Recently we travelled to London to learn about the investing behaviour of English Investors at the London Investor Show. Past Friday 9^th of November we travelled to Amsterdam to visit the Beleggersfair at the former stock exchange building Beurs van Berlage. Last year we also visited this event and learned some new stuff.

Beleggersfair is an investors event that gathers 50+ speakers. The program consists of 15 master classes, fast courses, golden tips and talk shows. For a little 5 Euro, you can talk to experienced investors, investing companies and attend interesting sessions where you learn how to boost your investing skills. I know most of you would say…why drive almost 3 hours ? To invest in your knowledge, you need to carve out the time and invest in your knowledge. I believe there’s always something you can learn at an event like this…

Key Learnings including Golden Tips 2019

The Beleggersfair Program has four sections : Main Presentations, Master Classes, Talk shows and Fast Courses. There is also the Golden Tips slots with tips to invest in for 2019. This year I chose to skip the fast courses and the majority of the talk shows. I want to focus on the masterclasses and main presentations.

We start the day with the Golden Tip 2019 from Thomas Kalsbeek – OHV Vermogensbeheer. 

Thomas presents the bond of Genel Energy. It has an annual return of 8,9% with limited risk. The company has a free cash flow of 139 million and a debt position of 300 million. They invest in oil fields in Kurdistan. They only have a net debt position of 19 million. The risk is a lower oil price and that agreements have been made with Kurdistan leadership.

Masterclass : 5 ways to find opportunities in the stock market – Siegfried Kok 

The first masterclass was a presentation of Siegfried Kok working for OBAM – BNP Paribas Private Banking. The presentation is split up in three sections : Context, Ways to invest and How to make your selections.

Context : We have been experiencing almost 10 years a bull market and now we start to see increasing interest rates. This leads to opportunities for the active investor. Index funds have been a good investment as you buy everything. But when the stock markets turn, you need to become more active. As an investor you need to decide on your investment horizon, the indexes you want to invest in and how active or passive you want to be as an investor. Today we see more volatility in the stock market.

Ways to Invest

There are five ways to invest :  Quality, Value, Shareholder value, Be different, Hype or gamechanger

Number 1. Quality

Let’s make a comparison of the airline AIR FRANCE KLM versus Rentokil. The comparison is done based on market position, generating cash flow and profit, pricing power and unique market position combination. Rentokil generates for every 100 Euro invested 20-25 euro. This money can be reinvested. Air France KLM does have a lot of competition, no market leadership, no pricing power, etc..

Another quality example is Google. Worldwide market share of 80%. The growth of Google can go forward. When you focus on quality and growth companies, you can find more examples on the following slide with names. 

Number 2 : What is the Price / Value of a company?

What is the value of the company on short and long term? Ahold is an example where the stock price crashed at a certain moment when Amazon entered this market.  Today a lot of hedge fund managers get rewarded based on a 3 month return. More short term trading results in lower values of certain stocks. Today there is a lot more volatility and you can step in a quality stock when investors get emotional.

Another example is Philips. This company share price has also dropped 20%. Philips is also an example of many promises and some setbacks. But when you look at the fundamentals, you see a quality company for a long term investment. Siegfried uses the quote “It’s far better to buy a wonderful company at a fair price, than a fair company at a wonderful price” by Charlie Munger.

Number 3 : Shareholder focus

Let’s take a look at Tesla with Elon Musk. OBAM does not invest in Tesla as the risk is too high. In 2016 Elon Musk invested in Solarcity. In 2017 Space-X program he has the ambition to bring tourists to the moon. In 2018 Elon Musk did some tweets which impacted the share price of the company. The question is : Does Elon Must have any interest for the shareholders? OBAM only invests in companies with a shareholder interest.

Number 4 : Be different

Sometimes you need to select a quality company and ignore the analysts opinions. Nike is a great example here. Since September 2017 the share price broke out to the upside.

Number 5 : Hype or Game changer

Is the business model sustainable? Is Bitcoin sustainable cryptocurrency? Let’s take a look at four examples. Fitbit, Airbus Group, GoPro and Apple.

Fitbit : Can a competitor copy you ? Apple and Samsung quickly copied the technology in their phones OS.  Same story with GoPro. It is not difficult to copy this technology.

Boeing and Airbus are dominant in the airplanes building industry. In China they try to build also planes now. Airbus has great margins. Boeing has 15 billion cash flow. Strong cash flow and hardly competitors.

Apple is also a sustainable company with strong cash flows and customer lock-in. Apple current stock value is too overvalued and OBAM has stepped out of the Apple stock position.

Siegfried thinks that the USA will not go immediately into a recession but just slower growth. OBAM does perform selective investing in IPO’s because current investment climate is at the top. The OBAM fund is always 100% invested in stocks with limited % of cash. Over the past 5 years they achieved a 83% performance. You can participate in the fund for a transaction price of 75 Euro.

Growth after 2018 macro-economic review

The next session is a debate about macro economic review with Bob Joman (ING Bank) Nico Klene (ABN Amro) and Elwin de Groot of Rabobank. Read below our summary notes.

