Janiero in the US yet, but then again peers like ELF have almost halved in valuation since then so maybe they are biding their time for a more hot IPO market. Although I sounded quite a lot of frustration at the time, them getting SdJ on the cheap etc, sure I still think that’s somewhat true but with some distance to the deal I’m very pleased with the work I did on this company and the very good outcome in a difficult market (this all happened before Hong Kong had it’s small rally). I was able to recycle some profits into other ideas which have lifted upwards in the second half of the year, contributing strongly to that I did well in 2024.

A big purpose of the post was to convince the in-experienced investor that there are different pockets of the Hong Kong stock market. Some which has nothing really to do with China or being controlled by Chinese. Euroeyes which was in that first category and H&H being in some type of middle category were the dogs, but even they were not major losses. I did own Euroeyes for some time and exited around 4.4 HKD and H&H I was close to buying but never pulled the trigger on. I think Euroeyes is an interesting business but the Chinese consumer is so down now and competition is actually rather high here in China for eye-clinics so I changed my view, not a bad business but not great either. I have found a much better case in the same sector (in Spain) thanks to a reader that gave me the idea. I will cover that in more detail on my new Healthy Stock Picks Substack during 2025.

Modern Dental is still my high conviction case, as such a 14% return when Hang Seng is up 25% it’s a clear disappointment. I can talk for weeks about MDG but will try to keep it very short here. For the new reader just head over to Healthystockpicks.com and I have a big deck there on the company. What I will say is that the company is still clearly struggling in the US, they are not able to get to local people to cooperate in selling their products from China/Vietnam. This seems to be what the market has focused on when the stock traded down from 5 to 4 HKD during the summer. On the positive side there is quite a bit and why it’s a high conviction holding still to me. Firstly they are killing it in Europe, clearly pulling away from the competition. The European market is still huge (aging population and all that) and even if MDG is now a clear market leader in Europe they are still at high single or low double digit percentages of market penetration, this easily has room to grow another double. Secondly I really like their acquisition in Thailand. The company has historically had a moderate amount of leverage (showing how they are not terrible cash hoarders like other HK small caps). But they slowed down the acquisitions so much after the “poor” purchase in the US that all that cash their business generates has evaporated that net debt situation. This acquisition adds to top and bottom line nicely at no cost to us equity holders, just a tiny bit of leverage which is just healthy – Bravo and the market so far doesn’t care – I have just kept adding.

JNBY is one of my proudest moments in my 12 years of HK stock picking. I had my own thesis since 2019, Chinese will become more “patriotic” in their shopping habits, I searched for years for the right company to express that view through. Really took my time this time and JNBY during 2023 emerged out of Covid as the perfect company to fit that thesis. Good management, great cash-flow generation, fantastic long term track record and a super-low valuation. I tried to bounce my idea with others, nobody really liked it enough to also buy shares. I went my own way, bought and added further when I was validated to be right fundamentally. The company has delivered fantastically, 17% div yield as of the date I posted the idea, but rather 20% div yield on my initial purchase price is just unreal. Most of the 85% gain is just through dividends and earnings growth, very little is multiple expansion. I have now started to reduce my position to a more normal sized position. The stock deserves to go to 25-30 HKD, but the HK market is fickle, best chance for that to happen is that the inclusion in the stock connect seems to have put a fire under the mainlander buyers. They are consistently increasing their holding in the company (you can track this on the HKEX webpage). I guess my only regret with JNBY was that I did not write it up fully, I talked about it a lot on Twitter, but I had done so much work on this one, that it did deserve its own full write-up. I still like it but with the underlying Chinese market being so extremely weak, I don’t have the same confidence the company can keep delivering outstanding figures.

Vitasoy – The second largest gainer of the bunch, here I did own it in the past, but stock price was a very very long falling knife. I felt so much pain and fundamentals kept deteriorating that I stop-lossed out of this stock unfortunately. For some time I was right but then I have been oh so wrong. It seems to be some ownership fight in the company which explains the dramatic turnaround in the stock price, which is not fully deserved as the company fundamentally is still doing quite poorly. So stock kind of went up for the wrong reasons.

CNOOC and Travelsky I think are two good examples that you shouldn’t be too afraid to buy China SOEs, you are in fact aligned with CCP here. And it seems CCP will also directly support the stock price much more for these types of companies compared to private owned ones. I owned CNOOC but sold way too early and TravelSky I never pulled the trigger on, both are high quality cheap companies. If just looking for HK/China exposure these are two excellent stocks.

So will this blog continue or not?

After much deliberation the answer is yes. 2024 was the year I made the decision to focus on Healthcare and my new Substack, although not very active yet, the format is set and it is now live. I spent the latter half of 2024 to read up on quite a bit of healthcare companies, this is a process that takes a lot of time. I knew that and the whole point of focusing on Healthcare was the journey to become really good at this sector. That’s long road to travel, which will hopefully be enjoyable but also means I don’t have tons of quality ideas as I’m still in the learning phase. Also I enjoy a lot of stuff which is not Healthcare related. Something of a way forward has been forming in my head over the Christmas holidays. I will basically run two portfolios, one non-healthcare and one healthcare only. The main focus will be on the healthcare portfolio but the other one will also be very much active. The non-healthcare one obviously does not fit the format of the Healthystockpicks.com page.

