The year 2021 started enthusiastic. In the first week of January we gained about 5%. In the second half the Reddit actions in especially GameStop influenced the markets significantly. Due to heavy losses on short positions, some very large and established hedge funds needs to make cash by selling their long positions. This violence drove markets down, especially the formerly best performing parts of the markets. Fundamentally this is offering excellent entrance possibilities to stocks which were earlier overpriced and overbought. We ended the month with a small positive result. By this we outperformed our benchmark by a small margin.
The madness in GameStop proved our strategy choice to do not short any individual share. The tail risk of this strategy is something we don’t want to deal with. This next to the many ethical discussions of shorting individual companies.
We had some excellent performing stocks in our portfolio. Star performer was again Daqo New Energy (+48,9%). Other companies which contributed to the positive result were Tesla (23,5%) and the Dutch company PostNL (22%). The last company is the national Postal service, their Q4 numbers were really impressive. The normal postal business was not shrinking and the package delivering business thriving due to COVID-19 lockdown measures.
We are looking forward with confidence to our portfolio and the markets. The current weakness in the markets offers us investment opportunities. The weakness is caused by the GameStop actions and delays in CIVID-19 vaccination programs. However, the opening of the economies is coming closer every day due to the vaccination programs which are delayed but not cancelled.