Weekly: Your stocks discussed
Weekly 24 2025 + Top 5 June
On Tuesday, the lesson in our Introduction to Value Investing series was published: Lesson 16 – Knowing when to sell
Just some brief news for the rest, summarized below, along with the top five stocks for June.
I also continued working through the stock suggestions from the survey. Slightly fewer were analyzed this time due to the Whit Monday holiday and my visit yesterday to Portfolio Day by Investment Officer.
In addition to very insightful presentations by speakers like Philippe Gijsels, Jan Longeval, and Boris Cukon, former Prime Minister of Belgium Yves Leterme also gave a keynote speech about the future and challenges facing Europe. Naturally, the side conversations with other participants were also extremely valuable.
Trump came up regularly in both the speeches and discussions. The takeaway was the same as you’ve read here before: you have to look past the noise and the drama of the day. The long term is what matters.
Philippe Gijsels painted an interesting picture of shifting power dynamics across the world and what that might mean for the future. Leterme also clearly pointed out that twenty years ago, the G7 made up more than half of the world economy—now that’s down to about 25%. Other countries have gained influence.
What he’s really saying is that we’ve achieved what we aimed for as the Western world: that life is improving and wealth is increasing in other parts of the world too. We just have to get used to the fact that this means our dominance is fading.
Jan Longeval’s message was that bonds should be avoided. He backed this up with data, showing that over the long term, bonds aren’t actually safer than stocks. In fact, with bonds, you’re far more likely to lose purchasing power over time (after inflation), whereas with stocks, that has never happened historically.
Both Longeval and Gijsels concluded that commodities, alongside stocks, are a much better asset class to protect your wealth.
Boris Cukon’s speech once again made it clear that commodities are a field of expertise in their own right. And if you ask me (and others pointed this out yesterday as well), Cukon is the expert in our region.
He’s very bullish on uranium, but it wasn’t until he started talking about another commodity that I really sat up in my seat.