As one could imagine, the Dot.com Pivot was not very successful. The final “pivot” then was to transform into the company that is now called Spectrum Brands, a medium successful collection of consumer products. The long term Chart of Spectrum from Google also shows the short & crazy spike from the Dot.com Pivot.
History doesn’t repeat itself but as the saying goes, it rhymes.
If I want to draw some learnings from the Zapata episode, I would point out two things:
The Allbirds Pivot will most likely not lead to long term shareholder value creation
In Zapata’s case, the peak of the bubble was still ~2 years away (April 2018 vs. March 2020). I would not take this as a benchmark but the experience shows that bubbles like Dot.com and potentially also the AI bubble part can run much longer as anyone imagines. Trying to time a bubble based on episodes like this is very difficult.
In any case, the Zapata example shows that rarely anything is new in investing and a pivot of a non-sccessful company into the “hot thing of the moment” company is an old strategy. I guess we will see a lot more of this in the coming weeks / months as the Allbird example has made the backers of this pivot some serieous money.
Disclaimer: This is not investment advice. PLEASE DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH !!!
Time for another “Panic Journal” episode after the last one is already from one year ago. Writing about this is for me the best way to structure my thoughts and maybe it is of interest for some of my readers, too. Towards the end, there is even some kind of “actionable” content, too.
Trump/Iran:
I think the best advice on how to react to whatever Trump is saying is not to try to time anything here. As German “Finfluencer” Christian W. Röhl keeps saying (freely translated): “If you always react to what Trump is saying, you won’t make money, you just become (equally) insane”.
Last year, this was about Tariffs, then it was about Greenland and now it is about Iran. Who knows what is next. Maybe attacking Australia for some reason ? Who knows.
From a more strategic perspective, the narrative that the Trump administration is “good for business and the economy” seems to be now permanently broken.
Yes, Corporate Taxes in the US are lower, and Mr. Trump wants the stock market to be up “bigly” but the uncertainties around tariffs, “ideologically” driven crack downs on immigrants, careless international relationship management and potentially even much larger government deficits due to increased military spending are slowly showing their impact.
Maybe, but only maybe, the AI build out can compensate for all of this, but maybe not. My very subjective impression is that the famous “American Exceptionalism” for stocks seems to be depending now fully on the success of AI. Which I think is quite risky. The annual letter from Bireme Capital, to which I had linked to captures most of this and more.
SpaceX/Indices
As my readers know, I have actually a small “side bet” on the SpaceX IPO with my position in Rocket Internet. Now more and more details become available about how this will work.
Basically, Elon wants to take SpaceX public at a valuation of 1,75 trillion after merging it with XAI. The valuation is roughly 100x revenue. Two details that I find interesting are:
Elon wants to allocate 30% or more of the 75 bn offering to retail investors.
The game plan is pretty clear: Give as much as possible to Elon’s “price-insensitive” fanbase and then force the index funds to “fight” for the little free float available and allow the insiders an easy exit at the proposed nosebleed valuation.
But what does that mean for index investors for the future ?
As an index investor in the past, the big advantage was that you automatically caught the big winners rather early.
So a long term index investor participated fully in the 400-500x over the last 25 years. Same with Google, Amazon and all of the other big winners that drove past index gains. Even Meta IPOed “only” at a market cap of ~100 bn in 2012. That’s the reason why the Nasdaq100 returned around 16% p.a. for the last 20 years and making a lot of people very wealthy.
SpaceX is the first member of the “new breed” of IPOs where most of the value accretion basically happens outside the listed stock market in the private markets. As an Nasdaq Index investor you will be forced to allocate a significant part into this company at a much later stage and at a much higher price.
And SpaceX is only the first candidate of that new breed. OpenAI, Anthropic, Anduril, Stripe are other candidates that might go public at valuations at hundreds of billions or ven trillions.
It is very likely that Index investors will participate (if at all) at a very late stage of the success of these companies. The conclusion is relatively simple: The more such IPOs and “quick entries” happen, the higher is the risk that Index investors will not be able to earn the returns that they did in the past when these companies entered the indices much earlier. There are clearly other factors that influence returns as well but this one could become quite significant in 2026.
