Historical Successful/Failed German IPOs last 3/5years - IPO Discount

I analysed the last 5 years of IPOs in Germany and there performance.
I screen every initial public offering in a German market since 2007.
It does not look very good for the IPO buyers, especially on the long term (3 years plus). Traditionaly people speak of an IPO discount of 15-30% given on the intrisic value to motivate investors to buy into IPOs.
However this data shows that more the opposite is true, an IPO premium of at least 15%.
Now maybe the German market is just really bad for IPO-investors. As my data shows there were only a total of 14 IPOs above a 0% performance, only 5 of them from 2008 and 2007.
In my opinon that is a pretty devastating account.

The 3 latest  years (2012-2009)
3 yr Median:                      -12,37%
3 yr Arith. Middle:            -15,60%
3 yr Variance:                     29,35%
3 yr Nr. IPOs:                     31
This is year 4 and 5, or 2008 and 2007, which shows the worst performance, probably since it includes all the IPOs from boom year 2007 where a lot of junk went public:
4 yr - 5 yr Median:           -63,64%
4 yr - 5 yr Arith. Middle: -49,51%
4 yr - 5 yr Variance:          39,97%
4 yr - 5 yr Nr. IPOs:          49
Here the total time span of 5 years:
5 yr Median:                     -52,58%
5 yr Arith. Middle:           -36,37%
5 yr Variance:                    38,58%
5 yr Nr. IPOs:                    80

Free tools for stock screening/look-up/news

Here I want to list some of my favorite tools that i use frequently when assessing/monitoring one stock or a portfolio of stocks. All are free of charge:

Stock screener:
Yahoo Stock Screener: Over 150 different criteria you can combine when screening. Works best for US stocks.
Google Stock Screener: Features a lot of different criteria, maybe a bit less then Yahoo. More graphical interface. As well only US stocks.
For a how-to-screen see Damodarans excellent guide, who also recommends screening tools.

Quotes, (Financial-) Information, Ratios of specific company:
Yahoo Finance: Works quite well for a lot of companies, however most information is available for US stocks and larger European caps.
FT marketsdata: Works well for a lot of companies, very graphic interface. Gives you a lot of information, including institutional investors, background CEO/etc. Has data for 3 annual periods.
MSN Money: Only for stocks from most important markets: US/CAN/GER/FRA/SP/BE/IT/JAP/SW/NL/UK. Features besides the usual stuff a 10 year summary!

News aggregator:
Finanznachrichten.de: After creating an account you can define your personal watch list of stocks and news from 430 international publications. If wished you can also have an Email being send to you at given day and hour with all the relevant news. However most content is in German! Also shows real-time quotes.

Recipe for chewy cookies

This is a very simple, easy-to-do recipe for cookies (american style).

Yesterday my girlfriend gave me a cookie as a present. Since the cookie was very good, I decided the check for recipes.
After some search I found a simple one, and since the results were very convincing (yummy), I wanted to share it:

Time of preparation: 20 Min
Time of backing: ~10 Min

250g butter/margarine, warm
2 eggs
250g sugar
1 pack vanilla-sugar
tiny bit of salt

a)Take big bowl. Mix everything in given order and stir well.

b) Here comes the creative part: Add chocolate/cherries/nuts/whatever to a)

400g flour
1 pack backing powder

c) Mix both ingredients, then slowly blend with the other mass.

d) Use two spoons, form little balls onto a sheet. Dont forget that they will go up during backing, give them some space. Dough should be enough for at least two sheets!
Heat oven to 180°C, then back for around 10 Min, at least until they get brown on the sides.
Backing time depends on degree of wished chewiness, the longer, the more hard and less chewy.
Take out, place on grid to cool off!

e) Eat!

Update 1: Here is a picture of mine. As you can see some of the dough ran down on the sides of one sheet.

Weekly links: Damodaran/China focus

Prof. Damodaran continued his series about value investing:
1. Contrarian Value Investing (must read, extremely interesting!!)
2. Activist Investing (more for informational purpose, since huge funds are needed to play)

And here the China focus:
1. Bronte Capital about Chinese kleptocracy (mostly state owned companies)
2. Research paper about Evergrand Real Estate Group (pdf, Chinese fraud, HK listing, very detailed!)

Its already Thursday, but better later than never!
A nice week!

Merkel meets british humour

British humour???

How online-newspapers make money with advertising

Collecting content for webpages in order to get advertising money through clicks gets increasingly popular.

This is one very good example I discovered this week (Handelsblatt again, they are very active with such things):

This is the picture line. That’s 25 pages of pictures.

Each time one clicks next, it reloads the whole pages, what is good since this generates more clicks. Every fifth image is a whole image full of advertising.

Despite the fact that the presentation method is quite useless, since it doesn’t yield any advantage, I wouldn’t mind so much.

However, on the first page one can see the source, on how what a wonder, there the ranking is presented as a table, what is just way more informational.

So remember this how-(not)-to-make-money-on-the-internet:

Find someone with some kind of content, take it, find some pictures (they don’t have to be related to the content at all, but should be free of charge!), copy some text and combine with not-related image, put one image per page, then advertise your great article.

Quality journalism at its best…

Another example I found today.

Also I read an interesting article (in German) about how the scam the new “output protection act” that has become a law in Germany recently. Very interesting and funny to read.

Interesting reads

So today is the day of the (second) election in Greece, what a lot of journalists are picturing as the final battle for/against the Euro: Good, old pro-EUR party (ND) against greedy, untrustworthy far left newcomers, screaming to get kicked out of the Euro zone.
In my opinion this is exaggerated, at least on the short run I expect Greece to stay with the Euro, since both parties want to -more or less- renegotiate the cuts and the EU (Hollande) will probably be willing to talk too, despite Merkels no-negotiation announcements.
Anyway im exited to see the outcome of the votes and market-reaction on Monday.

Now lets come to the links:
1. After his series of posts on growth (recommendation!)  Aswath Damodaran is following up with a series about Value Investing, starting two weeks ago with Value Investing: An Identity Crisis? and more recently Passive value investing: Screening for bargains. Interesting in the last post are, besides his very good instructions of how screening stocks is actually done, his closing thought on the moat of the investor and his odds of success.
2. The Brooklyn Investor on "the good old times" and todays market environment, with high-frequency trading, volatility, revolving doors and too efficient markets.
3.Value Walk on stocks and the Greek elections, seeing investment opportunities in Greece.

Thats it for now, have a nice sunday!