I’m not going to hold myself to any hard rules just yet but the idea is something like this for 2025:

40% of my assets in about 10 non-healthcare long term holdings – Some of these ideas I will share on this blog, given time constraints it will be much shorter write-ups than what I did in the past. Don’t expect too much though my focus is on healthcare so probably just a few posts in 2025.

50% of my assets in about 10 healthcare long term holdings – All these ideas will be covered on the Healthystockpicks.com substack and not mentioned here.

I will then track the performance of these two portfolios separately. This will be more of a hidden exercise as I’m done spending so much effort on sharing every buy/sell decision and performance reviews of my portfolio. Personally it will of course be interesting to see which one of the two performance best long term – what do you think?

The last 10% of my assets will go to shorter swing trades – I want to evaluate myself if this adds or detracts from my performance – Some of these ideals I will share on this blog, which will also fill out the frequency of posting nicely, as it otherwise will be a bit too silent here, just like 2024 has been.

So will I share how my 2024 went at all?

Yes, here it comes. I will cut my year a few days short as I’m posting this now, so as of close 27th of Dec I’m neck on neck with MSCI World in 2024 at 21% return in USD. I sound like a broken record saying this but I’m quite pleased with that since MSCI World is doing so well as the large tech stocks is lifting the whole index. As I don’t participate in those stocks at all I think I should be proud of my performance. My actual Benchmark is closer to MSCI World excluding USA and that index is up 3% on the year – just wow what a difference.

There is a lot to say about the year, overall it was a very stressful year for me. The Hang Seng gave hopes of revival and then quickly gave back a lot of it. Although I hit winners like JNBY and L’occitane I also had a lot of bag holdings, companies like Nagacorp, Essex Biotech and attempts to catch falling knifes like Nayuki has ended in disaster for the portfolio. There has also been lots of grief of missed opportunities, I sold bought Synektik and RaySearch (I have long write-ups on both) and these went on to make several hundred percent of gains after I sold. In the middle of all the chaos of gains and losses I had this tiny position which became a shining star in the portfolio. Back of my idea of bone graft material company OssDsign (still hold) I also invested in Swiss listed Kuros Bio. From my first purchase to last sale it became a ten bagger, in exactly 1 years time. That has never happened to me before. Companies like Paxman which sailed up as new high conviction holdings has also done really well, these big gains has spurred me on to keep digging in the Healthcare space, I know I’m on to something good here.

Finally my whole performance chart since this journey started in 2016. Repeating some numbers, 2024 YTD 21% return, that brings me to a CAGR of 13.5% since inception back in March 2016.

Quite a lot happened since I did my first performance review back in April 2016 Link:

Graph_20160415

Wish you and your loved ones a great 2025!

 

Summary 2023 & changes on the horizon

globalstockpicking 12 Comments

After two years with around zero returns (but a lot of volatility), like many others the GSP portfolio sprinted towards year end managed to eke out a return of +13% for 2023. This compares poorly to MSCI World at 25%, in-line with MSCI World ex USA and quite favorably versus Hang Seng at -14% (what an insane spread). I’m still quite far off my ATH which was set back in May 2021.

2023 Returns

Returns since blog start:

Thoughts about the past year

The start of 2023 was the middle/end of the massive Hong Kong stock rebound due to China reversing it’s Zero Covid policy and literally overnight removing all Covid restrictions. The bulls were out and it the big re-opening revenge spending was anticipated. I was fully loaded on HK stocks, having further increased my positioning in the 2022 autumn crash, using mainly my Swedish Match buyout proceeds. I knew I took some risk increasing my position so heavily to HK stocks, but the sell-off was just too brutal and quick, there had to be a bounce. Luckily for me it came and when it had run it’s course I reduced my HK positions again and have continuously over the year had as a rule for every increase in HK stocks I had to make an equivalent decrease in other HK stocks. This basically saved my year as Hong Kong continued it’s brutal slide after a bounce which only lasted until end of January.

Portfolio composition beginning and end of the year

The main reason Hong Kong is still such a significant weight is spelled Modern Dental Group (3600.HK), which is up an amazing 78% in 2023 in a market where the Hong Kong small cap index was -23%, just incredible. Due to the meteoric rise of ZimVie at the year end snap, it was only my second largest position but after some profit taking the last week in ZimVie, Modern Dental is back on top and remains my highest conviction idea.

2023 the year of bad portfolio calls

So if selling Hong Kong stocks (but keeping the MDG that bucked the trend) into the January rally was a master stroke a lot of other portfolio changes was rather the opposite. I prided myself in the past with how my portfolio changes added to my returns and so far almost every year my portfolio changes have been accreditive (something I evaluated quite thoroughly). If we disregard from the “HK moves”, 2023 was the first year I failed miserably at this, basically selling huge winners and adding to losers. Let’s have a look:

Synektik – I had done a full write-up on Synektik the Polish healthcare company in the past (company installing Da Vinci robots, servicing and production of other contrast fluids). My case was built on that the upside would come from the cardiotracer and as that did not materialize as I had hoped, I disregarded how well the rest of the company was doing and sold my shares at 35 PLN per share. Synektik today trades at 91 PLN per share.

GreatView – I could not take more pain in GreatView Aseptic, I company I held and covered closely for years when the majority shareholder sold their shares to Yili. Their major customer Mengniu got upset with the competitor having influence over the company. I almost bottom ticked my final sell at 1.65 HKD, there would have been plenty of opportunity to get out above 2 HKD if I just kept my cool. What Jardine Group did here I will never forget and I will never touch anything which is under their influence ever again. As a small side note, the Yili/Mengniu conflict seems to have been resolved with a share issuance to Mengniu.