How do you outlook to the stock markets for 2019 – 2020? Bob thinks after the correction we can go higher. Economic growth is slowing down and interest rates are still low. Bob is positive and sees a year end rally. Elwin de Groot sees the interest rates in Europe still low. What about price/value in European stocks? There is still potential if central banks stay moderate with increasing interest rates.

Macroeconomic Europe will grow slower next year. Today the outlook is stable. Uncertainty with Brexit and Italy budget has been weighing on the market. There is growth but it will be less.

What about bonds? There is little to gain in the bond market according to Bob. American bonds is no different. Emerging markets bonds give you 7% but you must be willing to take the risk in countries like Argentina. According to Elwin the dollar will increase in value. This could lead to a recession in 2020 in the USA. Nico thinks that the interest rates will increase 3x times going forward. Next year the dollar will lose some of his strong value. Bob thinks that the euro will suffer on the short term due to the budget issues in Italy.

What are the risks going forward? Trade wars are the biggest risk to the stock markets. Trump doesn’t care whether the import tariffs do have an impact on the US. He wants to put the Chinese economy 10 years backwards. This is disastrous for the global markets. Europe will be highly impacted at the end because Europe has a very open market. Trump will not make a quick deal with China. We still have to see how Trump will deal with Europe and Elwin believes that car tariffs will still be introduced.

Bob is more optimistic. If you make import more expensive and you have full employment, goods will become more expensive. So at the end you impact the consumer market in the US the most. Bob is more positive about a potential deal between US and China.

What about BREXIT? Bob believed still that there will be NO BREXIT. Otherwise a soft Brexit. Elwin believes that there are only 2 options: hard or soft Brexit. He hopes for a soft Brexit. If there will be an agreement, then investors will be relieved. The last question is what would be the title of the discussion 5 years from now. Title after 5 years : Recovery after 2020 ; What are the options of central banks ; What goes up, must go down ? How do we get out of this mess?

Presentation : Michiel Van Vugt – Enough ? What is enough ? 

What is your financial plan ? Who knows…very little investors raise their hands.

Michiel starts with 3 statements where the public needs to make a guess about his personality. But there is no context and extra information in order to decide correctly. So Michiel says that investors make constantly assumptions. And in financial investing you shouldn’t do that ! The average investor loses 2% based on bad decision making. The total value of an advisor is around 4 % to avoid mistakes.

The conclusion is that people think that they can always beat the system. For most investors it is extremely difficult to make a correct decision. If the stock market goes up, people buy and when the stock market goes down, people sell.

Start as early as possible and do it with a FINANCIAL OBJECTIVE AND PLAN!! The problem is that kids are not taught at school about the financial system and how to evaluate the economy and stock market. People are like sheep and cattle…constantly following others.

Golden Tips 2019 John Beijer 

The three tips of John Beijer are BE Semiconductor with a price target of 22.60 Euro, Randstad with a price target of 55 Euro and Shell with a price target of 30.20 Euro. 

Alternative investments

During lunch time I watched the talk show about alternative investments. There were 3 types of investments. Scottish Whiskey International sells physical whiskey and did a net return of 15,6% per year for this type of investment. There’s scarcity of whiskey which drives the prices. Investors are mainly entrepreneurs or retired investors. You become owner of the physical product and those investors want to diversify their investment strategies. You can sell on an online whiskey trading platform.

Real Estate of Dominion is a real estate platform with block chain technology. They build a cryptocurrency platform with DOM tokens. This allows to provide historical transparency of real estate properties.

Voordegroei.nl is a company providing loans for SMB companies to finance growth. 6-8% is the average return. Return is quite stable.

Make a return with limiting the risks in 2019 Christophe Cox & John Beijer 

The next masterclass I attended was given by Christophe Cox of Commerzbank and John Beijer of Turbotrends Signals.

What is the current status of the markets? Europe is red and the US is green. The markets are more volatile. Gold will make a rebound in 2019 according to John. Trading ideas of 2017 resulted in a 9,53%. Risk management is key for every investor. Do you watch the Fear &Greed index by CNN? Investors are more fearful. There’s today a bottom in the stock market forming. This is a great indicator. What about the FED versus ECB Policies? Fed is constantly increasing the interest rates. ECB doesn’t do anything.  In December there’s a possibility of an interest rate increase. In Europe nothing is planned. Interest rate increases will slow down in the USA.

What do we need to watch in 2019? Trump tweeted that an agreement with China could be possible. Brexit and the Italy budget need to be fixed. Many banks have Italian bonds on their balance sheets. This can be a problem in 2019. AEX index has performed well with a return of 9,6% including dividends. Small caps have performed worse during the past year. The AEX has dropped out of the trend channel. Can it regain his trend channel ? The month graph looks still good. The price target can go to 609 for the AEX index. Coming months and year we can go higher.

How can we invest in the AEX index ? We can buy a Bonus certificaat. Christophe explains how a Bonus certificaat works. Are there any stock tips ? John lists out three possibilities :

1. Ahold Delhaize
2. Philips
3. PostNL : 10% dividend. Both post delivery companies Bpost in Belgium and Netherlands are suffering.

