Letter to Our Partners - Q4 and FY 2024
Betting big on exceptionally resilient and steadily growing compounders
Hi fellow Tortoise!
May this year bring you financial growth, stability, and abundant opportunities. May your investments flourish, your goals be achieved, and your hard work bear fruit. Cheers to a year of prosperity, balance, perfect health, and financial security for you and your loved ones!
2024 marked the first full year of our Substack. At the onset of 2024, we couldn’t have dreamed of such engaging Community, and one of our priorities in 2025 is to meet more of you in person. On our list to meet some of our fellow members: Ireland, Italy, Germany and Finland.
It was an excellent year for many investors. A fully invested portfolio with our selected companies and corresponding allocation mix returned 18.59% (EUR) over calendar 2024. This time-weighted performance reflects the results of our public stock portfolio that was fully invested right from the start, net of transaction costs and related charges, with reinvested dividends included. However, equity investments represent just a portion of our overall wealth, and it’s ultimately up to you to decide where to allocate new capital and how much emphasis to place on the stock market.
We own exceptional companies, led by top-notch people, that are destined for a great future. Our investment philosophy remains unchanged: favor companies with solid balance sheets and dominant business models, along with buying these companies at reasonable valuations. It’s the message we’ve been emphasizing in our previous letters. If we can reiterate that same phrase for years to come, it means the portfolio likely won’t have changed much.
It’s like watching paint dry – don’t change a winning team, and the Q3 conference calls confirmed why we stick to the companies we own today. Barring some glitches/buying opportunities or excessive run-ups in valuations, we intend to keep portfolio turnover low as we pretty much got our initial weighting in most of our holdings. The conservatively calculated IRR mix still looks decent, but it does reveal that today’s market environment doesn’t offer screaming buying opportunities.
As always, we’ll keep you updated on our portfolio and the investable universe, continue to publish our deep dives, and look forward to highly interactive discussions on all kinds of investing topics. This year, we’re planning to publish 5 deep dives into businesses that could make it to the portfolio when the timing/valuation is right.
Thank you for your unwavering support, and let’s keep growing The Compounding Tortoise family in 2025 and well beyond!
Yours sincerely,
The Compounding Tortoise, aka the CT
Download the letter through the below attachment.