RaySearch – I had spent considerable time researching this company (full write-up done). But the question was if there was trouble on the accounting side, I felt decently comfortable, until the new CFO (again) was fired from the company. I could not believe it and decided I lost my trust in the CEO, I sold all my shares (I had built this up to one of my largest holdings at the time). Again I more or less bottom ticked the stock for the whole year, selling at 57 SEK. The share trades today at 90 SEK. This one was the most bitter of all, due to the high conviction I had in the companies products (but not enough conviction on management). The market later choose to focus on the results, which was really good the rest of the year (after I sold) and stock marched steadily up from where I sold it.

Other noteworthy stocks

CNOOC – The exception from my “rule” of no increase of HK holdings, was CNOOC. This was a short term play on picking up two dividend payments in less than 4-5 months time. CNOOC paid out 0.75+0.59 HKD per share over the summer period. So I picked up shares end of April in anticipation of this for 12.3 HKD per share. With some luck the oil price went up, so not only did I get my dividend but also managed to sell my shares (in two tranches) at 12.8 HKD per share. Even in a shitty HK stock market sentiment you can find good trades. If one want’s oil exposure as a high dividend play, this is still one of the best ways globally to get that.

PAX Global – This has been one of my top holdings, a high conviction position that I fairly “suddenly” changed my mind about. First I reduced my position during the January bounce and still sold some shares into Feb and March. End of August I exited my position fully, I just felt that I had given the management the chance to further improve dividend payout ratio, but they didn’t really, at a time when it was really needed. On top of that I had this fear that due to trade wars, USA would go out and ban payment machines made in China. This is wild speculation on my side and rather a black swan event but I believe it could happen, in this market PAX would be down 50-60-70% on such a day. I couldn’t live with that tail risk as there were other safer ideas that I really liked. In a better environment for HK stocks with less geopolitical overhang, even if PAX management is not the best in terms of capital allocation I still think this is a very interesting company, go anywhere in the developed world and you bump into PAX payment machines, its pretty amazing.

L’Occitane – Someone on Twitter made me aware of how L’Occitane’s latest purchase Sol de Janeiro was performing really well. Since I followed this stock for years it was quite easy for me to pick up the threads and just read about on the SdJ brand, which was new to me. To more I read and listened to influencers etc, I realized they had striked gold with SdJ. I bought a medium size position just before the market started to reprice the stock on a rumour of a buy out from the majority shareholder. Long story short, a really strange turn of events happened – again! Kind of a theme in stocks I’m in unfortunately, so the deal was on the table and then the majority owner turned around and changed his mind. I thought the buyout made ton of sense, apparently he didn’t. I would have liked to book a win in a tough market, instead I get a chance to own a company with a really fast growing product. I tried to benchmark how popular SdJ is on social media etc, to me it looks like it’s hitting very high basically among top 10-15 cosmetics brands worldwide. I expect monster sales from SdJ in the next report and I hope the majority owner regrets not buying out the company on the cheap.

Marimekko – In my rotation away from HK I have tried to find new good ideas. The one that worked out so far and I still believe in long term is Finnish designer brand Marimekko. I think this is a typical example where someone like me, with a Nordic background living in Asia can spot something before most people do. I believe Marimekko as a niche brand has a very strong market position among the small group of people that are drawn to their type of design. The brand is extremely popular in Japan and trying to replicate this in the rest of Asia. They are doing clever cooperation and cross-overs with larger brands, most recently Uniqlo. It’s always hard to guess fashion trends and Marimekko is not a super cheap stock here but I do think they will succeed decently well at minimum with their Asia expansion. So far I’m up some 30% on my position so market also seems to agree. What I like with these smaller fashion stocks is that you have kind of an imbedded call option if the brand really hits a craze. For example Swedish company Fenix Outdoor did such a journey 10-15 years ago with their Fjällräven backpacks. This was a brand we Swedes knew since we grew up, but they took that heritage and managed to push the brand worldwide and again especially in Asia. Marimekko has a similar strong brand for Finnish people but the brand is almost unknown outside Finland. If Marimekko manages half of what Fjällräven did I will do really well.

Thought’s about this blog and it’s future

For the long time reader, one would have noticed how the pace of writing has decreased the past few years. This has partly been due to not fully finding the same motivation to write but also some health problems, which now are finally fixed! In 2023 I only did 5 posts, a record low! On the other hand the last two stock pitches has turned out really really well (so far). I have spent quite a lot of time thinking about how and in what way I should continue this journey.

The blog has been a bit unusual in the sense that I have given very high transparency on my positioning and trades done. For a few years you could even search and see each trade done in my portfolio through a small database on a specific tab. The purpose of me starting this blog, was to evaluate if I could beat index investing, have fun and hopefully learn a lot along the way. The blog kept me honest and accountable for what I did. I also had to do the work properly as I could not post a semi finished thought or stock idea, I needed to cover all bases. This has been incredibly rewarding for myself. I look back at my posts from my first few years and feel I developed a lot. I had good intentions back then and I think I put good structures in place. I also got a few big things right, the call on EVs 2016 was great but I did not really have the experience to capitalize fully on it. Avoiding traps and really doing the work on a company was not there back in 2016. That’s something I’m confident I can do now, if I just have the time. Buying into ZimVie late 2022 around 8-9 USD getting a small quick gain and then getting hit with a -40% day, that’s not something I would have had the confidence to handle well 2016. Today I can keep my cool, it’s not my first rodeo losing 40% on a day in a stock. I can think it through rationally and decide. As in this case I decided I’m right and the market is wrong and I will double down at 6 USD per share. I recently took my first profit at 18 USD per share in ZimVie, this decision alone saved my year up 13% instead of another year close to flat returns.

