Commerzbank annual report for 2012

As expected it was no fun to read the report from Commerzbank which can be found here. There were a few highlights but plenty of it was bad.

The good things:

By the look of it they managed to reach the targets set with the Basel III rules. This means that from now on they should be able to generate revenue that will be given hopefully back to shareholders instead of building up the capital in the bank but I fear... that they want to take that for themselves instead in form of bonuses... Their book value per share is still pretty high with  over 4€/share. I liked that no one in the board or management got any cash bonuses but there is a but there...

Investment advice according to Housel

A blogger at The Motley Fool called Morgan Housel put together a list of what he called 50 unfortunate truths about investing. The 50 points can be seen below. I found plenty of them interesting to read and that is why I want to add it to my collection of investing advice list.

Easter

Easter is coming up and I will this time spend it with my family. I will have to see if I can manage to read the annual report from Commerzbank which I should have done last weekend but after flipping it through I found it so uninteresting that I really need to find an utterly boring moment in my life to read it through. I will try to squeeze it in during the flight.

Greenlight Capital Inc Q4 2012

In the fourth quarter of 2012 David Einhorn went ballistic in terms of adding new companies but especially adding more shares in the companies that he already owned!

Stocks Q4 2012

Below the changes are shown for the fourth quarter in 2012.

Greenlight Capital Inc Q3 2012

Since we have already reported on the Q1 and Q2 for 2012 we need to keep this going so that it will be possible to copy what these clever guys are doing.

Stocks Q3 2012

Below the stock changes can be seen that David Einhorn made in Q3 2012.

Greenlight Capital Inc Q1/Q2 2012: David Einhorn

Today I guess that everyone knows David Einhorn since he decided to sue Apple. He seems to like to get attention every now and then and sometimes I have the feeling that he mainly puts himself in the spotlight because the investment did not work out as he hoped or as fast as he hoped.

BP annual report for 2012

Managed to go through the BP annual report. What to say besides from that I hate annual reports that are thicker then my thesis but most companies seems to think today that if you can not perform then at least make a nice looking report. The report can be found here.

Visited shops

Usually in the weekend I go for a longer walk and I then pass by several stores especially since I am living close to one of the shopping streets in Berlin. So the stores that were highly visited today were:

BackWerk - selling bakery things with concept that you pick it yourself and then walk over to the cashier and pay for it. Very fast, acceptable taste, they heat up on location so they have a factory bakery somewhere.

This weekend...

will be filled with reading the annual reports from BP as well as from Commerzbank. I very strongly doubt that I will be impressed by either of them. I will also have to think about what to do with the next salary because this time, finger crossed, I do not have to buy more of any of my already owned stocks so I can find a new interesting company to be shareholder in!

Share buy back BP

BP is taking a jump up today which is due to their press release saying that they intend to buy back shares in a quantity of 8 billion $.

These 8 billions $ is what BP invested into the TNK-BP semi-failed joint venture back in 2003 and now when the sale has been pushed through to Rosneft that money will go back to the company through share buy back.

Investment advice by Sir John Templeton

Sir John Templeton is one of the legendary investors due to that he was highly successful, he was a philanthropist and he was financially moving around all over the world. Went into the Japanese market when it was in the very bottom and generally said that there is always at least one market in the world that is currently selling below actual value. He usually then also went there. So from his point of view many of the markets in the south of Europe would be highly interesting today. Personally I have tried to dig through them a little but from what I have seen the healthy companies are still selling at a fair value and it was just the seriously bad ones that have dropped tremendously. Some of his advice are good and some I just tend to ignore.

Dalal Street Q4 2012

This time we take a closer look at what Mohnish did during the fourth quarter of 2012. He decreased slightly in Citigroup and increased his positions in Chesapeake as well as in Horsehead.


Stocks Q4 2012

Bank of America Corporation
Chesapeake Energy Corp	ADDED
Citigroup Inc	MINUS
General MTRS Co
Goldman Sachs Group Inc
Horsehead HLDG Corp	ADDED

Germanys fault

Once again we have a European country that have in this case decided to attract business and money not by actually producing something but by offering low taxes and high interest rates in their banks. By doing so their banks have swelled to the size of eight times the countries GDP. Today in the US there are serious discussions about breaking up the Too Big To Fail because they, according to American accounting rules, represent around 65% of the US GDP and according to international rules the big American banks represent 105% of GDP.

Dalal Street Q3 2012

This time we took a closer look at Mohnish Pabrai and his dealings Dalal Street for the third quarter in 2012. He runs a very strict investment philosophy so few new investments are being made.

Stocks Q3 2012
  

Bank of America Corporation
Chesapeake Energy Corp	ADDED
Citigroup Inc
General MTRS Co	ADDED
Goldman Sachs Group Inc	MINUS
Horsehead HLDG Corp

American Giants

I spent some time this morning to look through some American giants and they really are giants. Wal-Mart, General Electric, General Motors, Microsoft, Apple, McDonalds, Johnson & Johnson, Mondelez, Chevron, Exxon, Citigroup, Coca-Cola etc. etc.

The earnings that they have already today are just unbelievable and even though many of them are present world wide they still have many regions to grow into... if those regions start to have buying power by increased salaries, increased education & increased job opportunities that is.

The though that I had was... when will be the best moment to buy one of these American giants? The conclusion I reached was that the best moment will be to buy it when it is out of favour.

Dalal Street Q1/Q2 2012: Mohnish Pabrai

Mohnish Pabrai is a tech guy that started a successful company sold it for a lot money. Started a second company and failed badly. He then changed profession and started to make investments instead. He adopted the old partnership contract that Warren Buffett had with: No yearly fee. Every year when the profit is above 6% for those %-age above Mohnish gets 25%. Ex. Yearly profit (gain) of 10% that means that you get 9% and Mohnish gets 1% of your gain. It is a very reasonable deal and I understand that value investors with some cash in the luggage are knocking on his door.

Annual report 2012 E.ON.

So today I spent some time to dig into the annual report from E.ON. SE. Lately they have been pounded pretty well by the Mr. Market. First it was in the end of 2012 mainly due to that they decided to decrease the dividend payment for 2013 to probably 50 or 60% of the profit. Then now in February/March the stock market slaughtered E.ON. again due to that their investment in Brazil is running far from smoothly. The partner that they joined up with is apparently close to or is maybe even insolvent.

Associated British Foods

The seventh stock I bought was Associated British Foods. This company was a classic Peter Lynch buy. I all of a sudden discovered that people were standing around on the streets, in the U-bahn, in S-bahn with bags and bags filled with cloths. On the bag was written Primark. I therefore started digging to find out what kind of company this was and if it was possible to buy stocks there. Happily it was possible to do so! Associated British Foods is a fairly interesting company.