Beginning of this year I posted that I had done my last performance review and promised a fresh start – something new. Well it took a while to move my ideas into a new product, but today it’s time to reveal what it is!
Before the reveal, give me a few minutes to explain how I ended up where I did. Afterwards I will also try to explain what it means for the longevity of this blog (which is getting pretty old by now – 8 years, yikes).
Starting GlobalStockPicking.com was really from the start planned as a long development & investment journey for myself. Although I did not spell out all the goals in a post but this was my thinking 8 years ago:
- Run with your passion for investing, do your best to become better and see if it’s enough to beat index/benchmark investing.
- Run a fully transparent investment process where internet will help you stay accountable for all your investment decisions.
- Record all your investments in a (by now mega) Excel spreadsheet and calculate a weekly NAV which you can use to evaluate yourself.
- Evaluate yourself under a long enough time frame so you have seen a bull & bear market cycle and how you cope in different investing environments.
- Use the journey to become a better investor, critically evaluate yourself, have a lot of fun and hopefully connect with other likeminded people.
On all of the above I can say CHECK! So given that I succeeded in all of the above, its time for GlobalStockPicking to change format. Stop evaluating my performance publicly and focus on something else. My next question then was, what should I do now? I want to become a bit more personal and share a little bit of what got me here (except the blog).
Journey within a journey
My actual investing investing journey started 20 years ago when I with shaky hands from my student dorm room bought my first stock. For the first 10 years this was the hobby investor journey and my focus on investing shifted up and down, depending on other life events or job workload. Towards the end of those 10 years I added a CFA to my existing Msc quant math background. The second half of my investment journey started with that I became a FoF portfolio manager for 2 years. I had the fantastic opportunity to spend two years meeting some of the best long only managers in the world. Get a glimpse into how they and their teams operated and sometimes discuss with them the stock ideas I myself had. This was incredibly rewarding and spurred me to start my blog 8 years ago. I classify the last 10 years as my more “professional” and structured investing journey, although it of course has been more of a sliding scale of becoming more mature/better investor.
What am I good at?
So sitting contemplating what to do next, I went through the thought process of what am I actually good at (investing wise). Well I have knack for finding ideas at infliction points for sure, quite often my stocks either take off or dump straight down after I bought them. I find it slightly harder to define how to exploit this if I’m not going to become an options trader. Since I don’t want to sit and trade options my mind wandered onwards to the next thing.
Which markets do I know well? I sharpened my teeth particularly in some markets and one market above all others – my new home – Hong Kong. After struggling for many years to invest here and making plenty of mistakes, I feel I’m actually pretty decent at investing in Hong Kong now. My first investment on the HK exchange I did 2012, so it was a long journey but I think I got there! Also coming from the Nordic region I feel very comfortable investing in Nordic stocks. These two pools are my home base and I try to expand my circle of competence by investing in places like Poland and Japan, I still feel more like a novice in these markets.
Thirdly I thought about what I feel most excited to do research about, it does vary but looking back many of the cases was related to Healthcare. I then dug a bit further and realized not only was it a sector I enjoyed digging deeply into but indeed I also had some of my best stock ideas and returns from this sector.
Healthcare?
I went through my 8 year GSP investment record of healthcare related ideas/write-ups which had clearly outperformed my broader strategy. Some of the better examples which all have solid write-ups here on the blog:
| Name | Story at the time | First Purchase | Peak price I sold at | Today Price | Still holding? |
| Modern Dental (3600.HK) | Dental lab turnaround | 1.29 | 9.4 | 4.7 | Yes |
| Valneva (VLA.PA) | Vaccine producer (potentially benefit from Covid) | 2.57 | 14.9 | 3.69 | No |
| ZimVie (ZIMV) | Spin-off with misunderstood dental / spine assets | 8.33 / added 6.55 | 18.1 | 15.4 | Yes |
| RaySearch (RAY-B.ST) | World leading software for cancer radiation, turnaround. | 46 | 80.4 | 116 | No |
New blog – Healthy Stock Picks
All this led me to the idea to start a new blog – a Substack this time – focused on the Healthcare sector. The reasons I came to this conclusion was:
- I really enjoy learning about Healthcare related products how they function or not function. There is something in the complexity of the topic that makes me want to dig deeper into a Journal publishing test results or just understand what is the key factors that is important for a spine disc replacement or eye procedure.
- I had and have persons around me in my life who are very good and knowledgeable about everything Healthcare.
- The two market pools, the Nordic region and Hong Kong are very rich pools of Healthcare stocks, if you add to that USA and Japan you have enough to dig into for a lifetime.
- There are so many highly skilled investors on Twitter, Substacks etc, but the Healthcare sector seems to be a bit of a white spot, I would love to be part of filling out that spot.
- It feels exciting to start a new investing journey, of becoming not only a good general investor, but really an expert within a specific field. I think I already came a decently long way in the Healthcare related write-ups in the past, but with more focus on the sector I want to bring it to the next level.
- This product I’m launching feels much more possible to in the future monetize. I’m dreaming about doing investments full-time and I then need to find a model where I can make some income from what I do, this could be one way forward (depending on how it succeeds).
So without further ado here is the link to the new blog:
https://healthystockpicks.substack.com/
It has so far only one write-up. It had to be one my oldest and currently largest holdings Modern Dental Group! The format I’m writing is focuses on the Slide deck which I’m attaching, heavily inspired by Asian Century Stocks. Many thanks to Michael who kindly let me use his disclaimers and given plenty of feedback in my process from everything of choosing a logo to the slide deck format. Others have also helped me a lot to deliver something I feel is a very high quality research product, I hope you will feel the same!
How about GlobalStockPicking?
Well time is limited, but I imagine from time to time I will still want to look at other things outside of Healthcare, my idea is to write much more informal posts here in the future. Probably no more full write-ups but shorter investment ideas are often as good as full write-ups. You should do your own due diligence anyways! Let’s see what I have time for, but I’m not retiring this page yet, although it costs me a bit of money to keep it running.
One final note, you are now 879 wonderful people who subscribed to this blog. I will give you a few weeks if you want to un-subscribe now, otherwise I will send you a link to add you as subscribers to my new substack also, I hope you will follow in my journey also there!
And like I said, this page will still publish non Healthcare ideas from time to time.
Thanks for this amazing 8 year journey!