Basically I have fulfilled the purposes I set out back in 2016, now close to 8 years later I’m a significantly better investor and although I invested close to half of my money on the Hong Kong exchange, I have beat the MSCI World (although barely). I have crushed the Hang Seng Index, or just World stocks ex USA for that matter. Ok enough of bragging, I’m still quite unsatisfied with my returns, as I know it could have been so much better with less focus on Hong Kong. So with this in mind it’s time for something new and different. I’m not sure if it will sadden you or not but I will not do anymore portfolio reviews. No more posting of all my holdings. The focus will shift to just discussing ideas, like thematic stuff I posted in the past and specific stock pitches of course. In what format I would do that I have not fully decided, but it will most likely not be in the shape of only as GlobalStockPicking anymore. This blog has been here to document my investment journey and my full portfolio, a fresh start will probably be better for a new format. I will take 2024 to set out a new path and let’s see what I come up with in the future. Stay tuned 🙂

Summary 2022

globalstockpicking 15 Comments

This has been one of the most eventful years since I started investing, I would say only 2008 tops it for me. War in Ukraine, crazy inflation, huge rate hikes, collapsing currencies and China who locked in their population to keep dynamic zero. And with all these events happening, my return for the year is anything else than spectacular – a meager -3.5% (but great vs MSCI World at -18.3%). Last year I dodged being down with a slim margin, but this year, unfortunately, became my first down-year since the blog started. I’m actually surprised I fared as well as I did given I was down 20% in October but with the strong Hang Seng rebound I was back in the game by December. One can try to be a stock picker like me, but in the end Beta matters a lot for your performance. Being allocated mostly to European and Chinese stocks I’m proud how much I out-performed these markets both this year and previous years (since the blog started MSCI World Excluding USA is up 17% and I’m up 123%). At the same time it has been such a big mistake to be so underweight USA previously. 2022 was the first year in a long time where Hang Seng did actually not perform worse than MSCI World, so finally I did not fight a headwind and as such I was back to printing alpha!

So without further ado here are the 2022 results (as always results in USD)

The share with holding period less than 1 year where bought during 2022 (best purchase Vitasoy, worst purchase Anicom).

Best stocks in 2022 – PAX Global and Vinda

Worst stocks in 2022 – Modern Dental & Greatview Aseptic

Instead of making a massive comment about these stocks here I will do a separate write-up of these four holdings, this also ties into my topic below about exposure to Chinese stocks – to be continued!

A number of holdings were sold during the year:

Overall the holdings I sold gave a positive contribution to my 2022 performance of about 3.5%. (press to read more)

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Portfolio updates, new holding and other thoughts

globalstockpicking 8 Comments

After a fairly long period of lower activity both on the blog and holding wise, in these past weeks I have sprung to action to make some changes. Others like Swedish Match were force upon me, now to be fully bought out by Philip Morris. This is a quite a dramatic change to the portfolio and Swedish Match leaves both very big shoes to fill and a lot of cash to deploy. I also have a new holding to reveal, so let’s go through the changes. But first let’s start with some brief thoughts about the market and all craziness that happened during this year.

Press to read more..

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Mid-year portfolio review 2022

globalstockpicking 8 Comments

It’s been difficult six months to try to find somewhere to hide, I have taken some hits but managed to navigate the downturn decently well.

My portfolio detracted -11% in the first half of 2022 vs -20% for my main benchmark MSCI World Total Return, both denominated in USD. Never fun to be down, but after a very weak 2021 I’m of course pleased to finally stay ahead of the index. I have talked a lot about the US market and the USD in the past. Being underweight the US market has for a very long time been a big mistake. This is probably the first half year in a long time when its been positive. The USD itself feels like one of the main macro factors to mention for this period as many compare their returns in their local currencies, which of course comes out favorably if one compares returns in a currency that lost a lot to the dollar. The USD is just insanely strong right now, this has been a big detractor for some of my investments denominated in Swedish Krona, Polish Zloty and Euro.

Returns for first half 2022

Below is the returns for my holdings during 2022 and the ending weights (not including dividends). For example Swedish Match has been a larger position but has been sold down over the past months and Modern Dental has been increased after it already fell. My position sizing and buying/selling has had a major positive contribution to the outcome.

Returns since inception

Quick comment on each holding

There is a lot to say about this half year in terms of Macro etc, but I will try to keep it as brief as possible with some thoughts on all my holdings. I hate to be so non-humble but my “everything is a bubble post” from January this year was timed almost perfectly for the start of the downturn. Ok bragging over, press more and read all thoughts on my holdings:

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My watch outperformed my portfolio in 2021

globalstockpicking 20 Comments

Happy New Year!

