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
It’s high time to review my holdings and if anything changed in their investment thesis. This will be a monster post, for me it’s a great way to review all my holdings and make sure I stay up to date. For you, if you hold or are interested in one of these stocks you will get a quick “what’s the latest” with some sprinkles of why this is a great company (or not anymore). As a bonus there is a short elevator pitch of my two new holdings.
I stopped posting updates for every portfolio change (instead found under Trade History tab), so I have some changes to comment on: MIX Telematics left the portfolio and Lvji entered and exited without comment from my side. MIX Telematics was a case of having too high exposure to the oil industry in the US, I don’t see that coming back at all in the same way as in the past. This was something I did not understand when I invested, properly hidden oil exposure and a mistake on my side. Lvji was a tech play on travel guides for Chinese, but soon after taking a position some twitter friends alerted me of doubtful accounting. I looked at it myself and couldn’t really feel comfortable, better safe than sorry I then sold at almost the same price I bought.
Now on to comments on all my current holdings from top to bottom in the table below.
Press “read more” and enjoy!
Time for some portfolio changes again. I have continued to contemplate what I’m comfortable with in my portfolio and have come to some conclusions:
PM International was bought as a highly defensive holding in my portfolio, a way to get a higher return over time than sitting on cash when I was negative on the market. I have slightly re-evaluated how defensive PM is. Partly because of declining tobacco sales (which I did know about), but because Corona obviously shows the need for healthy lungs, which perhaps will speed up this process. The other part is the debt load that PM is sitting on. Instead I decided to move into the ultimate defensive – gold. My thesis is that all this money printing by FED, ECB and other central banks in combination with banks actually at the same time lending more, will over time devalue fiat currencies. Most likely we will see a short deflationary shock initially, but I think this will turn to inflation for a number of reasons. First the mentioned money printing, secondly because supply chains and just in time delivery is going to revised – at a cost, which also adds inflation. On top of that air cargo will probably be more expensive as well, at least for a few year. With interest rate near zero, the “cost” of holding gold becomes very low at the same time as fiat currency is devalued. I’m not putting on a tin foil hats here going all in on gold, but a small allocation to gold feels good in this case. Kirkland Lake Gold is as close to what I can find to a well run gold mining company in an industry full of crooks. They don’t have mines in countries with problems and have a track record of building a good business creating shareholder value even without gold price going up. So, I’m selling my full holding in Philip Morris as of today, basically around the same levels as I bought it. This gives me some 2.4% of my portfolio in cash. I allocate 3.5% of my portfolio to Kirkland Lake Gold as an Opportunistic holding. Opportunistic because this is more of a mid/short term hedge, than necessarily something I planned to hold 5+ years.
Another opportunistic holding was car safety company Veoneer. It’s been a hell of a ride these past month, but now I’m back to flat. They have written of parts of their business recently, showing me that things I thought had value seems to have almost none. This was speculative, I can’t say I have been right, neither wrong. But the stock was apparently not as undervalued as I thought when I bought it. The revaluation might come later, but the probability of Geely bidding for Veoneer I think has gone down as well. I choose to move on to other holdings as my conviction is not so high anymore, I sell my full Veoneer holding as of close today, which releases 1.6% cash.
This stock has had a fantastic performance year to date (up +58%). The stock surge is partly warranted, but partly just hype in Asia around the whole toilet paper thing. I decide to take some profit here and reduce my position from some 7.5% of the portfolio to 5%. There is nothing more sophisticated about it than that I think the valuation is somewhat stretched short term, I think it’s still a great long term holding.
