New beginnings take time

What I have been up to and why I posted so little

I launched this Substack in the spring of 2024 and had quite high ambitions in terms of the ideas I would post. Since then, I have only posted four company write-ups, so what happened?

Well, first of all, I realized my circle of competence within Healthcare wasn’t so great. I have 20 years of investing experience, but it’s a different thing to really know a sector well, especially Healthcare. My conclusion - I needed to read more books. With a full-time job and an attention span like a goldfish (smartphone addicted), that was easier said than done.

Second, if I am converting to being a full-time Healthcare investor, what should my portfolio look like? Should I only pick stocks within Healthcare, or do Healthcare + index investing? I spent the autumn scratching my head on these topics while I was finding what books to read.

On the topic of reading, I managed to put my phone away, at least sometimes, to finish some great books. In total, I have finished four great books, and I’m halfway through a fifth this year. Most of these books were focused on Pharma and Biotech, the areas I definitely know least about.

On how to manage my portfolio, I decided to allocate 50% of my money to Healthcare investments, 40% to other sectors, and 10% to swing trades. So, I'm still doing stock picking outside Healthcare. The idea was to run a 10-14 stock portfolio of Healthcare ideas, the problem? Well, I didn’t have 14 good or even decent ideas. This was the main reason for my radio silence on the Substack. Silently, I have been lurking in the shadows, digging through healthcare-related ideas and building a portfolio of now 12 holdings, which I’m quite happy with. As I like to track things, with the inception beginning of 2025, I have also created a weekly NAV series of how the portfolio is doing.

The portfolio is off to a flying start, up +28% at the half-year end. I have decided to only share the full portfolio if/when I reach 2000 followers, currently I’m at 1000, but I will give some hints from time to time (for example at @HealthStockPick on X).

Given the strong returns above, something I’m less happy about is that the ideas I have shared, at least recently, have been among my worst performers.

If we evaluate the four ideas I published:

• Modern Dental - Price when published 5.1 HKD, price today 4.26 HKD

• Agfa Gevaert - Price when published 1.15 EUR, price today 1.06 EUR

• AngelAlign - Price when published 58 HKD, price today 56.5 HKD

• Envista - Price when published 16.7 USD, price today 19.54 USD

That doesn’t look like a list of stocks that generated a 28% return during 2025 and that’s correct, in my current 12-stock portfolio, both Agfa and AngelAlign have left the portfolio during 2024. Modern Dental is still there and is actually the largest detractor to returns, as it’s my largest position, and the stock is only up some 3% YTD, including dividends. Envista, which I picked up around the lows this spring, has contributed nicely to returns. To not be too hard on myself, the previous Healthcare ideas copied from GlobalStockPicking have killed it this year, OssDsign, which I was one of the very first to write-up, is up around 50% this year, RaySearch is +56% this year, as two examples.

Lastly, starting this Substack, I had planned to turn into a full-time investor and monetize this at some point, just like many other Substack writers worth their salt are doing today. Some good and bad news on that front. Healthy Stock Picks will, for the foreseeable future, remain a free Substack with no paywall. As I decided to continue my day job for a few more years. The bad news? A full-time job takes up a lot of my time, so the pace of writing will be slower. I will increase it from the current pace of one idea per quarter for sure, but perhaps lower the bar a bit in terms of how comprehensive the write-ups are. I hope I will be able to deliver ideas with better returns going forward and not just have them hiding in my portfolio, as has been the case this year.

Inspired by the books I read, I want to end this post with a story about how chemotherapy came to be and its link to mustard gas.

From The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee:

“On December 2, 1943, .. a fleet of Luftwaffe planes flew by a group of American ships huddled in a harbor just outside Bari in southern Italy and released a volley of shells. The ships were instantly on fire. Unbeknown even to its own crew, one of the ships in the fleet, the John Harvey, was stockpiled with seventy tons of mustard gas stowed away for possible use. As the Harvey blew up, so did its toxic payload. The Allies had, in effect, bombed themselves.

The German raid was unexpected and a terrifying success. Fishermen and residents around the Bari harbor began to complain of the whiff of burnt garlic and horseradishes in the breeze. Grimy, oil-soaked men, mostly young American sailors, were dragged out from the water seizing with pain and terror, their eyes swollen shut. They were given tea and wrapped in blankets, which only trapped the gas closer to their bodies. Of the 617 men rescued, 83 died within the first week. The gas spread quickly over the Bari harbor, leaving an arc of devastation. Nearly a thousand men and women died of complications over the next months.

.. The injured soldiers and sailors were swiftly relocated to the States, and medical examiners were secretly flown in to perform autopsies on the dead civilians. The autopsies revealed what the Krumbhaars had noted earlier. In the men and women who had initially survived the bombing but succumbed later to injuries, white blood cells had virtually vanished in their blood, and the bone marrow was scorched and depleted. The gas had specifically targeted bone marrow cells

.. Could this effect, or some etiolated cousin of it, be harnessed in a controlled setting, in a hospital, in tiny, monitored doses, to target malignant white cells?

In 1942, they persuaded a thoracic surgeon, Gustaf Lindskog, to treat a forty-eight-year-old New York silversmith with lymphoma with ten continuous doses of intravenous mustard. It was a one-off experiment but it worked. In men, as in mice, the drug produced miraculous remissions. The swollen glands disappeared. Clinicians described the phenomenon as an eerie “softening” of the cancer, as if the hard carapace of cancer that Galen had so vividly described nearly two thousand years ago had melted away.

But the responses were followed, inevitably, by relapses. The softened tumors would harden again and recur—just as Farber’s leukemias had vanished then reappeared violently. ..there was only a fleeting glimpse of a cure.”