There is no beating around the bush on this one, 2021 unfortunately was a lost year for the GSP portfolio. I bought a watch in mid 2021, it has already appreciated with roughly 10%, easily beating my 2021 performance of 3% return. That a watch can out-perform my portfolio is a pretty humbling experience but also nicely summarizes how upside down the world has been in later parts of 2020 and 2021. I have very mixed feelings about my 3% return for the year. I’m proud of how I covered stocks nobody else looked at, for example Modern Dental which is up +286% this year and I took profits when it was up 600% on the year. It’s pretty head-scratching then to have achieved such home runs and only be up 3% overall. The explanation is of course that broad parts of my (China/Hong Kong related) portfolio has just been hammered. So I will spend at least a bit of time harping about how incredible the spread is between Hong Kong and USA listed stocks in 2021. As you can see in the graph below, MSCI World excluding USA is on a total different trajectory. Since I barely invest in US listed companies I look like a terrible investor not because of stock picking, but because I have not been allocating to US stocks – rough! I do have exposure to other countries like Sweden/Finland/Poland, but even they failed me this year except one bright spot – Irisity. There I can’t blame having bad Beta exposure, I just didn’t pick the right stocks.

+

Given the low correlation (43%) to MSCI World is it still fair to use this as my benchmark? For 2020 that correlation was 87%.

Portfolio changes

Some highlight below in terms of good & bad decisions for the portfolio in 2021

The mistakes

AK Medical

I had initially bought the stock at 4.7 HKD in 2019 and quickly sold out around the 9 HKD level as the stock surged. The company continued to post great results and with multiple expansion on top of that it peaked at 26 HKD. The stock after that started a major down move due to fears of the changes in Chinas central purchasing of medical equipment and devices. I tried to look into the topic and as I understood it it would mostly be the distributors taking the hit and not AK Medical. I still believed in the long term story of aging population with higher disposable income, there will be a huge need for knee and hip operations in the coming 10 years in China. On top of that China is getting more nationalistic, surely they want the market leading local player to have a pole position here? I started the year by taking a position again in AK Medical at 14,7 HKD and a few months later doubled my position at 9.7 HKD. How the central purchasing actually pans out is still unknown, but for now it seems the market has agreed upon that it will be brutal. The stock ended the year at 6.6 HKD, -46% from my average purchase price. I’m slightly shell shocked by this move down, the market is basically saying that nobody will make serious money on hip and knee replacements in China, although China is one of the worlds largest markets. I can’t really believe that will be the case but the market doesn’t really agree with me. In my view AK Medical has good enough products to even shift focus to selling their devices abroad, which they already do in smaller scale. I will stubbornly keep this holding for now but not add until I see some proof of where this is heading. Market has already priced in a disaster, so I will only sell on proof of disaster.

Valneva

It was a pretty lucky stroke to research vaccine producers in 2019, 3 months before Covid started. Given that I did so, one might say I should have bought Moderna, which I never did. I am very happy though that I did buy Valneva and what a ride it was. I first purchased the stock at the very end of 2019 at 2.57 EUR, I then sold in Feb 2020 at 3.4 EUR (this was all still non-covid related). In May 2020 they announced their partnership with Pfizer for Lyme diseases, I also had a small hope that they could somehow get involved in Covid vaccine production. So I took a position again, unfortunately smaller than my original position at 3.98 EUR. I rode this and sold this at an average of some 14 EUR in February 2021. Given how Covid has developed, this was like the other vaccine makers something to hold on to, its now trading at 19 EUR per share (very volatile in the past days). It felt good when I sold but it would have been a good portfolio hedge to keep.

Alibaba

Another disaster decision was trying to buy the dip in Alibaba. I mean its not really even my style to invest in large caps, I have concluded many times I have no edge in these large cap stocks. So I feel double the fool when I dip my toe into one of these mega-caps and manage to catch the largest wealth destructor ever in a single year. I bought shares in May at 214 USD and increased my position in late September at 147 USD. Stock ended the year at 119 USD.

The right moves

Modern Dental Group

My shining star investment in 2021 which I already mentioned, was ironically on the Hong Kong exchange. In this weak market find a winner makes it so much more extreme. I sold most of my Modern Dental in the bottom of the Covid crash 2020 at 1.14 HKD. The reason was because I realized that dental clinics would be shut down and indeed they were. I kept a small position because I still believed in the company long term. As soon as the positive profit alert came showing that the business had rebounded I re-entered with all shares that I sold at 1.84 HKD. That turned out to be fantastic timing as the stock just sky-rocketed basically from that day onwards. I took some profits at 5.2 HKD as the stock grew into one of my largest positions and then cut again at 9.4 HKD as it again grew to one of my largest positions. Around these levels I felt the stock had gotten ahead of itself just momentum speculators pushing it past fair value. Today it’s trading at 5.54 HKD and business seems to continue to perform very well. I do think I found a potential gem to hold in the portfolio for the long term here. The stock is just barely up from its IPO price in 2015, revenues have doubled and profits more than tripled since then. It is still not an expensive stock and just today I actually added a little bit.

Essex Biotech

This was a serious laggard in the market early this year and I wrote a blog post in February 2021: Essex Biotech – Why I am bullish. I increased my position at 3.95 HKD. The stock then went on to almost double from there on back of good results and a strong Hong Kong stock market. For portfolio balancing reasons I took a small profit in July at 7 HKD. This turned out to be fantastic timing as the stock has been pulled down heavily by the weak Hong Kong sentiment, ending the year at 4.95 HKD. Fundamentally the company still seems to be on the right track and I’m looking forward to if the company can finally get a breakthrough with the wet-AMD (eye disease) trials they are funding through listed company Henlius.

