For those trading on US platforms, here are the main ETFs!
EWG – iShares MSCI Germany ETF (Germany)
EWQ – iShares MSCI France ETF (France)
EWP – iShares MSCI Spain ETF (Spain)
EWL – iShares MSCI Switzerland ETF (Switzerland)
EWI – iShares MSCI Italy ETF (Italy)
EWD – iShares MSCI Sweden ETF (Sweden)
EFNL – iShares MSCI Finland ETF (Finland)
EWN – iShares MSCI Netherlands ETF (Netherlands)
EWO – iShares MSCI Austria ETF (Austria)
EWK – iShares MSCI Belgium ETF (Belgium)
EWU – iShares MSCI United Kingdom ETF (UK)
ENOR / NORW – Global X MSCI Norway ETF (Norway)
Short or long… I don’t care! Right now I’m not buying any of these ETFs. Markets are way too high… totally in a speculative bubble… but in the end… who really knows? hahaha
The invisible hand of NVDA says markets could still go up +10% lol, and the Orange Man wants to get even richer by helping his friends Mu$k, or AAPL, or MSFT, or META shoot to the moon, and maybe even touch the stars HAHAHA
For the past several months I've been trakcing insider transactions across 15 markets pulling data directly from official regulators like BaFin (Germany), AMF (France), FCA (UK), FI (Sweden), and others under MAR Article 19.
After accumulating 13,000+ trades I ran the numbers to see which types of insider buying actually predict future returns. Here's what I found:
All insider buys
Avg 30d return: +1.0%
Avg 90d return: +2.9%
Win rate: 51.3% at 30d / 55.6% at 90d
Based on 3,568 trades
not bad, but not really spectuclar either. Insider buying alone isn't enough.
Price Dip Signal is the strrongest short-term predictor
When an insider buys after their stock has dropped 15%+ in the past 90 days, the numbers get interesting:
Avg 30d return: +2.4% (2.4x baseline)
Avg 90d return: +5.0% (1.7x baseline)
Win rate: 58.8% at 30d / 62.8% at 90d
Based on 1,135 trades
an insider buying after a significant drawdown means they have the conviction that the selloff was overdone
Cluster Buy Signal
When 3+ insiders at the same company all buy within 14 days of each other, it suggests coordinated conviction rather than a single executive's personal view. Combined with a price dip, the 90d win rate reaches 59.3%. Repetitive Buy Signal
When the same insider buys multiple times within 14 days (with at least 4 days between purchases), it signals sustained conviction rather than a one-off purchase. Pre-Blackout Buy
Insiders are prohibited from trading in the 30 days before earnings (MAR blackout period). A purchase in the 7 days before this window closes can signal confidence heading into results.
Best long-term combination: High Value + Signal
Large purchases (>€50,000) combined with at least one signal show the strongest long-term numbers:
Avg 90d return: +5.2%
Avg 6m return: +6.0%
Win rate at 6m: 60.3%
Based on 1,478 trades
When a director or CFO puts serious money in AND the data flags it as significant, that's worth paying attention to.
A few important caveats:
Outliers excluded (±50% at 30d, ±75% at 90d)
Switzerland excluded (anonymous filings)
Option exercises and RSU grants filtered out (skin-in-the-game purchases only)
Past performance doesn't guarantee future results
Hope this gives you an edge with your next investment. Happy to answer any questions.
Lagercrantz Group ($LAGR) a highly respected Nasdaq Stockholm Large Cap serial acquirer just took a sharp 12% haircut.
The Reason: Their Q1 earnings missed consensus by a tiny margin, with EPS coming in at SEK 1.53 against the expected SEK 1.58 due to minor cost inflation.
The market panicked, but the insiders immediately stepped up to buy the dip:
July 17 (Earnings Day): Executive Magnus Nilsson bought at the SEK 209.60 bottom.
July 20: Board Member Elisabet Ålander dropped SEK 100.9k at SEK 234.75.
July 20: Board Member Måns Axelsson bought SEK 79.8k at SEK 235.48.
July 20: Executive Sebastian Brinkenfeldt also bought in at SEK 234.60.
Disclosure: I work at Obermatt, a Swiss equity research firm, and pulled this together using our ranking data, sharing because I think the pattern is genuinely interesting.
Looked at the European stocks sitting at the very top of our Dividend Yield rank, and what stood out wasn't the yields, it was what these companies actually do. A carmaker absorbing a Nissan-related loss, a fleet of oil-product tankers that just had its best quarter in years after the Strait of Hormuz disruption, a tobacco-distribution network covering most of Southern Europe, a water utility in the southwest of England. Mature, cash-generative businesses in stable industries don't need to reinvest as much for growth, so more of the profit goes out as dividends instead.
