Friday, April 5, 2013

Karsan Value Funds: 2013 Q1 Results

Karsan Value Funds (KVF) is a value-oriented fund, as described here. Due to securities regulations, the fund is not open to the public at this time. Should that change in the future, there will be an announcement on this site.

For the first quarter ended March 31st, 2013, KVF earned $1.96 per share, increasing the value of each share to $14.08. This was a record quarter for the fund, as performance handily outpaced both that of the flat Canadian markets and that of the buoyant US markets.

Helping the fund achieve this out-performance were broad-based gains throughout most of the portfolio. Gains in TAT Technologies, Artio, Dell and G. Willi-Food (discussed here, here, here and here, respectively) were strong enough such that the fund is now completely sold out of its positions in these names.

This quarter, the fund also exited a losing position in shares of SuperValu, which turned out to be a poor investment decision on my part that cost us all money. All mistakes are easy to see in retrospect, but I'm convinced this was one which I probably should have foreseen, as discussed here.

Unlike in previous quarters where results have been strong, this time currency effects did not drag down performance. Had the CAD/USD exchange rate finished the quarter at the same level at which it started the quarter, earnings per share would have been lower by 24 cents.

Despite the fund's performance this quarter, it's worth mentioning that results over small sample periods (and in this business, quarterly and even annual periods constitute *very* small sample sizes) are not to be extrapolated. Particularly as the US market has become more expensive, it has become more difficult to identify bargains, making a repeat of this quarter's results all the less likely.

KVF's income statement and balance sheet are included below (click to enlarge). Note that securities are marked to market value, and amounts are in $CAD:

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Congrats Saj! Excellent results.

As always,
Big fan.

Anonymous said...

Saj,

Your numbers are great, and clearly you've done very well. Any chance you might be willing to share your performance over time, using a metric such as time weighted return?

Cheers,
Big fan.

Saj Karsan said...

Thanks BF,

Yeah, once a few years of track record is built up, I will post some performance data. Otherwise it suffers from a small sample size problem.