JOYY

What a mess this stock has been, its almost painful to write about. Baidu wanted to buy JOYYs Mainland business, a short report was released that targeted the mainland business. Left was a fairly attractive international Videochat business called Bigo Live. Baidu seemed happy to go through the with the deal, shooting down the short case for the stock. I believed them and added to my position since the cash from Baidu + other cash was as much as the market cap of the company. This was at 119 USD per share, my previous shares were bought at 64 USD. I capitulated when the deal finally seemed to be falling through when stock was at 55 USD, its now trading at 45 USD. So short term it was the right decision to sell but to be honest it still feels bad to have sold at these levels. Finally why I actually did sell was because I did track the Bigo Live app a lot myself (meaning I used it) and I could see that the popularity with the app was dying, basically negative momentum when they should have had positive momentum. Since I sold and it continued down I put this in good decisions (for now).

Other worthy mentions

Pax Global

This didn’t really feel like a mistake on my side, but a very very freaky event. In the middle of the Hong Kong stock market weakness, when PAX was one of few holdings to still trade close to all time highs, the nightmare news were released. FBI was raiding PAX warehouse in the USA on alleged security concerns with their payment terminals. The customer which alerted FBI had also decided to stop using PAX devices, stock was down some -45% in one day and this was before the drop my largest position – what a nightmare. Now the dust hasn’t fully settled on this but some of PAXs largest purchasers have come out and defended PAX saying they don’t see anything wrong with the devices. One could argue that is in their interest since they probably don’t want to recall millions of payment devices. Adding to this PAX still operates in USA, FBI or any other agency has not banned them from the US market, so it does not seem they so far has found anything. Lastly PAX has hired a large famous US security firm to independently check their devices (Unit 42 by Palo Alto Networks). The results from this was: “Unit 42 reported that the network traffic reviewed was consistent with the intended features of the associated services of PAX terminals. Unit 42 also concluded that there were no unexplained network traffic in the course of its comprehensive and thorough inspection.“. I don’t think PAX actually can do much more, some confidence in the company has been lost for sure both from investors but more importantly the distributors and purchasers of their devices. How much will these large buyers in Brazil/India and elsewhere shift to other brands to avoid PAX due to this? Well that’s basically what the market has taken a view on here. The market is basically pricing zero to very low growth, meaning that a major shift to competitors will happen over the coming years, I think that is exaggerated and there must be good reasons why they choose PAX in the first place (pricing vs competition, Android capabilities, PAX app store etc). I’m betting that this will slightly affect growth but PAX will still be growing at +10% or more per year. I slightly added to my position today.

Nagacorp

Another big loser for 2021, but here it’s in my view actually warranted. Given how China continues to be closed down and the funding risk of completing the Naga3 construction it’s pretty fair Nagacorp has traded down as it has. Given this view, this is where I found some of my funds (except the small cash buffer I had) to fund my purchases in Modern Dental and PAX. I haven’t sold all of my Nagacorp, but I reduced this to a smaller position today. I think the company could bounce back majorly in 2023 but Asia is still far behind on moving on from Covid.

 

That’s a wrap for my 2021 review. In my next post I will dive a little bit deeper into why my watch outperformed my stock portfolio in 2021. Because it has really been a year where all assets went up (except my stock portfolio and a few poor other bag holders who invested in Hong Kong) 🙂

 

When things go wrong

globalstockpicking 13 Comments

Back in May-June after my last blog post my life and portfolio was in bloom, I had my best outperformance since the blog started and I was back good physical shape. That did unfortunately not last and things went quite wrong from there on. I had struggled with my health for the past year and early this summer it got worse than ever when a injured myself quite badly. I’m much better now but going through something like this really drain you. Currently going through the slow process of trying to build up strength again. Due to these unfortunate health issues I haven’t had the mental capacity to post anything or research as much as I used to. But now after exactly 4 months of inactivity I’m back blogging. I got a bit of a writers block starting off this post, I try to just come as you are. Nevermind my health issues, let’s put focus back on what happened this summer and especially China.

Having a strongly China tilted portfolio has really been bad beta exposure these past months, the spread between developed markets and Hong Kong is really remarkable. Just like health issues which sooner or later emerge, I knew the day would come when China would have to clean up its imbalances and go through a readjustment/bust. I read plenty of books on the topic and spent considerable time trying to understand the dynamics of for example the Chinese housing market. Being somewhat mentally prepared and thinking through the downside helps, but it still hurts when it happens. My portfolio has taken it on the chin lately, but perhaps not as bad as one would expect. I had such a tremendous run in some of my holdings previously, that gave me plenty of cushion. Also I have had minimal exposure to all the sectors that have been worst hit. As of last Friday my portfolio is now in-line with MSCI World (20% vs 18%) and massively ahead of Hang Seng (-8%) YTD.

Portfolio changes/comments

Modern Dental Group

Although I haven’t posted I have stayed somewhat active in the market. I had to, for example Modern Dental continued to double yet again from where I started to reduce my position. I was very happy to unload another portion of shares at 9.4 HKD, keeping half of my initial position for the long term. This stock alone saved a lot of my bacon in terms of performance this year.

Greatview Aseptic / Vinda

I have been gradually increasing my position size in Greatview Aseptic, which I think is underappreciated and undervalued here. Yes the semi-annual was a bit weak in terms of revenue falling down to the bottom line, but revenue grew nicely YoY. Given the increased raw materials prices and the extremely stretched transportation market it was no surprise to me that profit wise it would be a somewhat softer half year. This is still a growth company (growing revenue some 9% YoY in the past 4 years) with a 8-9% dividend yield, priced as a zero growth company. Doesn’t make any sense, so I will continue to back up the truck and load up more. I added shares at 3.74 and 3.45 HKD, which apparently was too early as its now trading below 3 HKD.

In the same manner Vinda has come down in valuation, I added some shares at 23 HKD, again not the best timing but quite happy to add shares at this level. Both of these companies have similar characteristics: totally unsexy business, factories producing daily necessities, founder led and both taking market share in a market with a tailwind. This means the can post high single digit growth rates, which is nothing to scoff at in the long run.

Pax Global / Essex Biotech

Did some profit taking in both to fund the additions in above mentioned stocks, here I sold at good levels, 9.76 and 7 HKD per share. The selling has not really anything to do with not believing in these companies (they are even after selling my largest positions), just that I want to balance the portfolio and re-allocate to for example Greatview which I see as having better return potential from this point.

Dream International

When I added this company to my portfolio I wrote this post, with the question mark a dream Investment? I wouldn’t say it turned into a nightmare, but not far from it. I bought at 4.11 HKD and sold out 3 years later at 2.88 HKD, throw in a couple of dividends of some total 40 cents or so and its still a handsome loss, during a period my portfolio almost doubled. Incredibly enough most of the loss comes from the EV/EBITDA multiple contracting from 5 to 4, cheap got even cheaper. It’s ridiculous to sell but also ridiculous to allocate capital to something where shareholder value never seems to unlock. It would be painful to see the company announcing a special div or something like that now and the stock doubles, which would be reasonable. Such is life in value investing land, some stocks are just to deep value traps and this one I throw in the towel on. I could write tons more about this company, but choose to cut it short since its no longer in the portfolio.

Irisity

I have been flip flopping a bit in Irisity. I reduced my position in July thinking the odds for a continued rally seemed weak. Then they announced a merger with an Israeli company in the same sector, basically removing a one of the largest competitors (not that any of these players are large) and maybe more importantly gained a decent sales force. I think building some scale into this company is really needed and I saw this move as worthwhile to put on a position again, which I did a few SEK higher than where I sold 58 vs 61 SEK per share.

Nagacorp

Oh boy this has become a tricky one. The share price has taken a proper tumble dropping more than 50% from ATH. The market seems to focus more on the short term pain of Covid and Casino closure than the possible long term gains. Here you can see the sentiment difference between for example the US cruise liners like Royal Caribbean which has fully recovered from its Covid drop, although cruise sales worldwide has not fully returned. In this cases the market was quick to take the long term view but in Nagacorp’s case the market is either short sighted or changed its view significantly on future income potential. My interpretation of what the market thinks, its a bit of both. Short term scared that it could still take years for Cambodia and Asian markets to resume travel, combined with what has been happening in China with new rules for Casino Junkets, which makes it likely VIP business will not come back as before. This double uncertainty has just killed the stock. On top of that there is also some overhang fears of how the funding of Naga3.

I decided to add to Nagacorp (again too early) in July at 6.98 HKD per share. My reasoning being that Cambodia is a friend of China, which can be seen by high vaccination rates they got compared to the rest of south east Asia. My guess is that Cambodia will be one of the first countries which will open some type of travel towards China. But say I’m wrong and travel does not resume say in another 2 years, then the situation is tricky. Naga3 will be delayed and probably cost more to finalize, the down period will then be so long that I think share dilution etc will be a fact. Nagacorp will turn into a disaster investment with permanent loss vs current limbo situation. In my view all of South East Asia can not afford to be closed for another 2 years, yes it would crush Naga as an investment case but it would crush the economies of these countries more. Still I’m humble to the possibility of being wrong and I don’t want to size my bet too big, I’m not going to add further (7% position) until I see signs of actual improvement. In regards to VIP business, yet to see where this lands, I have a small hope that junkets will be more controlled in Macau but will find ways to continue to operate in Cambodia, but my base case is that VIP does only come back to 60-70% of previous levels, which is still good. In other words in my view risk reward looks good, but outcomes could be extreme both on up and downside.

New holding – GPW SA

A third Polish holding enters the Portfolio, the Warsaw stock exchange itself, a separate post will come soon!

China

A few words on China specifically as well, given all the things that happened perhaps I should dedicate a separate post to it. Since I started this blog I always had mixed feelings about my tilt towards HK listed companies and China exposure. First time I got bearish on the blog was 2017: Rotate away from China. Already back then I spelled out my worries of China property and sold out of my holding Ping An. Ping An has lately been one of the largest indirect losers of this Evergrande mess. Trade War feels like a really old topic by now, but its very much alive and kicking. The whole de-globalisation feels like a long term new theme one could do investment after

It’s clear to my by now that China has decided to decrease the wealth gap created in the past 20 years. There has been some obvious losers, like education companies but a lot of companies have been hammered for various reasons. In my view even the Evergrande mess is part of this same theme (at least partly). What is less talked about is that there are also some winners in equalization. Just like in the US with stimulus checks which created a huge buying freenzy. If the poor in China got less poor thanks to wealth redistribution, perhaps the customer base of Vinda’s Tempo tissues grows from a few hundred million to half a billion? If a dedicate another posts to thoughts on China I would like to explore this are more. As always happy to hear you input, who do you think are the winners if China wealth gets more equally distributed?