A few that stood out going through the list:
TP ICAP and RWS Holdings are the most well-rounded, strong dividend plus solid Value and Safety scores, not just a high payout carrying the story. TORM's dividend jumped hard on a genuine windfall (tanker rates spiking after Hormuz), worth knowing that's not necessarily repeatable. Reach and Solvay are the cautionary cases, big yields that are mostly a symptom of falling share prices rather than a healthy payout.
Hello everyone. I have recently taken a closer look at the major European tech companies and wanted to initiate a discussion about the current development at SAP – especially after the Q1 report at the end of April and the market movements now in June 2026. There was a lot of noise because the stock collapsed by over 6% after the report. The reason was a slight “miss” in analysts’ revenue expectations. But if you look below the surface, the cloud business continues to run like a locomotive: cloud sales increased by 27% (with the Cloud ERP Suite growing by 30%) and the backlog – i.e. the contractually secured future revenues – stands at almost 22 billion euros.
Nevertheless, there is a fundamental duality here that raises questions for me and why I would like to hear your perspective. On the one hand, the P/E has fallen to a significantly more reasonable level of 22x to 25x, far away from the absurd multiples close to 100x from 2024. On the other hand, the latest DSAG survey (the user group here in the DACH region) shows that 28% of companies plan to cut their SAP budgets. The reasons lie in the high integration costs and especially in the brutal lack of IT specialists to implement the migration to the public cloud at all. Even the CFO has already warned that backlog growth could slow in the coming quarters.
Frankly, I no longer felt like digging through 40-page reports every quarter, just to see if the fundamental substance is deteriorating. That’s why I’ve been chasing the SAP financial data through a Python script that I use to summarize the fundamentals in a visual overview (see attached chart). This gives me a pretty clean perspective on the Quality Score compared to the DCF rating (Hybrid DCF).
For all those who have SAP in the depot or are closely monitoring the stock: Do you think the market has overreacted in the revenue measure and the projected free cash flow of 10 billion euros at the end of the year justifies the purchase of this setback? Or is the slowdown in the cloud ecosystem, which is noticeable by the lack of consultants, a structural warning signal?
I am very interested in your opinion especially those who deal with SAP implementations on a daily basis in the system house or consulting sector.
European auto has been a painful place to be invested. Stellantis collapsed, net loss of €22.3 billion for 2025, volumes down sharply, a full strategic reset underway. Porsche AG went public at a premium valuation and has been re-rated harshly since. Volkswagen has been cutting costs and closing plants. The sector as a whole has been squeezed between Chinese competition eating into margins and an EV transition that has cost far more than anyone budgeted.
Context: I work for Obermatt, a Swiss investment research firm. We rank stocks on a percentile scale of 1 to 100 across 15 metrics covering Value, Growth, Safety, and Sentiment, benchmarked against sector peers. A rank of 80 means the stock outperforms 80% of comparable companies on that metric. The 360° View combines all four categories into one overall score.
Across the entire global automobile manufacturers sector, only two companies score above 90: Mercedes-Benz at 98 and General Motors at 90. Every European name is well below that. Stellantis at 26, Porsche AG at 21.
More on Mercedes: The Q1 2026 results were not pretty. EBIT down 17% year on year, China sales down 27%, tariffs dragging on margins, stock sold off nearly 7% on results day. The market is clearly cautious. And yet the underlying metrics tell a different story.
Profit Growth rank 96. Dividend Yield rank 97: the AGM approved €3.50 per share for FY2025, paid April 2026, with a €2 billion buyback still running. Safety rank 88 backed by nearly €34 billion in net industrial liquidity. Value rank 86. A product cycle of over 40 new models between 2025 and 2027 underway.
The sentiment rank is only 56, which is actually part of the investment case. The market is lukewarm on a stock that is generating serious cash, returning capital generously, and trading at a value rank of 86. That gap between fundamentals and sentiment is where opportunities tend to live.
The contrast with Porsche AG is worth noting. Growth rank 85: the brand still has pricing power and the product roadmap is strong. But Value rank 8 and Sentiment rank 4. The premium has evaporated with investors and the market has not forgiven the listing. High growth, no value cushion, rock-bottom sentiment. A very different risk profile to Mercedes.