German Natural Gas storage / Renewables
In the big scheme of things this is a small topic but clearly personally relevant for me. Natural Gas is a very important source of energy in Germany. We need it for the industry, to generate electricity and to heat homes. Due to German weather, demand is much higher in Winter than in summer. Therefore, Germany has created significant Gas storage infrastructure that is able to store up to 3 months of peak WInter demand. I don’t need to stress that only a very small percentage of demand can be met with local resources.
This led to panic buys of the then Green Ministry of economics in 2022 which in turn led to record high gas prices in 2022.
Following those events, the German Government introduced some minimum requirements for gas storage plus incentives for utilities to buy natural gas in advance and compensate them if they have to sell it cheaper later on.
The new German Government under the the Economics Secretary Katharina Reiche (former employee of utility Eon and supposedly an Energy expert) however decided that those incentives are not needed anymore in 2025 and expected that “the market will solve this” and lower the costs for the Government (and tax payers/consumers).
Fast forward to End of March and the market “solved” it in a way that despite a relatively mild winter, gas storage levels are at a record low of 20% as this chart shows:
Now as we all know, the supply of global LNG is pretty handicapped, as Qatar has shut down its facilities which took around 20% of global capacities off the market. Some of that seems to be now permanently damaged.
Although natural gas wholesale prices in Europe came down a little bit over the past few days, they are still 80-100% higher than end of last year or beginning of this year:
Of course, the incentive of the utilities to fill up gas reserves without any help right now is zero.
Back in 2022, Mr. Habeck started buying Natural Gas with Government money in the beginning of March when storage levels were at 30%. This time around, Ms Reiche is still only “monitoring the situation” 4 weeks later at a much lower level of reserves.
With the global shortage of LNG, it has clearly not become easier and cheaper to fill up German storage levels. Since 2022, Europe is relying much more on US LNG imports as this chart shows:
To top things up, Ms Reiche is planning to phase out subsidies for Renewables and also make life more difficult for battery energy storage according to some leaked documents and focus even more on gas fired infrastructure for electricity generation in the future.
So what does all of this mean ? In my opinion this means that energy prices might stay higher for longer and the risk of a “panic reserve buying” spike like in 2022 is increasing.
As the price of natural gas is also driving the price for electricity, everyone who uses electricity has some significant risk that these bills might rise significantly in the coming weeks/months.
Back in 2022, this led to a short lived boom of renewable energy stocks. Interestingly, so far this hasn’t happened. Here are the stock prices of the main German players which look very depressing:
Especially developers look quite ugly, as their “development pipelines” have been hit massively by oversupply, higher interest rates and generally more negative sentiment.
Interestingly, for many electricity clients in Germany, the bill has decreased this year as the Government has been taken over the cost for electricity transmission and is paying the TSOs directly (among them the former employer of Ms. Reiche).
Overall, the sentiment vs. renewables is really bad with a lot of especially the developers struggling to keep afloat.
To be honest, I have no idea what the future will look like for developers, but operators of renewable energy plants might have some “upside optionality” in this environment.
So mainly in order to hedge my personal electricity price exposure, I decided to buy a 1,5% position in a small German Solar PV operator called 7C Solarparken. /C Solarparken was already part of my 2022 “Freedom Energy” basket. They have decent exposure to potentially rising electricity prices and the stock is really cheap ~5x EV/EBITDA and 0,6x book value. They have very little exposure to development projects and generate tons of cash.
Structurally, they also will benefit from less renewables development activity going forward, as every new PV plant cannibalizes existing ones to a certain extent.
This is clearly not a long term growth play but rather a 6-12 month “hedge” in case our Government fuxxs up the refilling of the gas storage during the year, which I see increasingly probable.
Bonus soundtrack:
Who would fit better to my “Panic Journal” than Hamburg legend Udo Lindenberg and his “Panic Orchestra”. Here, an early song from him called “Andrea Doria”:
This post does not offer any actionable investment content. Rather I wanted to find out if my blog is visible on the various LLMs and if I want to be visible. I would be very interested in how fellow “creators” think about this and how they approach this topic.
