Looking back at the fourth quarter of 2017 we can see a good ending of the year for A&F Investments. 2017 turned out to be a great year for A&F Investments, which managed to achieve its highest yearly return since its founding.
However, it is not just A&F Investments that had a good year, the whole market has had a great year. If we take a look at the fourth quarter we can see that the S&P 500 has risen with 6.51%, the Euro Stoxx 600 remained roughly the same with a 0.00% change and the MSCI World has gone up with 4.73%. Nonetheless, for A&F Investments to realize the performance of its fourth quarter some crucial decisions had to be taken.
“We bought a stake in an All-World ex-US ETF that was in line with the strategy of our portfolio.”
Looking back at the last quarter we can conclude that the best decision that was made was to significantly reduce our cash pile. This turned out to be a harder task than we thought because allocating the cash to the right securities in a short period of time was not an easy task. Nonetheless, we managed to successfully do this by adding some new securities to our portfolio. We managed to increase our stake in Ahold Delhaize due to the fact that the market overreacted on Amazon.com Inc.’s acquisition of Whole Foods. After a few weeks we could already see some positive results of this decision. We also bought a stake in an All-World ex-US ETF that was in line with the strategy of our portfolio. After getting inspired by one of our guest lectures, we decided to purchase a stake in Alphabet Inc. The main reason to do this was because of the high competitive advantage that this company has compared to its competitors. Besides buying some securities we also sold some securities with a nice profit. After having benefited from the rally of the automotive industry we sold our stake in Porsche SE with great profit. The Canadian financial company GoEasy has also proved itself and we have taken some good profit with this security too.
Even though we have had struggles with a large cash position and a weakening USD we can look back at a great performance for 2017. We have also had the privilege to have a guest lecture from IBS Capital Allies in the last quarter. It was a great one where we learned a lot of new things that we certainly have not taken for granted. This upcoming quarter we are looking forward to the guest lectures of Accuracy and First Dutch and the great new insights that they will bring. Although 2017 has set the bar high for us we are hoping to keep improving our performance through 2018.