 

It’s very good to be back posting, hope you got the tribute hints, man 30 years already!

Portfolio changes over the past months

globalstockpicking 10 Comments

With ~5 years of announcing every buy/sell transaction on the blog, I have now for a while shifted to only post changes under “Trade History”. Sacrificing some transparency but with the aim to focus blog posts on more interesting things than every trade done. I imagine this will be my new format, where I look back on the past months and comment on what I feel is most relevant to mention. This is the batch of trades I will discuss.

Let’s start from the bottom

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Summary of 2020

globalstockpicking 14 Comments

Intro

Much can be said about this year, I choose to focus on how extreme the dispersion been this year. A very small subset of the markets has been doing tremendously well in 2020. Bitcoin has tripled and Tesla and other ESG trendy “hot stocks” soared hundreds of percent on back of the massive stimulus we seen. 2020 has been a treacherous year for us long term more value oriented investors. With the exception of 1999, it has probably never been harder to stay true to your investment philosophy. The liquidity flywheel has been turning extremely quick in a smaller segment of the total market at the same time we all know how poorly the real economy is doing. I’m pretty active Twitter user and never have I seen such euphoria among investors that had a portfolio of loss making, high growth tech stocks with as many SaaS etc in the company description as possible. I was still very young in 1999 and history never repeat itself, but I’m pretty sure it rhymes. And the rhymes I have been hearing lately are not positive for the returns for the coming years.

2020 has also been a terrible year from the perspective of have and have nots. And I’m sitting as a clear winner here from that perspective, with a stable high paid job and and assets that just keep appreciating at a high speed. At the same time a lot of the people who don’t have the luxury of big savings even lost their jobs this year.

The crisis months

What defined most investment returns in 2020 was how one navigated the period of February to April this year. Given that I live in Asia I had a front row seat to what was happening in Wuhan. In my post from Feb 9th I wrote the following:

I would like to start of by saying, that I think we are facing an extremely serious virus spread. It’s the sneaky feature of the virus that it can spread before people feel sick, which really makes this so very dangerous. Thanks to very powerful actions taken in China and elsewhere, we might just dodge a major major global health crisis.

When I started to write on this post a few days ago I felt my fellow investors in the US and Europe had not understood what is going on in China. But just over the past few days I think investors are getting input from company management and decent news reporting on what is actually going on. I felt all worked up, how could equity markets continue up when 1.4 billion people had decided to sit at home, not work and basically tend to basic needs!?

We humans are pretty easy to scare and what influences most of all, is the behavior of the people around us. People can be calm and rational about the likelihood of catching the virus, but change mindset very quickly when put with a new group of people that act more panicked about the virus spread. It’s very quick back to basics in situations like this, Maslow’s pyramid comes to mind. Nobody is any longer thinking about which Hermes bag or new car to buy, when you are fighting at the local supermarket for the last rolls of toilet paper. Maybe it sounds like a joke, but this has been the actual situation in Singapore and Hong Kong over the last few days. 

I think I was fairly spot on in my analysis in early February and really early to voice my views/concerns as well. After that point of being correct early I got a lot of things wrong. First of all I was very bearish and thought this bull market had in general ran its course. I thought we where staring at a crisis that would trigger a more long term economical decline. This meant I did not think of upside potential and buying potential winners from the crisis. I focused all my energy on downside protection and rotating out of anything with high leverage and/or severely affected by the virus. When all the stimulus packages started to kick in, again I was more thinking downside protection, that the USD would be devalued long term, so I took some positions in gold. The right move of course, now that we now the results would have been going in heavy on what was a Covid winner. For example I wrote my analysis on Valneva late 2019 so I was well aware of Moderna, go back to my post and you will see I compare Valneva to Moderna. A company probably nobody heard about in late 2019. In general the strength of the stock market boom from the lows really surprised me and still does.

The year of Poland

2020 was also the year that the Polish stocks in a more significant way entered my portfolio. It’s always a bit scary when one starts to trade a new market, where a lot of information is not available in English. My earlier investing years was very Europe and US focused and later when I moved to Asia I focused much of my investments on mastering investing on the Hong Kong exchange. I know feel I have a good grip of the western markets + HK/China. The become a truly global stock picker, I have over the past 2-3 years tried to widen my scope to other more undiscovered markets. I firstly focused on Italy but struggled to find real gems to invest in there (the market is still clearly on my radar). I then shifted my focus to Poland, a more emerging market than what I previously invested in. The companies have very tiny market caps and one has to accept poor liquidity to buy anything except the 5-10 larger companies on the list. The one big market I have left to look at would be Japan. I know there are tons of interesting companies there and I have from time to time been close to pull the trigger, but so far not.

Exceptional return in an exceptional year

I’m both extremely pleased and somewhat surprised over my return in 2020. With twice the return of MSCI World and at a lower standard deviation (measured on weekly data), it’s my best year since the blog started from an outperformance perspective. When I say that I’m surprised it’s because how strong the US tech segment been, which has a large weight in MSCI World. I have had very little to no such exposure (perhaps you can count LiveChat and JOYY in that segment). If you look at the below table of where most of that performance was created, it’s almost all from holdings that I added during 2020 (holding period less than 1 year). Many of my 2020 losers are my long term holdings such as Nagacorp and Dairy Farm, so activity has definitely paid off this year.

Thank you all for following my blog all these years, if you do enjoy it, please subscribe go get all my posts in your mailbox.