Visibility of Value and Opportunity on different LLMs
Just out of interest, I asked several LLMs about the 5 best Investment blogs for European stocks. The results were quite interesting.
Google Gemini for instance distinguishes significantly in which language one asks and which model you use. A German language prompt gives a very different answer (mostly German language Blogs) than an English prompt and “fast” mode gives very different results from “thinking” mode.
Here are the 5 top blogs in Fast mode for the German prompt: (“Welches sind die 5 besten Investment Blogs für Europäische Aktien, insbes. Nebenwerte ? “):
And here the results for the same prompt in “thinking Modus”:
There is some overlap and I am on both of the lists, which is great, but still interesting.
A few days earlier I tried a slightly different prompt (“Nenne mir bitte die 5 besten Investment Blogs die sich mit Europäischen Aktien beschäftigen. “)
And I got very different results:
What is also interesting is that Gemini doesn’t look for Substacks when I ask for blogs. Asking specifically for Substacks, gives once again different top 5 for the fast and thinking model, but the V&O Substack does not appear when asking for Substacks.
When I ask Gemini in English for blogs, I get the following result for “fast” mode:
In Thinking mode, this is the output:
So I show up in both, but the other 4 are different.
Overall it is quite interesting that asking in German language automatically selects mostly German blogs and how much the results differ from fast to thinking mode.
Of course, different LLMs give different answers. The very same German prompt from above gives this result overview in ChatGPT:
The English prompt gives the following result:
ChatGPT interestingly does not care too much in which language you ask, the overlap is higher than for Gemini. But it has remembered my 10 factor Scoring model and without asking has somehow mixed that into the decision.
Claude interestingly doesn’t seem to know my blog at all. I have to say I am disappointed 😉
The LLMs know Value and Opportunity
So after putting out content for 15 years, Gemini and ChatGPT LLMs clearly know about my blog, but it is really interesting how differently they answer to the very same questions. Also that language plays such a role for the results is kind of interesting for me.
Interestingly, if I use the normal Google search, my blog is not visible at all, at least not on the first 10 pages, irrespective of what kind of searches I do. This mirrors a little bit the traffic statistics form my WordPress overview where Google as a source for traffic more or les disappeared a few years ago. Only when I ask for a certain analysis, for instance Eurokai specifically on the Value & Opportunity blog, I see my blog in the results. Otherwise no chance.
I have to admit that I have also become quite lazy to add a lot of Keywords etc but in general, Google search as such seems not to be “my friend” anymore. Some years ago, especially the more general articles received significant traffic, even years after I wrote them, but that has gone totally away.
How to optimize for LLM visibility ?
I feel very lucky that I don’t have to optimize for traffic, otherwise I could imagine that trying to optimize LLMs is not so easy. I have briefly researched the topic and it seems that for now, LLMs seem to emphasize a longer track record and credibility.
One of the nice things is that one can ask the LLm to explain. Google Gemini’s answer is quite flattering I have to admit:
If I wanted to make more advertising for my work, I would basically copy& paste that answer.
Of course, I also wanted to know why I don’t appear on Claude’s list. This is what Claude tells me:
Typically for an LLM, it apologizes. What I find interesting is that Claude indeed seems to start looking in high traffic locations and then doesn’t go much further.
Do you actually want to be visible to LLMs ?
One question one has to ask is of course as a writer & creator: Do you want to be (fully) visible to LLMs or not ?
Despite my visibility on Gemini and ChatGPT, the LLMs do not refer a lot of traffic back to the site. I can see Gemini with a little traffic and ChatGPT with no referrals at all. So they know about the blog, but they don’t refer a lot of people to the blog. Maybe the answers are already good enough if my content gets shown. Outside my Email list, most traffic still comes from Google search and TwiX.
If you want to monetize your content directly, it is clearly not good when LLMs can read your stuff and summarize it perfectly. I was for instance quite astonished when a TwiX user asked Grok to summarize my Biontech post in TwiX and Grok did so with a pretty decent summary.