Finally Valneva, the company I previously owned, made a quick buck on and then sold. Here is my write-up: Valneva Microcap Vaccine Producer. Later when I sold I wrote: “If I had a strong belief they would succeed with the launch of a Lyme disease vaccine, I would be happy to hold this company through the 5 year process they have in front of them. Instead I will sell my full holding as of today’s close.”. Basically what has changed is that they have landed a good agreement with Pfizer to develop the Lyme vaccine. Thanks to that I know feel the company is investable again, unfortunately I have to pay the price of having this information known. I sold at ~3.4 EUR per share and today I will have to pay ~4 EUR per share. But I feel this is reasonable given that the company might have a revenue share in a new block buster vaccine. Again to weave in the Coronavirus into this case (it feels like you should mention Corona in every stock pick you do nowadays), I think the anti-vaxxers will be less loud when the whole world has got use to taking another vaccine here in the next year or so. It will raise the awareness of how important vaccines can be, and Lyme to be honest is also such a case. This is an important point, because the previous Lyme vaccine was discontinued due to loud anti-vaxxers. I take in Valneva at a 3% position of the portfolio.
Other bloggers and people public about their investment decisions have spoken about that it’s harder to exiting something that you recently bought. This due to some type of shame factor of changing ones mind so quickly on sometime, one recently thought was a good enough investment idea to add to the portfolio. I have to confess to having similar feelings when writing about this decision to sell Valneva. But I try to ignore those thoughts and do what feels right, given the information I have at hand now. Finalizing my full write-up on Valneva in the post below cleared out things in a way, which I hadn’t been able to see before when I had just sat and read a lot about the company and some competitors. Also this time I got some valuable feedback from you readers (and even some more help from one particular reader on twitter). All in all this made my understand that I don’t have such high faith in the development pipeline for Valneva. I think the company is valued reasonably cheap given the cash they generate from their two vaccines in the market, but I think there is high risk of the research pipeline being value destructive and not constructive. This narrows the margin of safety significantly. Right now the company has announced the listing on NASDAQ, which I mentioned in my previous post, the stock is up another +7% today after rallying sharply this whole year.
So the reason to sell is my belief about the research pipeline. Not that I have been lucky and gotten a quick revaluation of the company (I think partly on back of the Corona virus scare). If I had a strong belief they would succeed with the launch of a Lyme disease vaccine, I would be happy to hold this company through the 5 year process they have in front of them. Instead I will sell my full holding as of today’s close. I bought into my position on the last day of 2019 @ 2.57 EUR per share, it is now trading at 3.375, a gain of 31%, a fantastic result in such a short time!
I almost want to apologizes for putting this out as my latest investment idea and then turning around and selling a few weeks later. But on the other hand, it has been a great stock pick performance wise.
I haven’t updated my holdings page in a few weeks, but this holding after a continued rally is now 10.1% of my portfolio. The market seem to really have bought into the story that I believed in for a long time now, that ZYN will become a big product in USA. There are still some worries on the horizon with flavored cigars being banned in the USA. This is still a substantial part of Swedish Match revenue and profit. I have still strong conviction in this company long term, but I’m happy to trim my holding somewhat at these levels, I sell down my holding to a 8% position as of today’s close.
My current holding size is 7.7% and given the recent sell-off I think this my current high conviction bet. I visited the Casino recently and I was very impressed with the operations the built up. I was equally impressed with how the country is transforming, much thanks to Chinese investments in the country. That Chinese can get VISA on arrival when they visit Cambodia is key to the continued growth on back of Chinese tourism. So the main reason for adding to this holding is the fantastic long term prospects. One of very few worries, where we probably will get an answer this year, is the gambling tax, which still has not been decided. If the tax comes in much higher than anticipated, we will see more downside in the stock. But I rather believe there will be a relief rally (i.e. tax will come in very favorably).
Obviously Nagacorp will be hurt by a significant slump of tourist due to the current Corona virus outbreak. But I believe that is short-lived and by summer tourism will normalize. I also believe Nagacorp will be less hurt by this than Macau, given that 50% of customers comes from rest of South East Asia, who will travel more than Chinese do currently. Another factor is that Macau is going to close all its casinos for 2 weeks now, it will probably not mean a flood of tourism to Nagaworld, but at least if some people still want to travel and gamble, there are not that many options during these two weeks. All in all, Nagaworld will in my view be less hurt than Macau, but has traded down much more than Macau stocks. Looking a bit further than the next quarter, this is a great opportunity to add to the holding (as of today’s close).
+ Two strong cash generating assets, with the prime asset being Ixiaro, the only FDA approved vaccine for Japenese encephalitis
+ The only company attempting a Lyme disease vaccine, with a potential huge untapped market.
+ Strong family owner, which is the largest shareholder with 15%.
+ Interest from US investors who have taken a stake in the company above current market price.
– Not the best track record of successfully launching vaccines, several failures lately.
– In the hands of the big players to partner in development of vaccines, it is too costly to do by themselves.
– Small development pipeline means a lot hangs in the balance on very few trials and there is some doubts around the Lyme vaccine.
I already briefly introduced the company in a previous post, if you have not read that post, I urge you to start with the shorter pitch written there: See Valneva headline in this post
Below follows a bit deeper dive into the company (press Read More):
To align my portfolio further with my investment philosophy it’s time for another larger portfolio change with as many as four new holdings – Tethys Oil, Valneva, Tianneng Power and Union Medical Healthcare. I haven’t written as much over the past months, but I have spent a lot of time trawling for new investment ideas and yes I have quite many of them coming! But first what goes out:
As of the last day of 2019 I sold my full holding in Inditex, which holds the famous clothing retailer Zara as it’s main asset. This is another of my very large cap companies where I took the view that the market was overly scared of the retail-apocalypse and that Zara would come out strong in this. In my view today, I have a very weak edge to make such a call – although it this time turned out to be fairly true, both fundamentally and stock price wise. Therefore I today sell this holding, as I by know surely have no edge in forecasting where this stock is going to move on from here. I did my best to hold the stock in the weak positive momentum it’s been in for a while and I was rewarded nicely lately with a strong rally towards year end. My only doubt here is that I probably should ride the positive momentum a bit longer, but I’m eager to get to prioritizes right in the portfolio. Good riddance Inditex, you are truly a quality company, but you do not fit my strategy any longer.
This was a opportunistic holding which did not really turned out as planned. I had a quick gain for a while, but did not cover. More “dirt” was uncovered about Swedbank as the months passed by. I think banking stocks in Sweden in general are going to perform better now that the negative interest rate is gone. So the stock traded up not on me really being right, but just general revaluation of banking stocks. I have to say this was an opportunity which I should not have swung the bat on. Again maybe I’m a bit early to sell now, but I’m not a big believer in Swedbank has a winner in the Swedish banking sector long term. So the opportunity has pasted and this was a speculation that did not give me the quick gains I hoped, so now it’s time to close the trade. I sold my full position as of close 30th Dec.
As I mentioned in my performance review this quickly became my best performing stock during 2019. I have to thank twitter handle @alexeliasson for this investment idea. He was the one that first mentioned this stock and this has actually opened my eyes to look more broadly into the healthcare space on the HK exchange. Unfortunately I had only taken a “starting” position in the stock and was expecting to get to know this holding better over the years. I have been back and forth on if I should keep this holding, even though the valuation now is very stretched. First I just reduced my position with the plan to keep the rest “no matter what valuation wise”. But I come to the conclusion, that doesn’t work for me. I need to feel that the valuation is not pricing in some type of blue sky scenario that might never happen. I would not buy the stock today if I did not have it already, that is sometimes a little bit brutal way to look at it, but at the end of the day that’s how you should evaluate things in my view. So I decided to sell the full holding I had left in AK Medical. I’m very happy to buy this back if the valuation would come down somewhat again, I think the most probable scenario is that they have a long runway of growth in-front of them, but things can always go wrong in terms of competition, Chinese policy changes etc.
I have been reducing and increasing in Dairy Farm since my initial investment. I recently bought quite a lot more, punting on that we have seen the worst in Hong Kong in terms of protests. I changed me view on this and I’m afraid that the annual results that will come out of Dairy Farm is going to be terrible. On top of that the big holding in Yonghui Superstores has declined quite a lot in value lately, whereas Dairy Farm stock has been trading water sideways at very depressed levels. So I take the opportunity to reduce my holding with as much as I recently bought. I’m very close to closing out this position, but although the company is fairly big it’s still an overlooked stock in my eyes. The most important question though of course is if the company is a good enough investment. I will need a bit more information during 2019 to decide on that, but it’s not a high conviction position for me anymore.
