How Nemcap did it

Who is Nemcap, and what are the numbers?

Christian, a Swedish private investor who writes as Nemcap on X (@NemCapSE) and once on a blog of the same name. In 2003 he was given a portfolio worth about 170,000 kronor, four blue chips: H&M, Volvo, SEB and Ericsson. By April 2024, when the podcast Börsmagasinet gave him two episodes, it was about 250 million. By May 2026, when Veckans Trade had him for an hour and a half, it was over half a billion. Those are his own figures, given in long interviews in which he also names the mistakes. The arithmetic is a roughly three-thousandfold increase in about twenty-two years, which is some 40 to 45% a year compounded; the round number that circulates, 50% a year, fits the stronger stretches.

He studied at the Stockholm School of Economics without finishing the degree and learned the rest by owning companies. What makes him worth an essay is not the number but the way it was earned: no fund, no staff, and a method he has described the same way for a decade, from a blog interview in 2017 to the podcasts of 2024 and 2026. It is value investing of the kind Buffett practised before Berkshire grew too large for it, applied to companies small enough that one person's understanding is an edge.

What does Nemcap buy?

Profitable small and mid-sized companies, mostly Nordic, that he understands completely, bought when the price is low and the mood around them is lower. In his own words from 2017: profitable firms with strong growth, an excellent product, good management, a high gross margin and an operating margin that has not yet caught up with it. The example he gave was IAR Systems, bought around 37 kronor in 2013. He rarely needs growth to make the case work; he needs the price to be cheap against next year and the business to be one he can explain to the last detail.

The holdings tell the same story across the years. In 2017 it was Fortnox, Cherry, Catena Media, Moberg Pharma and Evolution Gaming, with cash beside them. By 2026 the names were Plejd, Evolution, Nelly, Cheffelo, Kambi, Hacksaw and Millicom, with Hacksaw the largest. The common thread is not a sector but a shape: a business he can take apart and put back together, a management and an owner he trusts, and a price that assumes less than he believes. Where the market prices a name as a troubled small cap, he is pricing a business whose margin has room to rise and whose owners will not let it be mismanaged.

How does Nemcap value a company?

Simply, and on purpose. A multiple on next year's earnings, or on next year's sales where earnings are not yet there, set against the growth and the quality. For a company with several lines, a sum of the parts: each line's revenue or earnings times a sensible multiple, plus the cash, equals what the company is worth today. No twenty-line model. Then two checks that are not valuation at all: the ownership list, who owns the company and whether they are the kind of owners who protect it, and the sentiment, whether the market has already fallen out of love with the name. Almost everything he buys is cheap on those terms. The exceptions are rare and deliberate: a superior business can be worth paying up to about twenty times next year's earnings for, and Plejd was one.

It is worth dwelling on how little machinery this is. A forward P/E, a forward P/S, a growth rate to set them against, a sum of the parts for anything with more than one business, and the cash. The precision lives somewhere else: in how well he knows the inputs. A multiple on next year's earnings is only as good as your estimate of next year's earnings, and his are good because he understands the order book, the margin structure and the management's habits better than the analysts who cover the name, if any do. The ownership list is the same idea applied to governance: a company owned by people who built it behaves differently from one owned by nobody in particular, and the behaviour shows up in the capital allocation long before it shows up in the multiple.

The twenty-times ceiling is the discipline. Even for the best business he has found, there is a price past which he does not pay, and it is stated as a multiple of next year rather than as a story about the decade. That is what separates a value investor who buys quality from a quality investor who stopped looking at the price.

Why is knowing what you own the whole edge?

Because it is the one thing a private investor can have that the market does not. He holds four or five positions, the largest around half the portfolio, and said in 2017 that he found it hard to keep proper track of many companies and did not want to dilute his best ideas with worse ones. For each one he can describe the product, the customers, the competitors, who is best in the niche and who is second, the management and the owners, well enough to know what a bad quarter means and what it does not. That depth is what lets him buy when the price is low and sentiment lower, and hold while it stays low, which is where the returns were made.

This is the part that cannot be bought and is most often skipped. Magnus, who built this service, puts it plainly: Nemcap understands Hacksaw; Magnus does not. The difference is not intelligence, it is hours spent inside one industry until the second-order questions answer themselves, and those hours are only spent where there is genuine interest. A private investor who tries to hold twenty names across ten sectors will understand none of them the way Nemcap understands five, and will sell the right company at the wrong time because the understanding was not there to hold on to.

It is also why he works in small caps. The edge of knowing a company better than the market is only available where the market has not done the work, and in a large cap it always has; in a Nordic small cap followed by one analyst or none, the investor who has read every report and talked to the customers is the best-informed person in the room.

What role does psychology play?

He names it as a competence beside analysis, not as a footnote: humility about what he does not know, rational decisions over emotional ones, an understanding of market psychology, money management, continuous learning, and the removal of his own biases, confirmation bias first. The influences are the ones you would expect, Buffett and Munger and Graham, and one book he recommends over most others, Edgar Wachenheim's Common Stocks and Common Sense. The practice that follows from it is contrarian by construction: he buys when sentiment is against the company he understands, because that is when the next-year multiple is low.

The returns came from holding through the periods when the method looked wrong. A concentrated portfolio of small caps bought on low sentiment does not go up in a straight line; it goes nowhere for a year and then re-rates, or falls further first. Holding through that is not a feeling, it is the consequence of having done the work: the price can fall on an intact thesis, and an investor who knows the business well enough to say what would make the thesis false can tell the difference between a quote and a change in the company. The psychology he talks about is, in the end, the same thing as the research.

What can a private investor copy, and what can they not?

Copy the method: cheap first, valued on next year rather than on a story, the ownership list read before the chart, concentration only in what you understand to the last detail, and interest in the business as a precondition, because the understanding does not come without it. Do not copy the numbers. His circle of competence is specific, iGaming suppliers and Nordic small caps among them; he understands Hacksaw and most of us do not. A portfolio of four names at 50% in the largest has lived through drawdowns that would have ended most people's investing, and twenty years of compounding at this rate is the record of one investor, told by him, not a distribution you can expect to draw from.

The method maps onto this service closely, which is not an accident; the process page was written from the same sources. The forward P/E, the forward P/S and the growth they are set against sit on every company page in one line; the sum-of-the-parts tool takes each line of business, a multiple and the cash and gives the number he reaches by hand; the ownership list and the insiders' buying and selling sit on the Context card; and the quality screen on Discover is a first pass over the profitable small caps he starts from. The price discipline is the same idea in a different unit: here the margin-of-safety price is half of fair value, there it is a ceiling on next year's multiple, and in both cases there is a price past which you do not pay. Where the service is looser is the number of names: it will hold any number of theses, and the discipline of owning five is yours to keep.

Sources: the Snåljåpen interview of February 2017; Börsmagasinet, episodes 13 and 15 (April 2024) and 100; Veckans Trade, episode 63; StockUp, "Fra 170 000 til en halv milliard med NemCap"; nyemissioner.se, May 2026; and his posts as @NemCapSE. The figures are his, as given there. Nothing here is a recommendation of any company he has owned.