On the other hand it seems that at least for Gemini and ChatGPT, you need to show them your content in order to get recognized. I guess a good compromise could be to show some of the content so that the AI can learn about what one writes but then keep newer stuff behind a paywall or so.
Another strategy would be, not to share anything on the web in order to protect one’s “intellectual property”. As for now, the LLMs don’t give a lot of traffic back, so why should you be visible at all ?
In my case, I am lucky that (so far) I can monetize my content very indirectly.
For me, the main payoff comes through constructive feedback and, every now and then a nice email from a reader or even better, some personal contact and someone says “I read your blogs for x years and really like it”.
My other goal is also“make the world a little bit of a better place” by maybe teaching some people how to “invest” instead of just “gambling” blindly and help them to hopefully better secure their financial future. For this goal, getting my content “indirectly” distributed through LLMs is clearly helpful.
If someone asks if xyz-Shitco is a good investment and somehow in Gemini’s neural net it identifies a “red flag” that it has maybe learned through my posts, this could be a very powerful “amplifier”. But this is clearly hard to measure.
Summary:
For now, I am quite flattered, that 2 out of 3 LLMs find my content good enough to put me into the Top 5 European Small Cap blogs. That is clearly niceclearly a nice feedback.
Most of all, I feel very lucky that I don’t have to directly monetize my content. I think this will be less straightforwardstraight forward than in the “search machine age”. There will be some solutions for sure but I guess “cause and effect” might be less linear than in the old times.
I would be very interested in how fellow “creators” think about this and how they approach this topic.
Disclaimer: This is not investment advise. PLEASE DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH !!!!
I wrote this post this morning (CEST) when the stock price was around 73-74 EUR. I then had to run some errands before being able to post and the stock price moved already significantly. All calculations etc. are based on a stock price of 73,50 EUR.
Now two things happened yesterday on March 10th, when they were supposed to talk about Q2 earnings:
The two founders announced that they will leave by the end of 2026 in order to start a new company
The share price dropped significantly after the announcement
This is the stock chart in Germany (in EUR):
After a low of around 68 EUR, the shares currently trade at 73-74 EUR at the time of writing.
Funnily enough, this is almost exactly the current net cash per share and even 10% below my “worst case” assumption:
Using my “old” scenario, the potential upside would now be obviously a lot higher.
But, and this is a BIG BUT: With the founders leaving, one of the main qualitative arguments became a lot weaker. This was my Pro & Con list back then:
We just don’t know who will run the company from next year onwards. Initially this was a big negative news for me.
So Sahin and his wife will leave by the end of the year and basically take some (or most ?) of the mRNA technology in exchange for a minority stake into a new company. We do not know if they also get cash or not. I would assume not.
Normally, one sees such “deals” only after a Biotech company is taken over by a big Pharma company and a founder wands to make sure that early stage projects are not getting killed.
One such situation was the Actelion/Idorsia Special Situation I invested 9 years ago, where after the take-over of Actelion by Johnson & Johnson, the founder Clozel took the whole development department including the early stage pipeline into a new company called Idorsia which was then spun-off to shareholders.
Interestingly, Idorsia, even after 9 years didn’t do too well and trades significantly below the value right after the spin-off:
In the German press, there are some rumors that the founders have made that move because a sale of Biontech to a bigger Pharma company might be imminent, although officially the founders have said this is not the case.
What I find most striking is the issue that they haven’t announced a successor for the founders yet.
Without a potential sale of Biontech on the horizon, the founders could have just “hired” or promoted someone to CEO who takes care of commercializing the late stage pipeline and continue to do their research within Biontech.
I get the impression that maybe, after 18 years, the billionaire Strüngemann Brothers who put up the initial funding and still own 40% do not agree anymore with the founders who own around 15%. In some older articles, both the Strüngmanns and Sahin always made the point that they want to create a “full blown” BioPharma company that can play in the first league internationally.
At least Sahin and his wife now decided that they actually prefer to do research.