John explains the services of Turbotrends where they have 5 portfolios – 5 strategies with automatic trading strategies. Take a look at www.turbotrends.nl for their performance.

Golden Tips 2019 Nico Bakker

Nico Bakker presents his 2019 Golden Tips. The first one is the S&P 500 index. Do we get a year end rally? YES. We want to accelerate to 2940,9 level. Nico believes we can reach 3000 points by the year end. Let this be the signal to become positive for the AEX index. Tip 2 is the EUR/USD currency pair. EUR/USD is in a trending range. You never buy extra when you hit your stop loss of 1,13.

Tip 3 Brent Oil. Weekly candle. Oil will go to 100$! Turbos can help you to leverage your profits. Below 70$ you step out.

One more extra tip is the AEX index. AEX fueled by US markets above 547, we can go to 576 and move towards 700. We are currently consolidating and bottoming. Bulls started at the level of 500. What will happen at 547 and break out going forward? Let’s see in coming three weeks. When is the bull market over for the US markets ? If we break below 2650 -2700 level, we need to close our long positions.

Golden Tips 2019 Istvan Pinter

Istvan Pinter recommends to invest in multiple projects at Funding Circle. Take a look at the website https://www.fundingcircle.com/

The return is between 6 to 8% and you can start from 100 euro.

 

Dashboard Investing – Nico Bakker

Nico works for BNP Paribas Markets who is market leader for Turbos at Euronext Amsterdam. More than 2500 turbos on 200 underlying stocks or indices. Nico applies Dashboard Investing. Here follows a quick summary of the strategy.

The indicators used by Nico are the 55 Simple Moving Average (he calls it “de sleepkabel” in Dutch) He uses the Sentiment (14 Dynamic RSI) and he uses support and resistance levels.

The Dashboard conditions are the only 4 you need to know.

How to select? 3 possibilities

1. Bottom at resistance – Get ready
2. Above SMA -> UP trend buy and sell (count 9 candles for topping)
3. Sell in a downtrend (candles going down)

Nico walks us through different examples : Ahold, Aegon, Bel 20 and others…

Nico provides on a weekly basis the Chart Navigator (CN) Dashboard, makes Technical analysis publications, sends tweets under the name “The Daily Turbo”.

Check out more on the website www.bnpparibasmarkets.nl

Golden Tips 2019 Geert-Jan Nikken

Geert-Jan brings three trading ideas. ASML, AKZO Nobel and ING. ASML can regain his trend channel and go to target of 190. Akzo Nobel is also in a trading range. ING can be a short until 10 euro.

Visit to the booths

During the day I also visited the different booths. I can catalog the different booths in the following categories :

• Wealth Asset Managers, Stock Investment companies, Private bankers
• Crowdfunding Platforms
• Investors’ magazines
• Investing in different asset classes such as real estate, whiskey, wine, real estate companies…

Other examples of Trading Ideas are Turbotrends (Turbos & Options) and TradeIdee

Maybe you dream about buying a house in France (B&D France), or participate in a crowdfunding real estate project in the Netherlands, or just let Index investors manage your money at a low cost of 0,67%. The interesting investors’ magazines are IEX and Cashcow. They are informative investors sources. This year I noticed a greater presence of crowdfunding platforms such as The Funding Circle.

Final Conclusion

This day was definitely another boost for my investing skills full of interesting information. I had never heard of a “Bonus Certificaat” and how to use it to invest in the AEX index. I learned two new investing strategies, one applied by the OBAM fund and Dashboard investing from Nico Bakker. I also checked the golden tips list of last year and NONE of the tips performed well. Gold has gone lower and chinese stocks such as Tencent have been beaten up. Nobody of the analysts spoke about the past performance of past year tips. Martine Hafkamp recommended Nokia as 2019 tip.

You can also sign up for free to the news updates of Turbo trends. Click on the link  www.turbotrends.nl/whatsapp. I did sign up. At the same time there was a Bitcoin Crypto Congress. If you want to watch and learn about crypto currencies and this 200 billion market place, go to the following two videos : VIDEO 1 and VIDEO 2.

What is interesting to investigate further is the Investment trends slide of OBAM. Here we need to identy the key players in each of those listed sectors. Investing is always doing some homework. Thanks for reading and as always we end with a quote below all the links section. Don’t hesitate to leave a comment or feedback for all the hard work that went in this blogpost.

If you don’t follow us on Twitter or Facebook, don’t hesitate to do so as we share more content during investors’ events in Twitter and more articles from other sites in Facebook. Stay tuned and thanks for the follow. Have a great day, weekend and week!!

Interesting video links are

Beleggersfair by Triple i : https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbEgcWwRQyc9CuFGoDqNB9g

Commerzbank : https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJn7Kbph0oqaBOLZcEjBeUQ/videos

Link to thhe Masterclasses videos : https://www.beleggersfair.nl/vijftien-drukbezochte-masterclasses/