I love being contrarian and right now sector wise, there is nothing more contrarian than the Energy sector. But I’m no macro investor, I need to be able to express this through a stock which seems unreasonably cheap and at the same time is a well managed company. I think Tethys Oil qualifies here on many levels. I have followed this company for a very long time and seen it’s execution. Very few oil companies has delivered such returns as Tethys Oil. Since 2004 the stock has compounded 21% annualized (incl dividends). If we instead look from the worst possible time, just before oil prices crashed from over US$100/barrel in 2014, the company has still compounded 7.5% per year.
The company has a 30% share in an oilfield in Oman with very low production cost, meaning that the company is cash flow positive even at very low oil prices. The downside of this is that you don’t get the same leverage in the share price if oil actually goes up. But my whole point of this investment is not speculate in if oil is going up or down, but buying a company that hopefully can perform well no matter what. Then as a kicker I love to get some energy exposure into my portfolio.
The company has a very high pay-out ratio, which is done both through dividends and special shares that are redeemed by the company (more tax efficient). In 2019 the company returned a total of 8 SEK and the stock is today trading at 84 SEK. Even so they still have money left over for exploration in Oman where they own quite vast areas of land. So there is a significant kicker to the upside if they strike oil.
Downside risk factors that should be mentioned is Oman itself. The country is run by a dictator (Sultan) and it seems that not all in the country are so happy with this. The country in general got rich on oil, but supplies are dwindling and it’s harder to please the people when cash is not pouring in anymore. Another risk factor is that the field which today is steadily pumping oil to Tethys would dwindle quicker than forecasts, but that is a small risk compared to the general country risk. This stock will probably always be trading at fairly low multiples due to the country risk, but I think there is a good chance for some general multiple expansion for energy stocks in 2020 and Tethys would benefit from that. Even with that not happening it’s a cash cow which just keeps pouring in money to investors. Insiders have recently also made some smaller purchases which is nice to see.
Back in 2017 when I did my first rounds of trying to find some good exposures towards the Pharma sector I came across this company. I was very close to taking a position, but then the stock ran away from me when it quickly gained some 35%. I kept it on my radar since and now recently it traded down below where I initially were interested. And this time with in my view better fundamentals than back in 2017. Valneva is something as unusual as a vaccine producer. This is a bit of a sidestep from the investment case, but something that is good to understand looking at this type of companies:
Vaccine producers are a very strange animal in medicine since you are only selling one shot and then hopefully the patient never gets infected/sick. Whereas a normal drug is the most “successful” when you have patented something that the patient need for a long time, in the “best of worlds” to even survive. It’s pretty cruel when you think about it, but Pharma companies does not really have an incentive to cure us, but keep us needing their drugs as long as possible. So vaccine instead belongs to a total different category which is preventive care, just like exercising or eating healthier. One would think that there exists a ton of vaccine companies then since surely preventing care is more clever? Well this is were free economics kind of fail us, due to the above argument of it being more profitable that we are sick. This also means that governments understands this dilemma, especially governments which pay for public healthcare. So they actually are pretty helpful in promoting in various ways to develop vaccines. For example via grants or speed up trial processes. The trial process which has it’s Phase I/II/III like drugs is also quite different. Given that you can’t give 500 people a vaccine and then infect them with whatever the vaccine was for you end up with a bit of a dilemma, how do you test the vaccines effectiveness? Well basically you have to develop vaccines for something that is so common to be infected by that within a large enough group you know a certain number of people will be infected. This means you either need a huge test group, or a vaccine for something which is extremely common (at least within a certain region). This is why vaccines for example for the ZIKA mosquito can be developed so quickly, the outbreak is so significant, that testing if a vaccine works is a very quick process. But if you are a small company doing such large scale tests is still very burdensome. And unfortunately given the income potential of only 1 shot of vaccine is so low, very few companies finds it worthwhile developing vaccines even for things that many people suffer from around the world.
