Every year on December 15th, the blog celebrates another anniversary, because on that day in December 2010, the blog went live for the first time.
As always there will be a separate performance portfolio review in the beginning of January. After a short break, I had to do a new “Panic Series” post due to the result of the US election.
With the rather “mixed” performance of my portfolio this year and the many headwinds, the motivation to write clearly has suffered a little bit, but having seen these situations before, of course I will continue to blog with the clear goal to become the longest running financial blog on the planet. In the subcategory of non-paywal financial blogs with a transparent investment portfolio, I would guess there are not many challengers.
A very interesting development is the current proliferation of investment blogs especially on Substack, however many of these blogs go behind a paywall after one or two years. On the one hand, I can understand this, as many of these writers are quite young and want to make a living on that. On the other hand, it will be interesting to see how long many of these ambitious writers survive, especially if markets turn really bad for a longer period or their specific style of investing turns out of favor (which at some point in time ALWAYS happens).
I also think that writing in order to live from subscriptions is not always 100% aligned with actually creating value for readers. But I wish luck to them all.
Again, a big thank you to all readers, especially those who contribute (and motivate me) via constructive comments but of course also to all the silent readers. Some of them stepped up during a quite nasty discussion around the Ocean Wilson special situation, which I apreciated a lot.
The top 10 posts in 2024 were the following:
- My 22 (+1) investments for 2024
- Eurokai KGaA (ISIN DE0005706535) – Playing the “Time arbitrage game” with the possibly cheapest Port Stock in the World
- The German Mittelstand is maybe Down but not Out: Hermle AG – Hidden Automation Champion from the “Ländle”
- Amadeus Fire AG (AAD.GR) – Come on and rock me Amadeus !!!
- STEF S.A. (ISIN FR0000064271) – An “Ice Cold” Quality Compounder at a “bonkers bargain” price
- EVS Broadcast SA – A Hidden Global Champion “Breaking free from the Van” with Software & AI at a Bargain Price
- Performance review 6M 2024 – Comment: “How do you know if your horse is dead ?”
- Samse Group (ISIN FR0000060071) – A Hidden French Compounder that is as exciting as watching Paint dry ?
- Fuchs SE (FPE) – A Hidden Champion “Greased for Growth” after a 10 year consolidation phase ?
- Performance review 9M 2024 – Comment: “How to train patience during periods of underperformance”
Blogging highlights 2024:
So far, in 2024 I managed to post only 53 times, which is again less than in 2023. As can be seen in the Top 10 list, deep dive stock write-ups and portfolio reviews seem to be the most popular posts. However they are also clearly the most work intensive ones.
I managed to finish the all Belgian Shares series. I am currently contemplating what to do next. Maybe I’ll do something more regional or focus on a sector to keep things interesting for me.
Statistics:
Overall, views are at around 280k for this year, which is very similar to 2023. This number correlates with the activity, so no surprise here that with fewer posts, the number does not go up. However, the Substack which I run parallel (with 1:1 posts) has reached around 30k views, so overall views are up mostly due to Substack. I am actually surprised that still so many popele are interested in these kind of stocks.
The power of Substack (and why most likley most financial blogs are created there) is clearly the “recommendation engine” which is quite powerful.
Subscriber numbers are growing slowly over time, on both platforms around 4000 subscibers pretend to be interested in my stuff.
In last year’s anniversery post, readers pointed out a few other “old school” bloggers that are stil around such as:
Crossing Wall Street (since 2005)
Rational Walk (since 2009)
Reminiscences of a Stockblogger (since 2011)
Alpha Vulture (since 2011)
The Brooklyn investor (Since 2011, now quite irregular)
Mr. Market miscalculates (since 2012)
Twitter:
I still post on Twitter, but it has become more annoying. I recently discovered that I had actually created a Bluesky account and I am currently checking out what’s going on over there. For some reason, I had already like 330 followers over there.
The year ahead
Going into year 15, the biggest goal is of course to keep up the frequency and complete a new “All stock” series. Other than that I don’t have any specific goals.
Bonus Track:
This is the song for all fellow suffering European small cap investors and old school “content creators” out there:
Don’t stop believin’