VIS 2026 – Norman Rentrop Pitches A Mispriced Micro-Cap Gem Hidden In Plain Sight

Few regulars at the 2026 Value Investing Seminar in Trani carry more institutional memory than Norman Rentrop. Having attended nearly every edition of the conference since its founding, the Bonn-based family investor arrived this July having literally taken the train from Germany to southern Italy – a deliberate choice that tells you something about the man. Rentrop, who bought his first stock at age ten, built a very successful publishing business before channeling the proceeds into a long-term equity portfolio and eventually founding TGV, a family investment office that manages capital for his family and hundreds of other business-owning families across the world.

A Berkshire Hathaway shareholder since 1992 and an Omaha regular since 1997, Rentrop operates with a stated time horizon of next-generation-plus – thirty years or more. At this year’s seminar he used his slot to walk the room through a micro-cap idea he believes the market has almost entirely missed: .a Nuremberg-based digital marketing and price-comparison group trading on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange.

Why Old Businesses Die and New Ones Take Their Place

Before turning to the stock, Rentrop talked about business obsolescence. He asked the room how many attendees had used a printed telephone directory in the past twelve months. Almost no hands went up. That image – a subscription-based directory business that once seemed unassailable and then simply ceased to matter, is the analytical lens he applies to every investment. He then went further back in time, describing a wealthy family of whaling merchants whose grandfather and great-grandfather had built their fortune supplying oil from whale catches to power the new industrial machines of their era. When petroleum was discovered and drilled, the whale-oil business was finished. The lesson Rentrop drew was not pessimistic: it was to identify businesses whose competitive position is strengthening, not eroding, and to hold them for as long as the thesis remains intact.