Month: January 2017

If I had to choose one European company to put my money into, Sampo would be a strong candidate. So I decided to increase my European exposure with a purchase of 50 additional shares for 42,99 EUR per share. As a valuation it’s acceptable in the current environment. Only downside is that it increases my exposure to Nordea Bank even further. Not necessarily a bad thing but a bit on the risky side. I do suspect that Wahlroos & Stadigh is cooking up something new. There were some rumours about Nordea merger but who knows if that will ever materialise. I suppose they will eventually take control of Topdanmark on the insurance side but that’s yesterdays news really. I just have a feeling that they are up to something that will be very lucrative and perhaps will go through during the next couple of years. Meanwhile better economical environment (interest rates) will support Nordea and dividends from Topdanmark will help to increase the distributions for next couple of years.

I’ve been thinking about this move for quite some time now. I generally don’t like to sell my holding but I suppose every rule has an exception. I originally opened positions in certain bond-like stocks mainly to park money in order to benefit from strengthening dollar. Colgate-Palmolive served that purpose well and most likely would have continued to do so. In general I don’t like to time markets but we are living exceptional times at the moment. Should there be a market correction perhaps triggered by Mr. Trump, I prefer to have this extra ammunition in place for that. And should there not be a market correction, such short term correction might occur for single companies. Defence and space is something that I would like to increase my position in. Then again it might make sense to lock in some of the forex gains by converting dollars back to euros if my forecast about parity ends up being accurate. This remains to be seen.

This was the reasoning behind the decision to sell my 50 shares of Colgate-Palmolive for 64,75 USD per share. In retrospect this should have been done some months ago when the stock was ridiculously expensive. During my ownership I collected 223,50 USD as dividends. I originally paid 65,37 USD per share but currency changes resulted almost 30% profits.

It’s getting really difficult to find decent valuations but for some reason Telia Company has performed quite poorly for quite some time now. It dropped today almost 2% so I decided to buy additional 250 shares for 3,714 EUR per share. Dividend policy is exactly what I expected it to be going forward. 2 SEK annually for next couple of years (+ perhaps additional ones) is quite OK and I still maintain a fair value estimation significantly above the current valuation. Then there’s the additional consolidation option in the sector which should provide interesting possibilities for the involved parties.