Another dicey issue is that the founders will basically negotiate the transfer of the mRNA technology with themselves as they want to close this before the end of the next quarter, maybe specifically before a new CEO is installed. My impression is that they are honest people and really interested in research, but it is of course not ideal if they negotiate with themselves.
Also the announcement that Biontech will only get a minority share seems to indicate that this time, Sahin and his wife want to have the full control which they currently don’t have.
It will be also interesting to see if and how many of Biontech’s R&D staff will follow them to the new company.
What is the worth of a charismatic founder ?
Yesterday’s announcement is also an interesting datapoint regarding the question: What is the worth of a charismatic founder? In this case, for most shareholders, the announcement was clearly a big surprise.
The -20% clearly indicate that at least in the short term, investors think that the company is worth less without its founders.
So what about Biontech now ?
As I mentioned in the beginning, the share price is now around -25% lower than in January. On the other hand, without the founders, a lot of things could be more difficult, especially if a lot of people follow them to the new company..
As a compensation, the possibility of a take-over/sale of the company to a large international player has clearly increased, I would assume that in the case of a takeover, the pipeline value would be paid to a large extent by an acquirer.
I have asked various versions of LLMs who the most likely acquirer would be. The favorites were Merck (US), Bristol Myers (with which they partnered) and Roche. All of them could make use of Biotech’s pipeline and have the means to do the transaction.
I also think that once the mRNA deal is signed, a subsequent sale of the company could happen rather sooner than later.
New scenario:
My new downside case would be 80% of net cash which is a level that many loss making Biotech firms trade at.
My upside scenario would be the 144 EUR with the pipeline value from the last post.
If I use a 50/50 scenario this would translate into (-20%+100%)/2= +40%
That looks a lot better than in January.
Of course anyone could add a lot of other cases but I like to keep it simple.
There is still the issue that we don’t have a “hard” deadline for a potential deal, but on the other hand, the year end deadline for their exit could be interpreted as a deadline for the Strüngmanns to find a buyer.
Playbook:
My assumption is that this situation doesn’t escalate totally between the founders and the Strüngmann brothers. One big warning sign and red flag would be, if the agreement for the new company would not be signed until the end of June.
Summary:
In a nutshell, Biontech now looks much more like an interesting “Special situation” than in late January.
Yes, the founders will be gone by year end, but the stock is 25% cheaper and we now have a “soft deadline” for a potential M&A announcement.
My “back of the envelope” calculation indicates and expected average return of 40% for roughly one year which is attractive. I therefore allocate 1,5% of the portfolio into Biontech at current prices of 73,50 EUR/Share.
Bonus Soundtrack:
I imagine that the founders will play that Soundtrack if the walk into their new company in 2027: Jon Batiste – Freedom
Sales up 19,3%, EPS up +45%. The Dividend will be 1,50 EUR, up 0,50 EUR from the year before. The only not extremely positive number was order intake which was only slightly up. I think it would be foolish to think that Jensen can grow 20% sales every year, but Management sounded quite confident for 2026 as well:
At a trailing PE of 11, the stock is now exactly as cheap (LTM) as when I published the initial analysis in January 2025, despite a 50% plus share price increase.
I have added a little (0,4% of portfolio) to my position at Friday’s price as I think the stock is still way too cheap given the quality. I should have waited until today, but such is life.
SFS
SFS, the Swiss parts and tools manufacturer/distributor also published preliminary results last week. Given the difficult state of many of its end markets, organic growth of ~3% before FX is quite impressive.
Unfortunately, profit suffered a little more as we can see in this table (before “normalisation”):
To be honest, SFS is quite behind against my expectations from 3 years ago, even factoring in CHF/EUR development.
I think back in 2023, I was too optimistic about manufacturing in Europe which really is struggling:
The stock is now much more expensive despite EPS being lower. So I really need to think about whether I should continue to hold the stock.
Italmobiliare
Italmobiliare’s preliminary 2025 numbers were a “mixed bag”. NAV increased (incl. dividends) by 6%, but for the two largest stakes, Borbone (Ebitda down because of high Coffee prices) and Santa Maria Novella (only single digit growth), the results were a little bit disappointing.
