Happy New Year 2015

Yet another year has gone past in tremendously high speed. By the look of it the older one gets the faster the years fly by!

I remember that it was around this time last year that my business partner called me up and said that the trouble I thought we had managed to take us out of (by cutting my salary to half during the entire second half of 2013) still had not left and that we would be hit with a, from our perspective, huge tax payment in January 2014 that would later on be followed with some hefty patent costs as frosting on the cake.

My new year back then was not so happy even though I managed to push it out of my mind by at least coming up with a strategy for not going insolvent and how to move further. It did work out even without us being forced to take plan B (which meant privately lending money to the company) and my company is still alive and kicking today. This meant that we managed to avoid going insolvent twice during 2014 and in total my company has had such issues four times but I am not yet ready to throw in the towel.

The other big thing that happened during 2014 was that I moved into my girlfriends apartment. Both of us take up very little space which means that we can live in harmony on 43 m2 (including the balcony) with a rent of less than 450 € per month which means I can save more money each month in comparison to before. The move, which has previously in my life financially set me back to square one, costed, this time, physical labour and not even one tank of gas for my car. I am still amazed at what one can transport in a small car with things hanging out all according to regulations (one meter without any indication, three meter with a red flag).

For 2015 I wish all of us good health and plenty of interesting investment opportunities that we must follow and sniff out with our noses!

For my previous New Year thoughts please see Happy New Year.

Dividend summary 2014

The first year of investment I received 461 € in dividends. The second year I received a total of 1,367 € however from this 653 € was due to selling share rights to Commerzbank, leaving 714 € in real dividends. This year I received a total of 1,025 € in dividends of which 70 € were due to sale of rights leaving me with 955 € in real dividends. So the yearly dividends are increasing year by year as it also should.

The dividend that I am receiving based on my total stock portfolio is at a little more than 2 % (for the last three years) which came as a surprise to me. I was expecting it to be higher but on the other hand I do not follow the dividend strategy so why should I receive a high %-age at all?

Even though I do not follow the dividend strategy but the contrarian one I still like to see that the dividends are increasing for each year and I am happy to see that it also have done that for the last three years.

Dividend from BP: December 2014

The British oil giant BP once again paid out a nice dividend to me. I receiver 0.063769 GBP per share and since I have 354 shares this gives me in total 22.57 GBP that gets converted into 28.67 €. On this I also pay 7.56 € in taxes and 21.11 € ended up as cash on my account.

Lately the entire oil industry have entered into a difficult period with strongly decreased oil prices which will hit especially small producers with little to no down-stream. All the big oil giants have both to leverage against such changes.

To get a closer look on BP then please see the analysis of BP 2014.

To see my total dividend flow then please visit the Stock Dividends page that has now been updated. 

Analysis of Scherzer

Company: Scherzer

ISIN DE0006942808 | WKN 694280

Business: A German investment company. They focus on three parts: Unknown (500-1000 stocks without analyst coverage), Unloved (due to restructuring, temporary problems in the sector or due to misunderstood business model) and finally Special Situations (mergers, take-overs and squeeze-outs as an example they have plenty of MAN (an old analysis of MAN) shares at the moment).

Active: Only within German jurisdiction.

P/E: 7.4

The stock portfolio development 2014

Since my target in the end is to reach 750 k€ invested on the stock market that will be my retirement fund I should not forget to every now and then look at the development for reaching this target.

Merry Christmas 2014

This is the first time ever that I have my own Christmas tree! It looks frugal as it should look being in my household. Underneath is however a bit too many gifts. The new rule this year was to buy one gift to a maximum value of 50 €. By the look of it, it semi-worked. The gifts, even though still too many due to coming from the entire family, have significantly decreased and this will do us all well for the future.

As I budget everything I also notice that the food bill have significantly increased during December. We needed to buy baking products for baking Christmas cookies. Food for the Christmas dinner includes meat that we would usually not buy neither in the quantity or price level and also fish that tends to be very expensive here in Berlin.

Already yesterday I started cooking for the Christmas dinner with a Christmas ham (julskinka), meatballs and a red root salad. Today I will boil potatoes, eggs, make the Janssons frestelse, Christmas porridge and re-heat everything that needs that to be able to make an acceptable julbord tonight!

I am currently thinking about giving myself, as a Christmas gift, a salary increase in 2015. If I do it and my company will be able to support it then I should be able, all other things remain the same, to make almost two investments each month which should then push up my yearly investments to around 20k € from my targeted 12k € that I have today.

Anyway... Merry Christmas to you all! I wish you a peaceful Christmas with your family and friends.

My previous greeting and thoughts in 2013 can be found in Merry Christmas!.

Analysis of TUI Group 2014

Company: TUI Group

ISIN DE000TUAG000 | WKN TUAG00

Business: A German-U.K. travelling company that recently merged. So previous TUI and TUI Travel merged into the TUI Group. They currently have three segments: Mainstream (with tour operators, hotels & resorts and cruises), Non-Mainstream (with online accommodation and specialist & activity) and finally Container Shipping (held for disposal)

Active: 31 countries world wide servicing 31 million customers per year.

P/E: 41.7

Comment: The data is based on the annual report which only involves TUI and are not showing the effect of the merger.

A danger of running a blog

I tend to look at myself as a fairly solid, down to earth person that are stubborn and likes to walk my own way. I read a massive amount of annual and quarter reports, I read plenty of newspaper articles (not exclusively financial), I read all the blogs that I follow and then some and even company press releases (only from my companies though!).

It is a massive flow of the written word that is bombarding me each and every day. In most cases this is by what I would call dead words. By that I mean that the words were not written to me specifically but generally for every one. Comments however, written for me on the blog or on other blogs that I read, are more "alive".

I was not expecting this but I must surrender and admit that I am getting influenced by comments when I run this blog. I can still not evaluate if this has been or will be in the future good or bad for me. Today I just need to admit that they do influence me and I hope that it will be for the good for me in the long run and that it will help me to improve my investment result.

Analysis of Nordex 2014

Company: Nordex

ISIN DE000A0D6554 | WKN A0D655

Business: A German wind power producer. They stand on three pillars: Wind turbines (single sale of units), Project services (planning and selling entire wind power parks) & Service (which includes also upgrading of older units).

Active: Present in 34 countries (mainly Europe and America) with 6,179 installed wind turbines.

P/E: 119.7

Comment: I was hoping that Nordex would be looking good due to that the share price has increased so much since the last analysis but that is just it. Yes they as a company has done well so no loss this time but the share price is a but crazy...

Analysis of Kurzemes

Company: Kurzemes

ISIN LV0000100949 | WKN A0M21D

Business: A Latvian animal company. They stand on mainly three pillars: Bulls (breeding and semen production), Boars (breeding and semen production) and finally Insemination Stations (main revenue from cow insemination).

Active: As of yet only in Latvia but are cooperating with the entire Europe.

P/E: 10.4

Comment: This company is too small for me but I found it charming to read that they explicit write in the annual report that they had to buy a new car and how much that costed them. Still due to that it is so small one can actually become a larger shareholder which I find funny and secondly these breeding and insemination "companies" are all over Europe but in most countries they are not on the stock market but are owned by the farmers themselves. In Kurzemes the Latvian farmers own only 37.25%.

Analysis of Best Buy 2014

Company: Best Buy

ISIN US0865161014 | WKN 873629

Business: An American home electronics retail chain. They have two pillars that they stand on: The Stores (1,400 of which 70% of the Americans can reach in 15 minutes receiving professional advice and help with their home electronics) and the Web Store (that together with the stores have more than 1.5 billion visits each year).

Active: In the US, Canada, China and Mexico.

P/E: 24.0

Comment: As I have mentioned I will keep mixing of making analysis of new companies with an update of especially the companies with negative earnings on the All company analysis list and Best Buy is part of that update.

"Dividend" from Tessenderlo: December 2014

It is not correct to call it dividend, because it is a sale of the pre-emptive rights that I received and decided to forsake, but I have decided to call all given money from companies for the sake of simplicity dividend and I will report the money in the dividend page.

I received 45 rights and they were sold for 1.548527 € giving me a total of 69.68 € and I have to pay taxes in the size of 7.29 €, I must admit that I had forgotten the tax payment when I calculated the benefit of selling the pre-emptive rights in comparison to buying more of them so in the end I will re-calculate what actually would have been the most favourable way.

If you want to find out more about Tessenderlo then please go to the analysis of Tessenderlo.

To check out my current dividend payment history then please visit the Stock Dividends page which has now been updated.

Back to the school bench again

After some set backs I am, soon to be, a full time student again!

I realised some time ago that I could make online studies for free at Swedish Universities (since I am still a Swedish citizen) and that some of the courses even means that one does not have to be present for writing the exams. Excellent!

I therefore signed up on the online portal that deals with all the applications and I even tried to apply late for some courses that started back in September. I never got any of those places which I found a bit disturbing because from my days as a "real" student I got accepted to practically everything I applied to.

So there seemed to be a smelly fish in the back seat!

