Don't lose sight of the big picture! Anyone who knows the stock market and also invests in it will sooner or later be faced with exactly this challenge. In Dr. Stern's case, by now he has more than 70 shares. It is becoming ever more difficult to determine what else to by which is not yet in the portfolio. To get a better overview, he looked at his portfolio with the Google-Sheet. It can be download free of charge.
As a first step, he decided to look at his portfolio by country.
As you can see, no country has more weight than 15%. The top countries are Switzerland with 13% and Germany with 12%. Non-European countries are rare in his portfolio which is to be expected. His focus so far has been on Europe because he thinks it is generally undervalued. Dr. Stern also wanted to start investing in markets he knows best.
If we now look at his portfolio not by country, but by sector, we see that it is even more balanced:
All but one industry has a weight below 10% - exception being the "Industrial" sector. However, this is not really a single sector, as it covers a broad field of activity that is not limited to its own sector boundaries. For example, an industrial company can sell to the energy, automotive or construction sectors. And all this with different risks and cycles. That is why he is not worried.
More importantly, there is another piece of information, which can be found in the sector breakdown of his portfolio: It shows that he has only invested to a limited extent in service companies. He finds service companies very interesting. They tend to be more resistant to slumps because their costs are more flexible. They have fewer fixed costs. So these stocks drop less in a recession.
Therefore, Dr. Stern has to download the entire Obermatt rank database to filter for service companies. So can you. The entire database is available as a link to a file that you can download into the Google Sheet app. This link is included in the weekly stock update for all premium subscribers.
For the next step in the analysis, he used a filter to find large European service companies with good Obermatt ranks. But there were still too many. He also filtered out all those stocks that could only come up with half-yearly reports. This means that the last report is quite old - in most cases from last summer. After all the filtering he got the following result:
This is somewhat disappointing, as all these service providers have a growth problem - with the exception of Beijer Ref from Sweden. Dr. Stern looked at this company but found that they are a construction service provider. Especially when it comes to protection from recessions as is the strategy of my current investment portfolio, he doesn't want construction service providers, but pure service providers.
The next company he looked at was Intrum. They have the highest value rank. But they are a credit provider. That also goes against his grain. People should first save their money before they spend it.
But the second one on his list, DKSH, is a Swiss service company! It offers sales support in Asia. That sounds interesting. Dr. Stern firmly believes in Asia and the emerging markets. In addition, he recently met the new CEO of the company and he keeps him in high regard.
Services in Asia. Yes, he likes that. He is choosing DKSH today. That is Dr. Stern's decision and we wish you success with your decision.