Author: Espresso Investor
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2025 Summary
The overall investment portfolio achieved 19% VND return in 2025, significantly lagging the 41% return of the VNIndex for the year. It is, though, important to note that (almost) all returns of the Index was from the 5-6x market cap growth of the country’s largest conglomerate Vingroup and its related entities. As such, market index…
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10. Short-term Volatility, Long-term Opportunity
These past few weeks have been a whirlwind to most investors. The tariff war initiated by the US has caused extreme volatility in the financial markets across all fronts – equities, bonds, rates, currencies, etc. The recent downturn, however, is nothing we have not witnessed before. In a not-so-distant past of just about 5 years…
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9. What drives Value
I do want to emphasize, here, the word Value and not Price. Price is decided by the maniac and bipolar Mr. Market (or the speculative public) and thus changes as frequently as everyday. Meanwhile, Value is determined by the fundamentals of the business that reflect more permanent conditions. A broker’s analyst, in making recommendations on…
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8. Mental Exercise – How to create a multi-billion-dollar Asian restaurant brand?
Let me get right into today’s topic. Imagine you have the following challenge to solve – How to create a multi-billion-dollar Asian restaurant brand that can sell globally? Concept First you got to pick a food concept to sell. Globally there are about over 30 restaurant chains that have market cap of above US$1bn. American…
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7. Vietnam’s middle-class rising, is it really? / Investing as a new survival skill
Among the investment and business community, the most common thesis on Vietnam, a tale as old as time, is its rapidly expanding middle-class. This narrative appears in everyday pitch materials, investment proposals, brokers’ recommendations and media. It is repeated over and over, and for long enough that most people now just take it as-is and…
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6. Investing Principles
I have a little notebook that I carry around, in which, I have summarized and listed down the best (to me personally) investment rules and philosophies, which I have gathered through my reading and listening to various super-investors and investment authors. Every time before I make a move, I would go through this list again…
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5. Analyzing company’s managers / Capital allocation for CEOs
For most, the process of assessing how capable a company’s CEO / management team is mostly qualitative – look at the their profile and background (education, previous workplace, past projects), ask a couple of smart questions and see if you like their responses. I used to follow the same approach of “due diligence” until I…
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4. Portfolio Review / Risk / Why Vietnam
Vietnam’s market has had some challenging years recently. When global spending began to normalize from late 2022 / early 2023 after a period of strong recovery post-COVID, retailers in Vietnam’s key export markets such as US and EU, seeing their inventories piling up, put a hard pause on buying. Vietnam’s exports slumped as a result.…
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2. My Revelation / Current Investment Framework
A sad revelation I had arrived at is that all the things we learned about investing in school such as Modern Portfolio Theory or Market Efficiency are not at all applicable in practice. One of the key assertions to these theories, that all investors are rational or logical, is simply never true. On top of…
The Espresso Investor 