The portfolio has been running neck-and-neck with the benchmark MSCI World Gross Return, but with the help of the bid on SAFT and strong performance from Criteo and a few other holdings we have managed to de-couple somewhat over the last two weeks. An unexpected bid is always a lucky shot, but I believe this shows big things is going on in the battery sector, we have both the whole electric car side as well as electricity storage from the grid. This is probably not the last battery buyout we will see over the coming years. I’m staying cautious still though, the industry is still driven by subsidies and China will most likely favor the Chinese makers. It is still many years until we see big profits from the Korean companies like Samsung SDI and LG Chem, I’m waiting for a good entry-point in Samsung SDI as the best pure-play in the sector.
Performance graph
Trading
I have also decided to take one new position and add further to an existing holding.
Microsoft
I have been looking for a good entry in Microsoft, it never gets cheap but with a little bit of weakness here I use 4% of my cash to make a first entry in the stock. The short rational is how Microsoft is pushing hard for cloud computing and I believe they will succeed taking a huge part of the corporate market. Corporations are already heavy Microsoft Office / SQL Server etc users and are so ensnared that they automatically go for Microsoft Azure cloud. This will be a huge deal over the coming 10 years.
NetEase
This is already a holding at 6.6% and I decided to make it a high conviction position at 9% by allocating 2.4% cash. Within a few days a bigger piece on the company will be out explaining the rationale, so stay tuned.
I’m now fully invested with only a small cash residual and I’m truly live, putting my neck out there to see if I have any alpha/skill. 3 months has passed since the first pen-strokes on the blog and 2 months of live performance and I feel I passed the trial period of the blog. Now let’s do this great!