On the plus side, they managed to acquire an additional 5% stake in Bene and Casa de Salute grows nicely.
The stock reacted quite negatively which lead to an increase in discount to NAV.
At least for Borbone, things should look a lot better in 2026 as Coffee prices have come down again:
It will be interesting to see if SMN can grow double digit again.
On the plus side, the NAV increased by 10% in 2025, mainly driven by the Chocolate business:
Also positive is that they will acquire the remaining 34% of Jeff De Brugges, their second Chocolate Brand.
Less positive was the disappointing development of the Real estate pillar (NAV -10%) and the decision to discontinue industrial participations and invest into PE funds instead:
This is really a downer in my opinion. As much as I like the Chocolate business, I do not understand this “new pillar”. As I mentioned in the initial post, this was meant to be a short term special situation. Therefore I decided to exit the stock at current prices (318 EUR). This was a decent Short term special situation with a 20% plus return in 3 months.
The last few days are super busy with 8 (or more ?) of my companies reporting 2025 numbers. That’s why I do only the first 4 right now, the others (Jensen, SFS, Bois Sauvage and Italmobiliare) will follow soon.
EVS Broadcast 2025 preliminary results
EVS released preliminary numbers last Friday. At first sight, they were a little bit of a “mixed bag”. Revenue was up which is good for an “odd” year, EPS slightly down.
EVS explained that that they have invested into people to penetrate especially the US market. The second half of the year was really good, the first 6 months were weaker, mainly because of the “Tarif tantrum” from Uncle Donald.
The outlook for 2026 was quite good:
In the call, the CFO mentioned that for 2026 they don’t plan big additional investments into staff and that more M&A could be possible.
According to TIKR, analysts expect EPS of 3,36 for 2026. So far, the development is roughly within the initially expected case from 2024. Knowing EVS, there is also a good chance that they will revise 2026 numbers upwards during the year.
The 1,20 EUR dividend will compensate for waiting a little bit longer although Belgian withholding tax is not nice.
Thermador 2025 preliminary results
Thermador followed this week with 2025 results. As to be expected, sales were slightly negative y-oyy as construction and modernization is still weak in France:
What I find very surprising is how well the result kept up:
They managed to reduce working capital so they have a decent net cash position which should allow them again some M&A. And maybe, maybe the sector looks a little bit better in 2026. Analysts are quite positive. Thermador itself mentions a couple of Government programs which could be positive for them.
Thermador is a “hold” for me at the moment. Nothing to change here.
Eurokai preliminary results 20025
Eurokai also came out with an “Estimate” of the 2025 result. Typically for Eurokai, the result for 2025 will be significantly better than the revised estimates during the year.
They estimate now that 2025 Earnings will be above the 2024 earnings of 88 mn EUR (which included a 19 mn Non-cash positive one off).
Depending on what allocation the Golden share gets at Holdco level, this could result in an EPS of up to 6 EUR . Which means that despite the significant increase in the share price, Eurokai is still very cheap.
Investors should prepare once again for a very cautious outlook for 2026, although in my opinion, there are a lot of factors which indicate that 2026 could be once again better than 2025, even before any “juicy” one-off profits from partial sales to Container shippers.
The share price is now slowly approaching the historical ATHs from 2006/2007.
Eurokai is now by far my largest position but I leave that one untouched.
Sixt Preliminary results 2025
Sixt was the fourth company that week that released 2025 results. Although the results ended up to be a little bit below the forecast from Q3, it clearly seems that analysts have expected worse as Avis and Hertz both showed huge losses and declining revenues.
Sixt in contrast managed to grow also in the US:
And a significant increase in Profits:
What analysts seemed to have really liked was a quite optimistic outlook for 2026:
That seems to have surprised analysts and led to a “decoupling” of the share price from those of the weaker US competitors:
With a trailing P/E of 9 and a dividend yield of 5,8%, the pref shares are really “good value” in my opinion.
value and opportunity 