Mr. Market once again brings the truth to the table about the hottest cases on the Helsinki Stock Exchange

***The comments below do not represent the views of Proprius Partners Oy or the author of the text. Nothing mentioned in the text should be interpreted as an investment recommendation or as an encouragement to take any action in securities.***

This piece is a follow-up to Olli Viitikko’s article from approximately 18 months ago, which can be read here.

It is fair to assume that not all readers are familiar with Mr. Market. He is the fictional and highly moody character introduced by value investing pioneer Benjamin Graham in his classic book The Intelligent Investor. At times, Mr. Market is wildly optimistic; at others, he is utterly despondent. In practice, Mr. Market represents herd behaviour in markets in both directions — and especially in hindsight, his behaviour is often easy to see as completely irrational.

One of his defining characteristics is also that “he is there to serve you, not to guide you.” In other words, a cool-headed investor willing to follow their own path can benefit from Mr. Market’s erratic behaviour in the investment world. Mr. Market often buys at the top and sells at the bottom — although investing is, of course, very difficult and often humbling for all of us.

After a break of about 18 months, I decided to give Mr. Market a call. I wanted to extract his sharpest views on the Finnish companies that have attracted the most attention in recent months. Below is a summary of his conclusions:

1. Posti

“Peter Lynch, the legendary portfolio manager, had a principle: whatever the Queen is selling, buy it. Posti was not exactly being sold by the Queen, but the Finnish state will do just fine. Believe it or not, I thought this was one of the best cases in the stinking Helsinki market for quite some time. The risk/reward felt genuinely attractive, and the whole setup had the smell of a transfer from the state’s coffers into the portfolios of endlessly greedy equity speculators.

As for how badly this business ultimately goes wrong… I really don’t know, but a dividend yield of more than 10% relative to the listing price was enough to grease even the last dividend hunters on the buy side. So far so good, and the quick +12% gains have partly been taken home.”

2. Neste

“Do you know what a stock that is down 90% is? It is a stock that first falls 80% and then halves again. Neste almost managed that demanding combustion exercise.

I made the easiest money of my life shorting this when the entire Finnish investor community was touchingly living on faith and hoping for the best, when they should have been fearing the worst. Best of all, the fundamentals have now quietly turned materially better for the company again, and Malinen & co. are delivering reasonably well under the circumstances while analysts are racing to revise their forecasts upwards.

The outlook for Finnish Neste longs has therefore improved dramatically, but they got insanely lucky. There is no evidence of skill whatsoever. This is an exceptionally difficult company and sector to forecast, but somehow this case just keeps working out for me to the max. My best return machine of the 2020s.”

3. SSH

“The Leonardo deal should not be underestimated, but I certainly would not have seen a +400% share price move happening that quickly in any scenario. Still, one has to remember that the company has been uninvestable for institutions for a very long time, and its historical track record has been almost pure disappointment.

I suppose this now has to be monitored, and in the worst case I may have to pump it into the portfolio if the FOMO intensifies further, when the SSH protocol is baked into a NATO standard and orders start pouring in like there’s no tomorrow.”

4. Huhtamäki

“Everyone knows that the EV/EBIT and P/E forecasts are extremely low and heading linearly towards zero, but at the same time the consumer simply is not consuming — the volume growth is missing. That is what everyone has been waiting for, for quite some time now, but the can keeps getting kicked further down the road.

Even the dividend yield still only reaches around 4%, so there is no point getting overly excited here. In reality, this should be bid out of the stock market now: EUR 42 and the deal is done.”

5. Nordea

“The fools thought the party would end when interest rates turned lower. Not quite! Of course, in the context of European bank share performance, this has been a total loser, but in Helsinki people get excited about smaller returns too.

I looked at the Q3 numbers on 16 October 2025, and they were rock solid. Strong hold — unless you own faster locomotives abroad.”

6. UPM

“Pulp, pulp and pulp. I am slightly worried that this pulp business has gone so badly off the rails that the truly good times may never return. Well, I’ll wait — and if they do return, I’ll buy this up 50% in a couple of months. Until then, I am selling everything even remotely linked to it.”

7. Fortum

“Foreign investors are getting excited about data centres and how electricity prices are going to skyrocket in Finland. I have gone through this hypothesis with various analysts, and it is not going to happen.

I keep selling this to investors coming from outside Finland, because no Finnish investor has bought it from me for months. The stock is outrageously overpriced.”

8. Stora Enso

“As with UPM, pulp defines this one. The company has had a historical tendency to soil the bed in one way or another, so I am cautious about the separation of the forests, although I have to admit that in sum-of-the-parts calculations, being short looks like an odd stance.

I do not dare to short it, but going long also makes me hesitate — after all, UPM is still the quality pick in the sector.”

9. Wärtsilä

“Probably Finland’s most successful listed company at the moment alongside Sampo and Nordea. The Q3 figures make me a bit nervous, as the data centre frenzy has lifted the market capitalisation to almost EUR 16 billion.

Orders had better beat analyst consensus, or… I do not dare to be out of this, so I am still holding on to my last shares, but I am standing right next to the exit sign.”

10. Metso

“Gold is ripping higher, copper too, and Metso is flying. I cannot help feeling that the company is constantly living slightly below its potential, but still, one simply has to believe in a better tomorrow and hang on.

The company has a strong position, and the commodity rally is a tailwind. No longer cheap, but there is upside to estimates over a multi-year horizon.”

11. Elisa

“I keep selling this into the market. Competition is tightening in Finland, and Elisa has a good chance of taking a proper beating. I am not even sure whether we will get a proper dividend frenzy this spring. I may still play around that.

It will also be interesting to see whether Elisa’s string of 10-cent dividend increases comes to an end and whether we move to 5-cent increases. That would be the sensible thing to do, although I do not like it, because payout capacity is gradually becoming a constraint — and one should not try to turn this dividend story into another ‘Sampo’ either.”

12. Nokian Renkaat

“The big picture remains that in Russia this was synonymous with winter tyres, while in Central Europe, for example, nobody gives a damn. Let them ramp up their factory in peace and then we’ll see whether the tyres actually sell.

You can paint a bull case here, but that requires a rather warm fan relationship. Look at the foreign peers and their valuations, and the Nokia name starts to look a bit nauseating, even if the tyre itself has good grip.”

13. F-Secure

“One of my absolute top picks among small caps at these levels. The profit warning in the summer made me anxious for a moment, but then I started calculating just how badly things would have to go for the current valuation level to be justified.

I concluded that even this case cannot go that badly, and there is always the safety net I learned from WithSecure: the ‘Siilasmaa put’. If I ever end up in investment banking, I will absolutely try to convince Risto to engineer a EUR 600 million deal for this name too, either with a private equity house or an industrial buyer. Makes no difference to me, as long as a deal gets done.

The market dislikes the company’s debt load, and growth needs to accelerate, but that is notoriously difficult for Finnish cybersecurity companies. Still, somehow this feels like a company that, even in my view, is genuinely trying to move forward — and unfortunately, there are not too many of those in Finland.”

***The comments above do not represent the views of Proprius Partners Oy or the author of the text. Nothing mentioned in the text should be interpreted as an investment recommendation or as an encouragement to take any action in securities. Of the companies mentioned in the text, funds managed by Proprius Partners held shares in Posti, Neste, Huhtamäki, Nordea, UPM, Stora Enso, Wärtsilä, Sampo, Metso, Elisa, WithSecure and F-Secure at the time of writing.***