Over to the investment case. Valneva has one star vaccine on the market for a very serious infection called Japanese encephalitis, I have myself taken this vaccine when I moved to Asia. The vaccine is called Ixiaro and the largest customer for the vaccine is the US military, where this vaccine is a mandatory shot for every soldier sent abroad. The US military spends as much on this vaccine as the rest of the world combined. The second product is Dukoral, which is a Swedish developed drinking vaccine for prevention of diarrhea. Basically the product is used for tourists which are afraid that some type of Delhi Belly will destroy their vacation plans. Canada is here the largest market for this product.
A few things make the investment case interesting here:
So this is probably not a great company which when I have sold we can go back and look at the fantastic return it had over the coming 10 years and I wish I just held on to it. This is a swing the bat, because now is a good opportunity to do so case. Since I followed the Electric Vehicle sector for so long I know a lot of players in this supply chain. This company looked for a while like it was going to a player in the battery space for EVs. Instead they took another route. When all other battery factories scrambled to develop the latest generations of Lithium ion batteries this company instead perfected in making the more simple old technology. Basically the lead batteries you have in your petrol car to turn the ignition on. I understood early that EVs would one day be big, which is happening right as we speak, even buses. But what i did not consider as much were to two wheeled objects we have, like motorbikes, scooters and even bicycles. It’s become a huge trend worldwide to have electric versions of these. In fact in China electric scooters has totally taken over the market. And the thing is, that these batteries need to be cheap, really cheap, otherwise the economics don’t make sense. So majority of these batteries are of the older cheaper type. Which has made Tianneng selling volumes go through the roof and hugely profitable in a market where most Lithium ion battery producers are fighting a very tough pricing war battle in the EV space. So for a few years now the cash has been raining in, but the market has not really revalued Tianneng because there will come a reckoning day when Lithium batteries will be cheap enough and take over the market. But how cheap should the company be?
The company is currently trading at P/E of 4.5 this is historically below average, but due to cash build up EV/EBITDA is a better measure.
The company is then incredible cheap. So it could be stuck in value trap land for a few years and then lithium battery prices gets so low that fundamentals start to deteriorate. To counteract the value trap you often need a corporate event of some time. That just happened the other day when they filed to spin-off parts of the company on the Mainland exchange. This might unlock some of that value and this is the trigger to take a bet on the company here right now. They plan to spin-off the battery division on the mainland exchange, where it will most likely be valued much higher than the depressing valuation on the Hong Kong exchange currently. The maneuver is a bit complicated though since the shareholders in Hong Kong can not own the mainland listed shares directly. So the listing of the shares in mainland China will have to go to a new set of investors. But effectively a new set of investors are going to pile into this company at a much higher valuation. I’m not sure where that leaves the HK listed stock in terms of share price, theoretically it could stay the same of course, but most likely some convergence will happen. I see fundamentally little downside to punt on this and potentially quite a lot of upside, although somewhat unclear how much. This will be an interesting one to follow.
This is another stock that I came across in my search for healthcare related investments in Hong Kong. The same twitter handle that found AK Medical I believe is invested here as well. This is a Hong Kong healthcare provider that started off in the more light services around medical beauty services and has from there expanded into dental and doctor clinics. A big part of the growth story has been mainland Chinese that come to Hong Kong for medical services. Obviously with the situation in Hong Kong that should have slowed down significantly lately and it also explains why the share is trading weaker the past six months. But what drew me into this case is the founder. He has a bit of story how he came to found the company, he is still fairly young and the way he consolidated and built this company really impressed me. I don’t think this is the perfect timing to enter this company, there might definitely be setbacks in the next annual report due to the HK situation. That’s why I start with a small position, but I do think the founder is on to something here and the fundamentals speak of it, with revenue growth of some 30% YoY and EBITDA in the same range. At the same time the stock is trading at P/E 14 trailing and P/E 12 expected for 2020. I hope I will be able to buy more even cheaper going forward, as long as the underlying business keeps going in the right direction.