News and Press Releases

What do Catella’s fund managers think about the stock market situation right now, and how do they view the possibilities of being able to generate returns despite low interest rates, uncertain economic activity and regardless of stock market performance. This was the theme of one of the events during Catella Day, a panel discussion between three of Catella's hedge fund managers, Mattias Nilsson, Martin Jonsson, Anders Wennberg, and Carl Berg.

For the seventh year in a row we organised our regular Catella Day event. We see Catella Day as an opportunity to offer our distributors important, useful and above all interesting content. Our ambition is that the content and the speakers we engage should really help to broaden views and contribute new perspectives. We have already started planning for next year.

Risk information With less than two months left, 2019 has so far been a really strong stock market year. The Stockholm stock exchange’s broad OMXSPI index is up around 25 percent since the start of the year, and among the gems that have sparkled especially brightly are the market’s many small companies. How does Catella Småbolagsfond go about picking its stocks, what does a well-composed portfolio look like and, not least, which sectors and companies are particularly hot right now and for 2020? Forest products, selected health care and technology, and really good corporate management and reliable owners – this is a brief summary of the wish list of Martin Nilsson and Henrik Holmer, the managers of Catella Småbolagsfond.

Mattias Nilsson is a new portfolio manager at Catella. But he is not new to the industry and, with his solid experience, is a very good addition to Catella Fonder’s fund management team. We took the opportunity to interview him about his background, his views on hedge fund management and the upcoming reporting period.

After a large post-summer slide, Sweden now has negative interest rates. A Swedish ten-year government bond is at -0.2 percent, while the ten-year US treasury has fallen to 1.7 percent after having been over 3 percent. Sweden’s Riksbank governor Stefan Ingves has battled to raise inflation, which is about 1.5 percent. This means that a “parked” investment that should be really secure generates a negative return of around -1.7 percent after inflation. What can you do in a market like this? The fixed income managers for Catella Hedgefond and Credit Opportunity, Stefan Wigstrand and Thomas Elofsson, spend their days thinking about just this.

My two-day business trip to Skåne begins with a visit to Lindab in the town of Grevie on the beautiful Bjäre peninsula. Lindab is an international industrial group that develops, manufactures, markets and distributes products and system solutions for construction and indoor climate.

Global stock markets are hanging in the balance. There are plenty of clouds, including weaker macro indicators, trade wars and Brexit. Will we slide into recession, as many believe?

With a rise of more than 20 percent for the Stockholm stock exchange, the first half of 2019 was the best in 10 years. 

Making judgments about the future calls for a large dose of humility. I would guess that most portfolio managers, particularly value-oriented ones, have asked themselves: Why are valuation differences so extreme? What is underlying this? What needs to happen in order for the valuation differences to return to what has historically been normal? Or is it, to use the words many call the most dangerous phrase when it comes to the financial markets, different this time?

After spending a few days cleaning up my old childhood home, I was intensely reminded of how things change over time. We really did have a manual typewriter when I grew up. I also reflected on how the era of a standalone caller ID beside the phone was short-lived, and that the once-essential bank passbooks now feel like a memory from a terribly distant age. Bill Gates once said, "We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten. Don't let yourself be lulled into inaction."

'In war, whichever side may call itself the victor, there are no winners, but all are losers.'Neville Chamberlain

The chart below shows US and European credit spreads and the S&P500 stock index for the past year. The movements track each other well, which is perhaps not surprising since stock markets and credit markets make reflective assessments of corporate cash flows.

Forestry is one of Sweden's most traditional industries, and today's ever-growing demand for sustainability is gradually turning the sector into an experimental workshop for modern technology.

It is half day on the Stockholm Stock Exchange on wednesday May 29th. This means that the stop time for orders of purchases and sales in our funds is at. 11:00.

The Garpenberg mine is situated in the municipality of Hedemora, in one of the oldest mining areas of Sweden still in operation. Ore extraction in the Garpenberg area began as early as the 13th century, and in the 14th century German miners were engaged to improve the mining techniques and make them more efficient. The locals called the Germans ‘garpar’, which later gave the town of Garpenberg its name.

The current economic cycle has been going on for a long time, and global growth has slowed somewhat. Interest rates have again fallen to almost non-existent levels, while the stock exchanges began the year with a surge. In Sweden, the krona continues to fall.

Catella applies various management processes and strategies, depending on the product. We have a fundamental approach, and conduct our analysis from a sector perspective. With our actively managed long-only equity funds, Catella Sverige Aktiv Hållbarhet and Catella Småbolagsfond, our teams work closely together to analyse companies, trends and themes in the Nordic stock markets. The fundamental analysis of large and small companies is conducted in a similar way, with the main difference being the consideration of liquidity risks for each company. To be able to justify a higher liquidity risk in a small company, this risk must be reflected in a greater potential upside for the share.