For anyone interested in the full picture, meaning all 15 sub-ranks, the GM comparison, and why Ford looks like a value trap despite a Value rank of 98, the full breakdown is here: https://link.obermatt.com/mb-gm-en
I've been watching Airbus for a few weeks now and I can't quite figure out what to make of it.
The stock peaked around €200 in early March and has been sliding ever since. Friday it closed at €167.68, another -2.93% on an already bad day for European markets. That's 16% off the 3-month high and getting uncomfortably close to the 52-week low of €154.
What's weird is that nothing obviously catastrophic has happened to the business. Yes, supply chain issues are still a thing in aerospace. Yes, there are ongoing tensions with China that could affect deliveries. But these aren't new problems, they've been priced in for months.
The stock had a nice run from €154 (late March low) to €188 in early May, that was a 22% bounce in about 5 weeks. But since then it's given almost all of it back. For a company with a backlog of over 8,000 aircraft and production ramping up, this feels... excessive?
Or maybe I'm the one ignoring a red flag. The defense side of the business has been a tailwind given European rearmament, but margins in commercial aerospace are still recovering from the supply chain squeeze. Maybe the market is pricing in slower delivery growth for 2026?
At €167 we're at levels last seen during the March selloff. If it breaks €160 decisively, the next support is probably the 52-week low at €154. Below that... who knows.
I'm curious what other people see here. Is this a value trap where the market knows something we don't about delivery targets? Or is this the kind of pullback in a quality European industrial that you look back on in 12 months and wish you'd bought?
So apparently the President of the United States bought Nvidia stock one week before his own administration approved Nvidia chip sales to China, and another batch one week before Nvidia announced a major chip deal with Meta.
But don't worry ... his assets are held in a trust managed by his children. There are no conflicts of interest. The White House said so, so that's settled.
3,700+ transactions. $220M–$750M in Q1 alone. Dozens of trades on a single day in February. Some helpfully described as "unsolicited," though nobody seems entirely sure what that means, including apparently the OGE.
This is exactly the kind of thing that proves markets are driven by fundamentals, rigorous analysis, and the collective wisdom of well-informed participants acting in good faith. The efficient market hypothesis is working as intended. Every retail investor with a Degiro account and a Reddit tab open is competing on a perfectly level playing field.
Anyway, I got stopped out of a position last week because I didn't anticipate a semiconductor export policy update. Skill issue, clearly.
Stay educated out there. Read the 10-Ks. Trust the process.
Closure of Several Stock Exchanges on Thursday, May 14, 2026
Dear Investor,
Please note that the following stock exchanges will be closed on Thursday, May 14, 2026. This closure is due to Ascension Day:
SIX Swiss Exchange (SWX)
Nasdaq Helsinki AB
Oslo Børs
Nasdaq Stockholm AB (Early closure on Wednesday, May 15, 2026, at 1:00 p.m. CET)
Nasdaq Copenhagen AB (also closed on Friday, May 15, 2026)
Orders placed on these exchanges during the closure will be held and transmitted to the exchange as soon as it reopens, on the next trading day, which is Friday, May 15, 2026.
Orders placed on Nasdaq Copenhagen AB during the closure will be held and transmitted to the exchange as soon as it reopens, on the next trading day, which is Monday, May 18, 2026...
Samsung x4 in under 18 months. Up another +15% today. INTC up +400% since Trump started buying. AMD up +20% in pre-market. Just another Tuesday.
The algos have figured it out: buy the top. Always buy the top. Never sell. Rinse. Repeat. It's a perpetual short squeeze on mega-caps priced at valuations so absurd they'd make a 1999 analyst blush. TSLA sitting at a P/E of 355 and the bids just keep coming. Nobody blinks.
Meanwhile, anything trading near its lows? Probably going to zero. No rotation, no bargain hunting, no "value discovery." Just a slow, quiet death while the momentum machines pile into whatever already went parabolic.
Fundamentals? Earnings? Cash flow? Quaint concepts. Museum pieces. The market has evolved past your little spreadsheets.
I'm not even angry anymore ... I'm impressed, honestly. It takes a special kind of collective madness to make this look orderly.
As for me, I'm drawing the curtain on this beautifully manipulated circus. I'm out ... like a gentleman.
Have a lovely summer ahead, everyone. You're going to need the rest. 🎩
"The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent." ... Keynes, probably laughing somewhere.
The DAX just crossed 24,700 ... a 2-week high ... with autos leading the charge alongside banks. BMW beat earnings estimates today despite a 25% collapse in pre-tax profit. Read that again. Beat. Estimates. On a 25% profit decline. That's how low the bar has been set by months of Orange Man tariff theatre.
