Welcome to my personal investment blog!

My name is Ventsislav Dimitrov, and I have been working as a credit risk analyst since February 2016. My journey in the financial sector began at ProCredit Bank, a regional SME financing bank, where I honed my skills in analyzing business models alongside traditional financial metrics. This approach proved to be highly effective, allowing our team to outperform the market consistently. While the local market had approximately 25% of business portfolios at risk, our bank maintained less than 2% at risk, a testament to our strategic risk management. This success continued for many years and remains true today. The bank has been profitable for every year since its establishment, including during the 2008 and later years when nearly no bank was profitable.

The bank’s performance is even more impressive considering our annual growth rate of over 10% in a stagnant market. We took risks, but only the right ones. This experience shaped my perspective on evaluating companies, focusing on what they do, how they do it, management practices, key strengths, supply chains, capital assets, and the people behind the operations as opposed to focusing simply on the traditional financial metrics.

My educational background includes eight years of studying economics, a master’s degree in finance, and over three years of specialized training at ProCredit’s private academy, which involved an investment of around 100,000 EUR. At the end of my career at ProCredit, I was working as a credit risk officer for large corporate clients and investment projects. Later, I became a Country Specialist working in Frankfurt am Main, overseeing the entire credit risk process on a regional level.

I am also a profitable day trader with a proven track record. When I day trade, I focus on 1-hour and 4-hour timeframes, taking trades that last several hours or up to a few days. This approach gives me a technical understanding of where the price of a stock is and where it might go in the short term.

Currently, I am married and a father of two wonderful children. After my first child, I decided to go out of the banking sector and try something new, so I day traded for a few months, but then found it very difficult to work from home. Instead, I found a great challenge working for a major commodity trading firm, where I continue to apply my expertise in credit risk analysis and investment strategies while gaining new perspectives for managing risk from some of the best in the world.

I simply love the financial markets and can look at a chart for many hours without losing excitement. I also love to learn and analyze different businesses. When I invest in a stock, I hope to never have to sell it, but I follow closely the companies I have invested in. If there is new information, I rethink whether it is still the best decision to have my family money allocated the way it is. In the financial markets, you should always be open to saying that there is a better way now. This is important because the financial markets are the most competitive market that has ever existed on the planet. You have to take only the best decisions and avoid as many mistakes as possible, as early as possible.

Through this blog, I aim to share insights, strategies, and experiences that have helped me navigate the complex world of investments. Join me as we explore the intricacies of financial analysis and investment opportunities together.

My Investment Strategy: A Blend of Value and Active Management

I follow a strategy that mixes the wisdom of Warren Buffett’s value investing with Peter Lynch’s active money management. Here’s how it works:

1. Finding Great Businesses: I look for companies with strong fundamentals that are selling at reasonable prices. The goal is to buy these stocks and hold them indefinitely, hoping they will continue to grow and generate returns.
2. Monitoring Business Value: The value of a business can change over time due to various factors like market conditions, technological advancements, and management decisions. For example, IBM was once a dominant player in the tech industry but struggled to adapt to the rapidly changing environment and lost significant value over time, so if you owned IBM at its peak, it would be a waste not to allocate your money to Apple, Microsoft, or something completely different.
3. Active Management: If a company’s management starts making poor decisions and the stock price remains high, I prefer to sell that stock and reallocate my investment to a better opportunity. This ensures my portfolio remains strong and aligned with my investment goals.
4. Importance of Price: It’s not enough to buy the best businesses; the price at which you buy matters. Money is made by purchasing undervalued stocks—those that are priced lower than their intrinsic value. This approach helps maximize returns and minimize risks.
5. Focused Investment: I don’t believe in diversification on the stock market. It’s worthless to buy 100 stocks only to watch them all go down simultaneously. Instead, it’s better to invest in the single best stock out of those 100, which would gain more than the competition and fall less than the average market. Most people who got rich did so by owning a single stock rather than diversifying across many.
6. Concentrated Portfolio: With the ability to reallocate cash nearly without any cost, I think the best strategy is to have your money allocated in about 5 stocks. Owning around 10 or more stocks is not a great idea because even professionals cannot know everything about 10 big businesses—their markets, competitors, follow closely earnings releases, etc. It’s simply too much. Having 5 stocks already requires a lot of time and research if you really want to know them well. I believe 90% of people cannot stay up to date with 5 different companies.