The traditional way of looking at portfolio diversification, with equity exposure being combined solely with bonds, has provided a fantastic risk-adjusted return for many years. But with interest rates at record lows and stock markets nudging all-time highs, there is good reason to think afresh.

It is half day on the Stockholm Stock Exchange on Tuesday April 30th. This means that the stop time for orders of purchases and sales in our funds is at. 11:00.

There are often trends on the stock exchange, and right now spin-offs and streamlining are in vogue. We have seen SCA spin off Essity, Atlas Copco spin off Epiroc, Autoliv spin off Veoneer and Kinnevik distribute MTG shares. More recently, Maersk has spun off Maersk Drilling, Schibsted has spun off 35 percent of Adevinta, and MTG has spun off Nordic Entertainment.

Thursday April 18th, it is half day on the Stockholm Stock Exchange. This means that the stop time for orders of purchases and sales in our funds is at. 11:00.

Online retailing is taking an ever-greater proportion of Swedes' total spending, and companies that focus on the internet are being rewarded with much higher growth than those sticking to physical stores. Will regular stores disappear completely, and if so, when? In this month's podcast, Catella Fonder has brought together a number of analysts with expertise in this area to provide an overview: Carnegie's retail analyst Niklas Ekman, Catella Fonder's portfolio manager Anders Wennberg and Sandra Gadd, Business Development Director at Boozt.com.

At the beginning of the year, Catella Fondförvaltning AB (Catella) made a decision to coordinate the management of Catella Hedgefond and Catella Nordic Long/Short Equity into a single team. This was to increase synergies and to take another step towards an even more market-neutral and well-diversified management style.

It is always darkest before dawn, an expression that can in retrospect describe the conclusion of last year and the beginning of 2019. During the late autumn and, to a greater extent, all the way into the Christmas holiday, the financial markets were dominated by a strongly negative sentiment, with economic worries exacerbated by a continued belief in monetary policy tightening. The preferred interpretation was clearly negative, and 2018 closed on a low note. With the first quarter now over, we can instead look back on an absolutely fantastic start to the year, with almost all the worries blown away – at least when it comes to stock market performance.

I fielded a question at an investor meeting this week: “What should you do when your gut feeling says the stock market cannot rise any further but the interest rate on deposits is still zero?” I think there are many of us who can feel these reservations. The big underlying issue is how we feel about the economy. Is this just a pause or are we heading for a fall, and in that case how steep a fall? Economic fluctuations are tricky. They rarely come when you expect them, and they are even more rarely calm and rational since the market constantly overreacts. And both Brexit and a trade war are lurking in the shadows, reinforcing the uncertainty. Nonetheless, the stock market has been exceptionally strong at the start of the year and it is difficult to find good alternatives to shares when interest rates are so low. So, what should we turn to if we have that gut feeling the questioner expressed at the seminar?

Catella Fondförvaltning AB today publishes the funds' annual report for 2018. 

After a gloomy end to 2018 the new stock market year has begun very strongly. The US Federal Reserve has taken a softer stance and there are positive signals from the US-China trade talks. The reporting season was largely as expected, with an absence of negative news, and a Fed statement was enough to lift the stock market, say Catella's equity fund managers.

The Catella Nordic Long Short Equity (RC) hedge fund had a tough time last year. It fell by 13.8 percent and underperformed both the Nordic stock index and global hedge fund indexes. Although the fund has demonstrated a positive return of almost 32 percent since its inception in December 2010, and an average annual return of 3.6 percent over the same period, Catella Fonder decided to realign the fund's strategy and management in January 2019.

A large exposure, and a long-term holding that we have highlighted before, is care company Ambea. Since the company has just completed its acquisition of Aleris and reported for 2018 alongside its sector colleagues Humana and Attendo, it feels natural to look forward to 2019 and the coming 2020s.

The equity market has begun 2019 strongly after a gloomy end to last year, but in large parts of the world there are signs of weaker growth. The question is whether this is a temporary blip, caused by inventory build-up, or whether a longer decline is on the way.

Catella has during recent years gradually developed its portfolio management with increased focus on sustainability and absolute return strategies. The performance outcome in 2018 did not live up to our expectations and we are not satisfied, especially in the case of the fund Catella Nordic Long/Short Equity. Therefore, we will carry out a number of changes in our portfolio management by reallocating resources within the portfolio management team.

“It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.” Karl Kristian Steincke

Jack Bogle of Vanguard once said, “Half the time, I wonder why I have so much in stocks, and other times I wonder why I have so little.” The quotation rather neatly sums up the past year, but also investment decisions in general.

After several years of stable growth, global financial markets once again demonstrated their idiosyncrasy, and one word sums up 2018: Challenging.