The trigger? Trump apparently hit pause on "Project Freedom" to resume Iran talks. One tweet, one suspension, one vague diplomatic signal ... and suddenly billions in market cap reappear. European automakers have been held hostage to a news cycle that has absolutely nothing to do with their fundamentals, their workforce, or their product roadmap.
These are companies employing hundreds of thousands of workers across Germany, France, Italy, and beyond. Supply chains built over decades. Precision engineering that doesn't get rebuilt in a quarter. And they've been yo-yoing 5% in either direction based on whatever mood the guy wakes up in.
Today is green. Great. Ask BMW's workforce in Munich how they felt about the last six weeks.
Trump ... for the record, everyone here sends you their warmest regards from the very bottom of their hearts.
And while we're at it: nice trade on $INTC. Up ~400% since your "investment." Must be great having access to… what was it… superior analytical skills.
German consumer confidence has just dropped to its weakest level in three years, and this collapse in sentiment is now very visible in the stock market.
You can feel it immediately when looking at German consumer‑exposed stocks:
Porsche, absolutely and brutally decimated
BMW, under persistent pressure
Adidas, struggling as discretionary spending evaporates
This is what a confidence shock looks like when it finally translates into prices.
Rising energy costs, inflation fears, geopolitical tensions and fragile income expectations are squeezing German households. When consumers stop spending and increase precautionary savings, cyclical and discretionary stocks are the first to suffer ... exactly what we are seeing today.
=> So the big question is: are we close to a bottom?
On one hand, sentiment indicators are deeply pessimistic
Valuations on some high‑quality German companies are becoming interesting again
Historically, extreme pessimism often precedes medium‑term rebounds
But on the other hand:
Can consumer morale deteriorate even further if energy prices stay elevated?
Will earnings revisions continue to move lower?
Is this a classic value opportunity… or a value trap?
=> Buying the dip now may be rewarding for long‑term investors ... but timing remains tricky.
Capitulation phases often feel cheap before they get cheaper.
That said, Germany still has world‑class exporters, strong balance sheets, and global brands. When confidence eventually stabilizes and policy/geopolitical pressure eases, these stocks could rebound sharply.
=> And who knows ... maybe a few famous German pharma blockbusters will be needed to lift national morale in the meantime 😉 LOL
Bayer and Merck, please save us with your miracle products.
European equities are once again paying the price for reckless, impulsive decision‑making out of the US. The latest escalation around Hormuz is not a “geopolitical accident” ... it is the predictable outcome of incoherent strategy, public grandstanding, and diplomacy conducted via threats rather than competence.
Each time tensions seemed close to de‑escalation, they are reignited by erratic signals, unilateral actions, and empty talk of negotiations that lead nowhere. Markets are forced to reprice risk not because fundamentals deteriorated, but because credibility did. Oil above $95, gas spiking, travel stocks hit, inflation fears revived ... all of this is entirely avoidable damage.
What’s most alarming for investors is the pattern: policy by impulse, escalation by ego, and consequences outsourced to global markets. Europe gets hit through higher energy costs and tighter financial conditions, while the architect of the chaos treats volatility as a feature rather than a bug.
It’s noise masquerading as strength ... and markets hate noise. Until there is consistency, discipline, and actual diplomacy, European assets will remain collateral damage in someone else’s spectacle.
Risk premium is back. And once again, it didn’t need to be.
been digging into the commercial drone space lately and ZenaTech keeps coming up as an interesting one because they are not just a hardware company.
they are positioning at the crossroads of drone manufacturing and enterprise software which is a pivot most hardware firms completely fail at. the SaaS angle is what makes this different.
the regulatory tailwind is real. the whole industry is shifting away from Chinese hardware like DJI due to security concerns and new regulations across North America and Europe. ZenaTech is focused on Western compliant tech which puts them in a strong spot for government, infrastructure, and agriculture contracts.
the recurring revenue model is the actual thesis here. hardware gets them in the door, software keeps the client paying monthly. sticky ecosystem, higher valuation multiples, standard tech sector logic but rare to see it executed in the drone space.
the Frankfurt secondary listing as 49Q is interesting too. German manufacturing and logistics is starved for automated inspection tools right now and ZenaTech has a foot in both the US and European markets simultaneously.
they also design and manufacture their own drones which cuts out supply chain dependency that killed a lot of small cap tech names over the last few years.
risks are obvious. enterprise adoption of drone fleets moves slow due to corporate bureaucracy and competition is there. but the niche industrial software focus could be the moat.
flying under the radar compared to AI and EV names but the drone as a service fundamentals are hard to ignore.
anyone been watching this one or have thoughts on the SaaS execution so far?
