The Shares Researcher

Rising interest rates had a profound impact on some stocks. Contrary to expectation, even decent paying dividend stocks saw major losses in value during the last couple of months. A reallocation of the portfolio may be needed. Fuchs Petrolub: The company was mentioned on this blog in May 2022 and has increased from a stock price in the low twenties to almost €32 per share. The share buy-back will come to an end in spring 2024 and although the company is expected to show solid figures also in the future, it may make sense to switch into firms which are valued cheaper. Excluding the dividend payment, Fuchs trades approx. 34% higher than in May 2022. Organon: One of these companies seeing major corrections is Organon, which was initially mentioned on this blog in August 2021. Organon has been busy to become fully independent after the spin-off from Merck. Hence, we can expect that some one-off integration costs will disappear in due course. What’s currently missing is revenue (and profit...

Last August, there was a lot of pessimism around Vopak in the markets. Since then, the company has performed very well and the share price increased from €22.23 to around €34.12, while collecting a dividend of €1.30 in between. This leaves a performance in Euro of almost 60% incl. dividend and might be a good time to take some chips off the table. Congratulations if you have been holding Vopak in the last year!

Intro RBG is a legal services firm based in the UK. Historically, the company had four divisions with a focus on: a) disputes, b) advisory services, c) sell-side corporate finance and d) litigation finance. RBG has shown a strong performance in the past years in the first two divisions, a decent but more volatile performance for the sell-side corporate finance boutique and a very weak performance in the litigation finanRBGce segment. Hence, the new management decided to exit litigation finance and was able to sell part of this segment in mid-July. Shortly thereafter, a further impairment was booked, the dividend suspended, and the focus is now on restructuring the existing business and paying down debt. Due to the above challenges, the market cap has decreased from more than £150m in 2021 to approx. £17m.   Valuation The legal services (disputes and advisory) and professional services (sell-side corporate finance) have shown revenue figures of £42m in 2021 and £50m in 2...

Intro Roche is a more than 125-year-old pharmaceutical and diagnostics company with its head office in Switzerland. The majority of the bearer shares is still in the hands of the heirs of the company’s founder. That being said, there are also non-voting equity securities (NES) outstanding (see ticker symbol above). Both share classes are listed with the NES showing significantly higher trading volume.   Valuation Probably due to some disappointments in R&D, ceasing of Covid-related profits in the diagnostics segment and different capital structure due to purchase of Novartis’ stake in Roche in 2021, the price of the NSE has come down by around 30%. Let’s see if we can find some value in here after the price drop: Core EPS (excluding for instance some global restructuring plans, amortization and impairment of goodwill and intangibles) has been around CHF 20 per security, which translates into a Core P/E of around 14x, which seems not very demanding for a high-quality...