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:
Wish you and your loved ones a great 2025!
Glad to hear you decided to continue the blog. Well researched independent analysis of less well known names is hard to come by and your track record is strong enough to shout about.
Perhaps include the best ideas of the healthcare portfolio in the core portfolio too?
Thanks Robin for the kind words, it will be two separate portfolios and I could just blend them for the full portfolio results. But like I have been saying for some time now, will be less focus on my returns (I think I proven myself already) and just good old stock picking discussions..