Analysis of Fyffes

Company: Fyffes

ISIN IE0003295239 | WKN 875263

Business: An Irish importer of tropical fruits. They have four segments: Bananas, Pineapples, Melons and Fruit Snacks. They are working intensively with the entire supply chain from the farms, to the shippers all the way to their won distribution and ripening centres.

Active: In Windward Islands, Belize, Costa Rica, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Ivory Coast, Honduras, Cameroon, Brazil and Peru, Panama and Ecuador are the farm sites and sales are in Europe and the US.

P/E: 16.3

Dividend from IBM: December 2014

My second American company, IBM, paid also out dividend so that I can afford to buy a Christmas tree this year. Actually I managed to get the Christmas tree cheaper (it costed 10 €) than what they paid me still it is a pity that I must buy one at all. I prefer the north Swedish way of simply going into the forest and cutting down the tree to the annoyance of the forest owner but maybe they can write it off on the taxes as a donation to the population so maybe they do not really care either.

For my 16 shares in IBM I received 1.10 USD per share which gave in total 17.60 USD that became 14.19 € from this I paid 2.13 € in taxes and I received 12.06 € on my account. Due to the change in USD/EUR I received more € out this quarter than the previous.

If you want to know more about IBM then please visit analysis of IBM 2014.

To check out my current dividend payment history then please visit the Stock Dividends page which has now been updated.

Working population in various countries

I actually took a look at this data and collected all the information several months ago but then I kind of lost track of it. Probably due to that the report season started for quarter three. Anyway now I start to be back on track again so I then decided to make an article concerning it.

The starting point was that I found it strange that the unemployment level is so low in Germany (around 5%) but at the same time I see so many people, probably especially here in Berlin, that unfortunately are forced to live on social welfare.

Analysis of Polytec

Company: Polytec

ISIN AT0000A00XX9 | WKN A0JL31

Business: An Austrian automotive supplier that have around two thirds of their workforce in Germany. They have four business units: Plastics (injection moulded components for engine compartments and vehicle interiors and exteriors), Composites (SMC exterior parts to the European commercial vehicles industry), Car Styling (accessories, small series parts and systems for the automotive world) and finally Industrial (plastic moulded parts and polyurethane coatings for a wide range of industrial applications)

Active:  In Austria, Germany, Hungary, Belgium, Netherlands, UK, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Turkey, Canada, USA, China.

P/E: 10.3

RSS Feeds for simplicity

Today something hit me due to an article publish on Old School Value. He had there produced a Google spreadsheet to compile and separate news from his different companies because he did not like that all of them ended up in one long list. This for him meant that the "hot" companies ended up eating all the space of the feed and drained out any news from the other not hot companies.

My first thought was why use a spreadsheet and why not just import the RSS feeds concerning the companies directly to Outlook, Thunderbird or the blog for that matter and then only add them as separate feeds under the company name?

My second thought was darn, why am I not getting the news feeds myself from my companies?

I mean, I use RSS feeds all the time. I use it for work to stay updated with the important journals in my field, I use it on the blog to stay updated with what other bloggers are publishing, heck I even produce my own on this blog! I have after each quarter or annual report taken a look in the financial calendar to see when the next report should arrive and then added that to my calendar to make sure I do not miss something which has been pretty annoying and I have even missed some reports...

By getting the RSS feed I will then get all this information directly plus additional things concerning the progress of my companies. My fear is that I might end up getting married to the companies due to too much information. Future will tell and by the look of things I seem to be married to most of them already.

Anyway, upon this realisation, I directly went to all the homepages of my companies and added their RSS feeds to my Outlook account, each company in its own little folder and sometimes they offer several feeds that I have now just baked into one heading under their name in Outlook.

Funny how one can sometimes not see what is directly in front of ones nose.

End of year overview 2014

The end of the year is near and for that reason it is a good time to look over all the investments again. The reasons for why I bought shares have not changed since last year so for all the old stocks you can go to the previous report called End of year overview of my contrarian stocks 2013. The old companies will however still be brought up with how much value they have generated (share price * shares + dividend - trading fees) and if there has been any new lesson learnt then that will also be brought up.

Extra investment December: ETF Russia

I guess I must call this an investment side-track that I have now started up. Happily it covers two advantages at the same time:

1. That I start to buy index funds just like I said that I would do when I did not manage to perform better than index after five years of investing (I still have two years to go!).
2. The index funds will be bought in pushed down markets so it will still be contrarian as it also must be done by me or else my blog need to change name.

I was and I still am, probably even more so now, very interested in Russian companies. To own individual companies I found difficult and for that reason an ETF of the Russian index turns out to be a perfect option for me.

