Summary of February 2014

So I have finally decided upon the summary picture and as you can see it is a previously published picture that I decided to change a little.
Currently I am in Delhi attending and presenting at a conference here. The schedule is tough so I do not know if I will have the time to make interesting investor observations concerning what they buy, use etc. but I will try my very best especially since I assume that after China then India will boom just before Africa gets started with their boom. My head is also a little foggy so there might be more spelling errors than usual.

With my own company things are still hard but there is a faint light in the end of the tunnel. I expect that I will be able to start investing again during next month and I am seriously looking forward to this since I found some very nice new candidates in February but in the end I went for one of the old ones since it had dropped so much in price. Oh, well, next month is a new month for investing!

Contrarian stock bought March 2014: Kernel

When I came back to my hotel room after a shopping session in Old Delhi I discovered that yet again one of my stocks had dropped like a stone and this time it was not the usual one: Asian Bamboo but it was my Ukrainian agricultural and logistics company Kernel. If you want to look at the analysis of it then please look here. I checked on their home page if there were any indication of changed fundamentals of the company and since I saw nothing I assumed that the reason is due to the potential war between Ukraine and Russia.

War is a well known reason for strong drops in stock markets as well as in individual stocks. The reason for that has usually been that all the speculators get scared and run away and it can provide excellent moments for value investors to get stocks cheap.

No matter what happens people will still need to eat and they will still need sunflower oil. Therefore the fundamentals have not changed even if the environment around Kernel currently is turbulent. There will be trouble and there will be hard times but things tend to bounce back and I hope that things will not escalate into war.

So I increased my stock portfolio with 160 Kernel shares at a price of 6.23 which with fees give me now a total of 360 shares for 9.79 € a piece. Already before this investment the shares have been slowly dropping, which I assume, has been mainly due to decreased sale of sunflower oil which is the main profit driver.

With the next update of the monthly report the new change will be brought in to the Stock Portfolio.

Analysis of Associated British Foods (ABF) 2013

Company: Associated British Foods

Business:  A British conglomerate with traditionally main focus towards agriculture and agricultural products. Currently they have five pillars: Sugar (20% of revenue), Agriculture (10% of revenue), Retail (30% of revenue), Grocery (30% of revenue) and Ingredients (less than 10% of the revenue). Their fastest growing part is Retail with the low-price chain called Primark.

Active in: Main focus since long time has been the UK and Australia and they are currently expanding strongly in the rest of EU especially with the retail part.

P/E: 39.6

Associated British Foods (ABF) annual report 2013

First of all I must say that I am embarrassed and sorry for completely dropping the ball on this one! I This report came out already in November 2013 due to that ABF is running a broken year. I downloaded the report and read it but completely forgot to make either a summary of it or to publish a  new analysis of it. So for that reason both are coming now and my deepest apology for this ball drop. I can no longer remember how the stock market responded to the news but ABF has increased substantially in value on the market that it was probably accepted pretty ok.

All the information given here can be found in the annual report that is published here.

German inside trading: February 2014

The German inside trading in February was very modest I must say. Only some minor changes here and there which made it very easy for me to construct the list!

Here the dealings come: