VIB Premium was discontinued at the end of 2018. More information can be found here. Refunds for unspent credits have been sent in early January 2019. If you were a user with unspent credits and have not claimed/received my payment, please contact me.
I will probably keep the premium section alive and might use it as a semi-private blog when I want to share some illiquid ideas with a small audience. Past users of VIB Premium will have access to those posts, but this will not be a paid service anymore.
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Welcome to the premium section of ValueInvestingBlog.net. This page shows you all the write-ups that have been published.
Make sure you are logged-in to your VIB.net account.
The buttons below will bring you to the pages with the write-ups. By default, you’ll only be able to see a short preview of the write-up. This preview allows you to get some sense of whether an investment idea is of interest to you.
Portfolio positions
Japanese basket – July, 2019: an overview of all the Japanese companies that are currently in my portfolio. Most of these companies are cash-rich net-nets, but there are a couple of companies in the basket that I like for other reasons, such as: a large discount to book value or significant share buybacks by a company. The post was updated in December 2018 to reflect the latest financial information.
Date of publication: April 20, 2017 – Post updated: July, 2019
Credits: 20
Company 3 is an Australian microcap trading at a single digit multiple of free cash flow and normalized earnings. Business conditions have been somewhat subdued and this has led to a market valuation that I see as attractive currently. Insider ownership is substantial and capital allocation by management has been intelligent.
Date of publication: May 11, 2017 – Post updated: September, 2018
Credits:10Free: Publicly accessible.
Click to read- Company 4 is a palm oil company trading at a large discount to the land values as presented in a recently announced offer for another plantation company and to another recent comparable transaction. The company looks pretty cheap from an earnings and cash flow perspective as well. I’m not going to disclose where this stock is listed in the preview text, but it can be bought through Interactive Brokers. This list of available markets on IB gives you an idea of whether other brokers will be able to offer access to this market.
Date of publication: June 09, 2017
Credits: 10
- Company 6 is an Australian company with some potentially valuable assets that are in the process of being monetized by the company. There is considerable uncertainty about the ultimate value of these assets, but there are some indications that this value could be well above the implied value currently being given to the assets by the market. I think the uncertainty is a lot greater than the risk in this case, but there are certainly speculative elements to this investment.
Date of publication: August 03, 2017
Credits: 10
Special Situation 1: a special situation investment. I think this UK-listed company is likely to be acquired in the near future and I don’t think that this possibility is sufficiently reflected in the current market price. This write-up focuses almost exclusively on the special situation aspect and not on the intrinsic value of the business. The reason for this is that there is currently a lot of uncertainty surrounding the business. I want to be able to change my mind quickly if needed and writing down estimates of what I think a business is worth makes that harder. All this makes this idea speculative.
I was not able to buy the stock through Interactive Brokers. A broker that deals in stocks using the SETSqx trading service is needed. Basically, you would need a broker that offers access to the full range of stocks listed in London to be able to buy.
Date of publication: January 05, 2018 – Post updated: February 23, 2018
Credits: 10
Company 9 is a South African company that is trading at 6x earnings and 0.5x book value. Free cash flow can be quite lumpy though. This is not a high quality compounder by any means, but I think it’s too cheap to ignore at this price. You would need a broker with access to the South African stock market (Johannesburg Stock Exchange – JSE) to be able to buy this stock.
Date of publication: April 24, 2018
Credits: 10
Company 10 is a small, OTC-listed community bank. The company is trading at less than 10 times this year’s expected earnings. It is however trading at a premium to book value, unlike most of the other banks in my community bank basket. I do think the bank is cheap on an earnings basis and I’ve found very few banks trading at a comparable earnings multiple. I believe there is a reason for the cheapness that doesn’t have anything to do with the quality of the bank and that shouldn’t result in a permanent discount to the bank’s value.
Date of publication: August 01, 2018
Credits: 10
Investment ideas
- No published investment ideas yet
Sold / Merged Positions
The stocks in the list below were once portfolio positions, but have since been sold or have been acquired by another entity. The posts remain listed here so people who purchased access to the write-ups can still read them. It is not possible for me to disable the buy-button on the write-up pages without also taking away access to those pages for those people who spent credits to do so. This is why it remains possible to buy access to these pages. Obviously the fact that I sold a position means that I believe there are better investment opportunities out there.
- Company 5: a small, OTC-listed bank that is currently in my basket of community banks. The company is trading at less than 80% of book value, which has become pretty rare in the current market. The bank also has fairly consistent earnings and low non-performing assets.
Date of publication: June 28, 2017
Credits:10Free: Publicly accessible after acquisition offer
Company was subject of an acquisition offer in August, 2017. The merger was completed in January, 2018.
Click to read - Company 2: a US-listed microcap bank that trades over the counter (OTC). An investor with some history of activism has taken a significant stake in this bank. I expect the activist to push the management of the bank for a sale of the bank to a larger entity. The bank trades below tangible book value and is probably too small to remain independent in the future. Shares are very illiquid.
Date of publication: April 20, 2017
Credits: 10
Sold: August 2018
Company 8 is a Hong Kong listed small-cap manufacturer, mainly operating in China. The company has consistent earnings and free cash flow, combined with a cash rich balance sheet. Many Chinese companies look fishy or impossible to asses with any confidence, but I think this company is unusually open in providing information in its annual reports about its operations.
Date of publication: January 24, 2018
Credits: 10
Sold: September 2018
Company 1: a Singapore listed company trading at a low P/E multiple and a low price to free cash flow multiple. There’s also a substantial discount to book value.
Date of publication: January 07, 2017
Credits: 10 (lowered in price due to stock price increase since January)
Sold: November 2018
- Company 7 is a micro-cap community bank that has been earning a 1.0%+ return on assets in the last few years. The company is trading over the counter and is currently selling very close to its book value and at a reasonable earnings multiple. I think it is probably cheap at the current price, given the above average ROA compared to other banks of a similar size.
Date of publication: October 06, 2017
Credits: 10
Sold: February 2019
Difference between portfolio positions and investment ideas:
Portfolio positions are public companies that I owned in my personal portfolio at the time of publication of the write-up.
Investment ideas are companies that are not in my portfolio at the time of publication, but that I still consider attractive. Reasons for not owning a stock despite considering it attractive could be:
- A lack of cash to invest in all attractive situations that are available at a particular point in time
- I already have a large exposure to other cheap companies in a particular country or sector
- I don’t have access to a particular market or investment
- I might have a limited understanding of an idea, due to the complexity of it (or a lack of intelligence on my side), that makes the idea speculative for me, but still potentially interesting and valuable for others. I will disclose the speculative nature of ideas like this in the preview text for those ideas.
Generally, it will take less credits to access write-ups in this second category. Since I don’t have “skin in the game” with these ideas, they could prove to be less attractive than my portfolio positions. I also think it’s a good idea to create an incentive for me to own the companies I write about. A higher price for portfolio positions than for other investment ideas creates an incentive for me to invest in the companies that are profiled in the premium section.
In the years that I’ve been blogging, there have generally been many more attractive investment ideas than I could invest in, given the limits of my net worth. That’s the main reason I created this second category. It creates a lot more ideas to write about than if I limited myself to writing about portfolio positions only.