2025 review & Exor numbers

 Bit late with this, but here's what happened in 2025:

• Bought more Wendel, Exor, GBL and Kinnevik (thought they were cheap)
• Sold SEDY and ISJP (wanted some cash)
• Aviva Preference shares were bought out (no choice)

Total return for the year in GBP: 15%.  Substantially underperformed the FTSE 100 (around 24%), roughly equal to the S&P 500 performance.

Exor has performed pretty poorly, so a quick sanity check that things are OK there:

• 201m shares outstanding in mid-2025.
• Current share price 69 Euros.
• Therefore market cap currently just under 14bn Euros.
• NAV at mid-2025 was 36bn Euros.
• Dominated by listed shares.  As of mid-2025, the big holdings were:

• Ferrari 15.7bn
• CNH 4bn
• Stellantis 4bn
• Philips 4bn
• Developments since then:
• Ferrari down 30%
• Stellantis down 5%
• CNH down 15%
• Philips up 20%
• So current NAV around 31bn Euros.
• There have been some dividends and buybacks, so not sure of the exact discount to NAV, but it seems to be around 55%.  Not too shabby.

Selling more stuff? That can't be right?

I decided to sell the two ETFs that I hold: SEDY.L and ISJP.L.  Not because I think they're bad things to hold, but:

• Shares/ETFs listed outside the EEA are not as tax-efficient for me, since I can't hold them in an aksjesparekonto.
• Aviva are cancelling their preference shares and this felt like a good time to rationalise my non-aksjesparekonto holdings (no real logic to this, just emotional).
• There's no massive capital gain locked into them as there is for BRK-B, NWBD, BARC and PLUS, so selling them won't trigger a big tax bill.
• For non-investment reasons now is a good time for me to realise a bit of cash.

I sold SEDY.L at 1140p.  That's a capital loss, but the loss of capital is balanced by income I've received, so pre-inflation this has been neutral (post-inflation it's cost me money).

I sold iSJP at 3326 for a small profit.

My non-aksjesparekonto holdings now represent (a) shares with a large capital gain, which I'm happy to hold long-term, and (b) small holdings showing a capital loss which I'm hoping will bounce back and don't seem worth selling at their current low valuation.

More Kinnevik, Exor, GBL and Wendel

Just roughly doubled my holdings of these 4 European investment companies:

• Kinnevik at 90 SEK
• GBL at 67 Euro
• Wendel at 81 Euro
• Exor at 93 Euro

Bye bye Raspberry Pi

Drove my Chevy to the levy, etc..

I bought Raspberry Pi at 372p in October and just sold at 726p, for a 95% profit in 3 months.

I still like the company, but I thought it was expensive when I bought the shares.  There's been some mildly positive news since then, but nothing to warrant them almost doubling.  

A P/E ratio well north of 50, for a company that still has all the headaches of being a manufacturing company?  Having to worry about stock levels, chip shortages, and all the rest of it?  Sure, I expect them to grow over the long run, but there's an awful lot of growth already priced in.

This is the first time I've sold a share since Plus 500 in 2018.  On that occasion I bought back in 15 months later at less than half the price.  I'd be very happy if the opportunity arose to do the same with RPI.

2024 review

Over the course of 2024 my portfolio is up 25% in GBP (vs 8.5% for the FTSE 100), 23% in USD (vs 25% for the S&P 500), and 38% in NOK (vs about 17% for OBX).

Some highlights:

• Berkshire Hathaway returned 29% and is still almost half of my portfolio.
• Plus 500 was up 72%.
• Barclays was up 80%.
• Raspberry Pi was up 68% despite me only buying them at the end of October.

Sylvania Platinum was by far the biggest loser, down about 40%.  All the rest was only mildly up or down.

It's been a pretty busy year of buying shares:

• ISJP
• More Sylvania Platinum - oops
• Kinnevik, GBL, Exor and Wendel
• Raspberry Pi - yay

For the sixth year in succession I failed to sell anything.

Raspberry Pi

 I've just put a small amount of money into Raspberry Pi.  They'll make up about 2.2% of my portfolio.

Things I like about them:

• They've steered the ship well for the last 12 years, iterating their core Single Board Computer (SBC) product, making money, growing sales.
• They've developed beyond the education & enthusiast market into OEM sales and now microprocessors.
• They can achieve decent margin, because:
• They have a strong brand, particularly due to the connection with the Raspberry Pi Foundation.
• Their products have a reputation for quality and longevity.
• There's a great ecosystem around the product thanks to a lot of hobbyists contributing to open source projects.
• The engineers tinkering with these things in their spare time introduce them to their professional lives - so the hobbyist market drives OEM adoption.  I expect the same will be true (though with a much longer lead-time) of the education market, where engineers who played with these at school/Uni eventually turn into the decision-makers of the future.  They've been around since 2012, so this should be starting to happen now/soon.

Things I'm not so keen on:

• They're expensive, on a P/E ratio of around 30.
• A decent chunk of that profit is actually capitalized development expenses - yuck.
• They're heavily dependent on a few other companies: Broadcom who design most of the chips they use, TSMC who manufacture them, and Sony who manufacture the Raspberry Pi itself (in a single facility in South Wales).

4 European investment companies on a massive NAV discount

These four companies each own a mix of listed and unlisted investments, mostly in Europe, and are all trading on a discount of around 40% to their Net Asset Value:

• Groupe Bruxelles Lambert (GBL)
• Kinnevik AB
• Wendel Group
• Exor N.V.

You can quibble about the valuation of their unlisted investments, but most are trading on less than the value of just their listed securities.  The exception is Kinnevik, and that is sitting on 12bn SEK in cash, vs market cap of 24bn SEK and investments of 27bn SEK.  For the share price to be too high those unlisted investments would have to be worth less than a third of the number quoted.

Trading at a discount to NAV is normal for these companies.  You'd have to go back ~20 years to find a time when GBL traded at roughly NAV.  However, their NAV and share price have been drifting gradually further and further apart, and in my opinion the discount is now compelling.  Any combination of dividends and share buybacks should deliver exceptional shareholder value over the next couple of decades from this starting point.

I form no judgement about the actual investments the companies hold, and I don't intend to pick and choose between them.  On 5th August I invested in GBL (at 65.35 Euros per share) and Kinnevik (at 79.41 SEK per share).  On 6th August I invested in Wendel (84.15 Euros per share) and Exor (88.65 Euros per share).