What I therefore bought was a replicated, dividend paying, 0.6% fee ETF Russia from HSBC (ISIN DE000A1JXC86, WKN A1JXC8). Of this ETF I bought 135 parts which including fees I ended up paying 1013.65 € in total for or 7.51 € per part.

To take a look at my current Stock Portfolio then please click on that link. The portfolio will however not be fully updated until the end of the month.

The forest of ETFs

I have made few posts concerning ETFs but I have thought plenty about it and I have been digging a little also. Today the ETF market is a jungle. I get the feeling that once someone has established a new system that starts to attract investors then pretty soon every financial institute start up plenty of "products" in that field so that you can hardly see the individual trees due to the forest.

Today there are ETFs covering every field you can think of (index, large cap, small cap, regions, segments, commodities etc.) and too make matters even worse there are even long and short and leveraged ETFs. The ETFs can also be physical replications (meaning the bank/broker actually own the shares) or they can be SWAPS (meaning that an agreement has been made between your ETF and a third part that holds the money). There are ETFs paying out dividends and there are ETFs that directly re-invested the dividends.

Analysis of Eurokai

Company: Eurokai

ISIN DE0005706535 | WKN 570653

Business: A German container and logistics holding company. They stand on two pillars: with 83.3% of the shares in Contship Italia S.p.A., as well as 50% of EUROGATE GmbH & Co. KGaA, KG.

Active: They run container terminals at the seaports of Gioia Tauro, La Spezia, Cagliari, Ravenna and Salerno in Italy, in Hamburg, Bremerhaven and Wilhelmshaven in Germany, in Lisbon in Portugal, Tangier in Morocco and in Ust-Luga  in Russia.

P/E: 16.3

Comment: This company appeared as much more exciting in the screeners. The Eckelman family owns 75% of the shares. Half of the shares are voting shares and the other half non-voting shares.

Dividend from Intel: December 2014

The forth and final dividend payment from Intel arrived just recently. I directly see on my broker account that some extra cash has arrived but I am then never informed how much taxes were taken so for that reason I always wait until I receive the paper with the mail before I make a publication.

Intel paid exactly the same as last quarter so 0.225 USD per share. This means that I received 22.50 USD for my 100 shares of Intel. There has been some changes in the USD/EUR exchange rate so I received 18.01 € this time. From that was removed 2.71 € in taxes and I received 15.30 € on my broker account.

Since spring 2014 the share price of Intel have rushed like crazy from 17.70 € to now being around 30 € and I start to be uncomfortable owning them. I hope that the earnings of the full year 2014 will justify their latest market valuation.

If you want to see more about Intel then please go here for the analysis of Intel 2014.

To check out my current dividend payment history then please visit the Stock Dividends page which has now been updated.

Analysis of SMT Scharf

Company: SMT Scharf

ISIN DE0005751986 | WKN 575198

Business: A German mining industry supplier. The SMT Scharf Group designs, supplies, installs and maintains systems for the transport of personnel, equipment and material. The products are: Monorail transport systems, Floor-mounted rail systems, Chairlift systems for mining, personnel transport, Cable handling systems and Conveyors.

Active: In Germany, Ukraine, Russia, South Africa, Poland and China. They are of course selling their equipment world wide but the major hubs and sales point are the ones mentioned.

P/E: 19.4

Stock bought December 2014: Talanx

As I mentioned yesterday I was very much interested in increasing the piggy bank part of my investment portfolio. By piggy bank I mean a solid, boring company that pay out a good dividend with a low risk of going belly-up. Since before I already have Münchener Rückversicherung (analysis of MüRe 2014) for this purpose and I thought that I had bought E.On (analysis of E.On 2014) for that very same purpose but in that case it turned out to be a wrong decision since not only have the share price dropped like a stone but they have also cut the dividends during my ownership.

In an attempt to receive a new piggy bank I therefore bought 40 shares in the German insurance company Talanx that are traded on the MDAX and that also owns around 50% of Hannover Rückversicherung (analysis of Hannover Rückversicherung 2014) if I remember correctly. For my 40 shares I paid including fees 1012.18 € which means that I paid 25.30 € per share.

Last year they paid out 1.2 € per share in dividend and I hope to at least receive the same during next year since it then only corresponded to 40% of their earnings and the running nine months are looking pretty flat compared to 2013.

To find out more about Talanx then please click on analysis of Talanx 2014 and to take a look at my current Stock Portfolio then please click on that link. The portfolio will however not be fully updated until the end of the month.

Stocks of Interest: December 2014

It is once again time to look over the lists to find out which new investment that should be made here in December. As you might have seen I managed to push in some cash on my broker account so they should and will directly be put to work.

For the previous publication please click on Stocks of Interest: November 2014.