Charles Goodnight

Sports gambling going mainstream will ruin American college and professional leagues: bleacherreport.com/articles/10073…

Hmmm...this conversation is funny but never stood a chance and strikes me as unfair. Once you spoke English, she immediately stopped trying to understand you and just found the person who spoke English in the company least badly. The head of General Affairs in these companies is usually a lifer there (worked his way up doing all kinds of admin & compliance stuff, probably). He undoubtedly has quite a bit of authority within his lane but plays a subservient role to the family owners or CEO. He may be on the board but I've been on boards at companies like this and he probably doesn't say much other than report his compliance and admin duties and definitely isn't discussing shareholder value or making capital allocation decisions. He probably owns close to zero stock, has zero understanding of capital markets and has been delegated to deal with English speakers because he studied in Los Angeles for two weeks in high school. He serves an IR function because he knows how to file the company reports to the TSE and knows all the exchange compliance rules. He probably is NOT reviewing the cash position as you imply, that's not his job, he just files it to the TSE. He owns minimal stock and keeps all his savings in bank deposits earning less than 1%. He probably had one goal when he picked up the phone, to get you off as soon as possible so he didn't have to try to speak English. If you really want insightful conversations Japanese ability is required, and the ability to figure out how to meet actual leaders in the company is a must. A lot of these companies do have horrible understanding of markets and poor governance due to a lot of reasons, but there are often nuances and ways to find win-win reasons for them to change if you actually speak the same language as them and speak to the chairman or CEO. Telling them what their PBR is won't work, that is zero value-add for them. Your experience seems to me a confirmation that local language is a pre-requisite when investing in foreign small-cap companies especially in Japan

Called the IR line for a Japanese net-net trading at 0.4x book with more cash than market cap. Rings twice. A woman answers. “Hai, de gozaimasu.” I butcher my way through asking for investor relations in Japanese. Long pause. I switch to English. Longer pause. “One moment please.” Hold music. It’s a MIDI version of a song I think I recognize from a Studio Ghibli film. Three minutes pass. Four. “Hello. This is Tanaka-san. General Affairs.” Not IR. General Affairs. The department that orders the office slippers. “Hi, I’m a shareholder. I had some questions about capital allocation.” A pause so long I check if the call dropped. “Yes.” That’s the whole response. Yes. “You’re holding ¥80 billion in cash. Your market cap is ¥55 billion. Have you considered a buyback?” “We are studying.” “For how long?” “Since 2009.” I laugh. He does not laugh. “What about the cross-shareholdings? You own stakes in seven other listed companies worth roughly ¥30 billion.” “These are important business relationships. Tanaka-san at Sumitomo and our president were at university together.” Different Tanaka-san. I don’t ask. “Are there plans to unwind them?” “We review annually.” “And the conclusion?” “To continue reviewing.” I hear a fax machine in the background. An actual fax machine. In 2026. “The activist fund that filed last quarter — are you engaging with their proposals?” “We received the letter. We are considering carefully.” “They sent it eight months ago.” “Yes. Carefully.” A long silence. I can hear someone in the background unwrapping what sounds like a rice cracker. “Tanaka-san, with respect, the company has traded below book for fourteen years.” “The market will understand eventually.” “When?” “When it is time.” He thanks me four times for my interest. I thank him three times. We bow at each other through the phone. I hang up. Stock is unchanged. Has been unchanged. The cash pile grew another ¥2 billion last quarter. Tanaka-san is reviewing.

A periodic reminder that you can listen anytime to the best radio show in the history of radio, for free. Apolitical, funny, and intelligent (both of these guys went to MIT despite their jokes about each other). NPR used to set such a high bar. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the…

@michaelxpettis Is it possible to separate the needs of the economy from the needs of finance? Aren’t they bound at the hip?

5/8 Like the USSR before it, Beijing wants CNY to become a global currency without giving up control of domestic money. I think it is right to maintain control of it capital account as this separate the needs of the economy from the needs of finance (even the US should do this).

1/8 Brendan Greeley on the development of the eurodollar. If Beijing truly wants CNY to be more widely used in international finance, the eurodollar market provides one potentially useful model to show how that might happen. ft.com/content/be3459…

$MU will be #6 on this list with $77bn for FY8/2026, and 2027 consensus is for more than any company here ($135bn). Market cap is lower than all but 2 of these companies

@GearoidReidy I’ve always wondered why tacos are the last best world cuisine not to be perfected in Tokyo

Prepare for excruciating American "not real tacos" Mexican food discourse...

Another comment on memory from guys putting capital to work ($LRCX). This is not your father’s memory cycle. $MU

$LRCX used to be considered cyclical worth between 7x and 18x depending on the point in the cycle. Now it's at 39x. $MU needs a little more time. Sure it's cyclical but people just need to start believing this cycle is not like the previous ones.

At every fund I’ve seen the Bloomberg terminals and $FDS subscriptions are all covered by the client as a fund expense. Vibe coding something wouldn’t seem to make a lot of business sense or be a priority for most firms.

$SIVE may be the real deal but it smells fishy. Lots of narrative and assumptions and an ex-CEO with vested options writing daily tweet pumps AND a substack pushing the company. I’ve tried to think of another small cap being so heavily pushed by an ex-CEO who voluntarily left the company to work elsewhere, I can’t think of one.

Life is more beautiful when you have friends who know how to be friends.

@lhamtil John McPhee

Alexis de Tocqueville, W. Somerset Maugham, Joseph Conrad, and Ernst Jünger to name a few

One of the greatest commentaies ever. 🤣

@ii_analyze In all seriousness openclaw and claude code can do this but you have to write the prompt carefully so it doesn't define "marketing" too broadly

@ii_analyze 😅

can an AI agent please click unsubscribe on all marketing emails in my gmail and then delete them all

@TMTLongShort Just ensure that happiness can sustain when 15 Filipino relatives move back to the states with you

Fuck. Wrap it up boys. Once the economist posts it’s usually dead and buried. In all seriousness….exit. If something is broken it’s not your job to fix it. Find happiness in a better market.

This is an underrated tweet, unless the compute AND memory AND energy bottlenecks are all cleared a lot of these SaaS companies will survive a lot longer than they would in a world of infinite compute

Some of you in 1849 would be overanalyzing the competitive moats of picks and shovel manufacturers

I continue to think this. If compute (or memory) is the bottleneck the hyperscalers have the most of it and there’s a solid chance they will be able to price it to generate a reasonable return

Mythos is not a bad name for a model but it would be better if Anthropic switched to using famous Claudes. Monet, Debussy etc. The final model that achieves AGI would obviously be Van Damme