Portfolio Manager comment Coeli Global Select February 2022

An assault against democracy. Our fund has a policy never to invest our shareholders’ money in Russian companies, and with the month that has passed we feel more strongly than ever over this policy. Despite all our emotions, as investors, we need to keep a cool head and analyse the situation objectively. If you would like to read more about how we have acted in the past few weeks, you can find that here (in Swedish). In short though, we have reduced risk by halving our position in Renault, the only company in the fund that has any meaningful exposure to the Russian market. We have also sought out any mispricing as a result of the stock market turbulence to give us an opportunity to improve our portfolio, but so far these have been few and far between.

During the month, our fund was down 4.37%, which was 1.91 pp worse than our benchmark. The best-performing investments were hearing aid manufacturer Sonova and US construction company Sterling Construction. On the other side of the coin were Renault and PayPal, the latter which we have now sold off. If you’d like to read more about Sonova, you can find out more here (in Swedish).

The situation in Ukraine is so unstable and fast-moving that there is little value in us speculating about how the coming months will play out geopolitically. We can just say that many shares are dirt cheap right now.

Key market events and trends – what has influenced performance most?

In the big picture, the time of zero inflation and zero interest rates has come to an end. The coming years will bring risks, but also a great many opportunities. We see considerable potential now that many European and US companies are increasing production on the home front rather than in Asia. We have consequently increased our holding in WDP, one of Europe’s leading logistics real estate companies, and expect to make more investments in this area.

Portfolio changes

During February, we sold our small position in podcast production company Acast. We had expected it to turn profitable faster than the information in its year-end report suggested. We fear the share will tread water for some time to come. We also sold the last of our holdings in US payment company PayPal after it released a weak report and took down guidance for next year but with continued high cost guidance for the employee option programs. This last left a bad taste in our mouths and prompted us to sell off the small position we had left. We instead bought into a Swiss company that is growing especially rapidly, is more profitable, and is riding the trend we described above. More on this in next month’s newsletter.

The fund’s positioning – our market expectations

In the coming months, we will upgrade our holdings further to create an even more competitive fund and to continue delivering good long-term returns to our unitholders.