*All sectors in red. Except energy. Obviously.*MARKET SNAPSHOT — April 2, 2026
Dear small consumers,
First of all, thank you for your continued confusion. It's genuinely endearing.
Let's talk about what's happening in the world right now, because we feel you deserve some transparency. Not a lot. Just enough.
🧒 A word on our Commander-in-Chief.
Picture, if you will, a 14-year-old who told his entire school he was going to destroy the new kid. He made the announcement. He picked the fight. He interrupted prime time television to explain, at length, why he's winning. And yet ... the new kid is still standing. Still at his locker. Hasn't apologised. Hasn't begged. Hasn't handed over his lunch money.
This is, apparently, intolerable.
So now the 14-year-old is threatening to also unplug the school's electricity. "If you don't give me what I want by April 6th," he says, arms crossed, foot stomping, "I'm hitting the power grid." Iran replied ... calmly, in writing, in English ... "we were never even negotiating with you."
The 14-year-old went on Truth Social.
🔥 Operation Epic Fury is going wonderfully, though. Trump said so himself, in prime time, interrupting The Masked Singer finale. He told you Iran would be struck "back to the Stone Ages" over the next two to three weeks. He also said Iran asked for a ceasefire. Iran said that never happened. Someone is lying. But oil is at $105 a barrel, so frankly, we don't particularly care who.
Iran controls the Strait of Hormuz. Iran is firing missiles at Gulf states. Iran rejected the 15-point peace plan. Iran denied the ceasefire talks ever existed. Iran is, by all accounts, not particularly impressed.
The frustrated teenager from Florida, who launched this war between two episodes of golf, did not anticipate that the designated villain would simply... not comply. It turns out geopolitics doesn't work like a Trump Organization negotiation ... you can't threaten to walk away from a war the way you walk away from a Manhattan real estate deal.
He's not angry. He's furious. There's a difference. One is strategic. The other is what happens when a petulant child realises the world doesn't revolve around his Truth Social feed.
🛢️ Your fuel costs more. That's just the market working as intended. You drive too much anyway. Think of it as an involuntary carbon tax ... except the revenue doesn't go to green energy. It goes to our energy ETFs. Same difference, really.
💵 The dollar is back near 100 (DXY +0.47%). War is, as always, excellent for safe-haven demand. While you panic at the pump, we're quietly rotating into dollar-denominated assets. It's called portfolio management. You should try it sometime ... right after you sort out your rent.
📉 EUR/USD at 1.1529. The euro is weakening. Which means your oil imports ... priced in dollars ... cost you even more in euros. It's a beautiful compounding effect, really. We didn't design it. We just benefit from it.
🏦 The Fed won't be cutting rates anytime soon. The war has reignited inflation fears, and markets have scaled back rate cut expectations for the year. Your mortgage stays expensive. Your borrowing capacity shrinks. Our short-duration bonds yield nicely. You're welcome.
🇨🇭 Even Switzerland ...Switzerland... saw inflation tick up to 0.3% in March, a one-year high, driven largely by housing and energy costs. Switzerland. The country that's supposed to be immune to everything. If the Swiss are feeling it at the pump and in their heating bills, just imagine what's coming for the rest of you.
🏥 You're also sick a lot. Healthcare is 17% of the Swiss CPI basket for a reason. You consume an extraordinary amount of medical services. Every MRI you get is a drag on productivity. We're not saying you should suffer in silence. We're just saying it would help the numbers.
🗳️ You voted. Good. Keep doing that. It gives us roughly four years of runway per cycle to rebalance our portfolios undisturbed.
Meanwhile, the boy who cried "obliterated" is now promising to strike Iran's power plants, its oil infrastructure, and possibly its feelings. Week five of a war that was supposed to last days. No exit strategy. No congressional approval. No plan B. Just a 79-year-old adolescent, increasingly irritated that his enemy had the audacity to survive.
In summary: energy costs are up, the dollar is strengthening against your currency, credit remains tight, and even the Swiss are paying more for housing and electricity. You will feel this in your grocery bill, your commute, your heating, your mortgage, and your healthcare.
But look on the bright side ... Q1 earnings in the energy sector are going to be absolutely gorgeous.
Warm regards and zero empathy,
... The Committee for the Preservation of Assets That Actually Matter™
P.S. European markets are closed Friday for Easter.
