Jason Hirschman

Truer words were probably never written.

@lhamtil How does this change? In response to high prices, we add even more regulations and land use restrictions, causing construction labor productivity to decline at a faster pace. 🤷🏻‍♂️

"Labor productivity in U.S. construction in 2023 was essentially the same as it was in 1948." How does this change? Robotics? More machines? richmondfed.org/publications/r…

Party like it’s 1776. 🇺🇸🎉🇺🇸

Miami: When Malcolm Gladwell wanted to learn about health care fraud, he came here. He labels us the Medicare Fraud Capital of America! Las Vegas: Park my Ferrari. Wound care fraud, of course.

Finally, a Millennial tells a helicopter parenting story a Gen Xer can wholeheartedly endorse.

Friday 4:05pm 8-K.

@Petty__Cash @leevalueroach @Petty_Cash Believe it or not, the safety eyewear biz is a dog-eat-dog world in which some competitors use private investigators. I equipped my dumpsters with gravity locks - look them up. 😀

@EightTrack180 @leevalueroach Did you learn this the hard way? Be honest

The best alpha in the market is legally available to anyone willing to dig through a publicly traded company's trash at 3am. California v. Greenwood, 1988. Supreme Court, 6-2, Justice White writing. Once a company puts its trash on the curb for collection, it has abandoned any reasonable expectation of privacy in it. The Fourth Amendment does not protect what you have voluntarily exposed to the public. This is the law. I have read the opinion. I keep a printed copy in my glovebox. Last week a police officer asked what I was doing and I produced the printout and he read it and looked at me and said "sir this is technically legal but I am asking you, as a person, why." I did not have a good answer for him then. I have one now. The 10-K is a document the company chooses to release. The trash is a document the company does not choose to release. The entire edge is in the gap between those two documents. Here is how I do this. First, the target. I do not dig through random trash. I dig through the trash of companies I have already studied. I have read every public filing they have produced since 1997. I have driven to the headquarters at least three times in daylight. I have eaten at the diner across the street enough times that the waitress thinks I am having an affair with someone in the building. I am not. I am having an affair with the entire building. Second, the law. Greenwood applies to trash on the curb, awaiting public collection. Trash in a fenced lot is trespass. Trash in a private parking garage is trespass. Trash in the loading dock is trespass. I do not go into any of those places. I wait until the bins are on the public-facing curb on the night before pickup. If the local ordinance says trash can go out at 6pm, I am there at 11pm. If a "No Trespassing" sign exists, I leave. The legality is the entire trade. The moment you step onto the property the case law stops protecting you. Third, the timing. Trash night is municipality-specific. Most townships publish the pickup schedule on their website. I cross-reference this with the company's holiday calendar because corporate trash volume spikes after long weekends and after quarter-end. The two best nights of the year for this are the Sunday after Q1 close and the Sunday after Q3 close. Document destruction at public companies follows a calendar. The calendar is, itself, public. Fourth, the gear. Nitrile gloves. A 4-cell Maglite, because phone flashlights are too dim and look suspicious. A roll of contractor bags. A printed copy of Greenwood in the glovebox. A second printed copy in my back pocket. A dash cam that is always on. I do not wear a hat or hood because covering my face is the single fastest way to convert a legal activity into a suspicious one. I dress like a guy who lost his dog. Fifth, the protocol. I park one block away on a public street. I walk to the bins. I open the bin slowly, because the sound of a slammed lid travels in a quiet neighborhood at 3am farther than you would believe. I work bin by bin. Cafeteria waste, useless. Bathroom waste, useless and unpleasant. The bins you want are the ones from offices and from the loading dock outside the print room. The print room bin is the lottery ticket. I take what is useful, in full, and I leave what is not. I do not vandalize. I do not scatter. I close the bin exactly as I found it. I am there for an average of nine minutes. Sixth, the read. Once I am home, the haul gets spread out on a folding table in my garage. Most of it is nothing. A typical haul is 90% nothing. The 10% that matters is rarely a single document. It is usually a pattern. Three printouts of the same internal HR memo suggests a hiring freeze. A draft slide deck with an old date in the footer suggests a stalled initiative. A printed expense report from a regional VP traveling somewhere the company has never disclosed operations in suggests a geographic expansion. None of these are smoking guns. All of them are tells. The trade is built on tells, not confessions. Seventh, what I do not do. I do not trade on documents that look like they were intended to be confidential and that contain material non-public information about a specific transaction. The legal status of that is a longer conversation than this post and I am not having that conversation here. I trade on the atmospheric information. The vibe of the bin. The thickness of the print room output. The presence or absence of catered-meeting waste, which tells me how often the executive team is meeting. The brand of soda in the recycling, which tells me how recently the office layout changed. I am a sociologist of garbage. I am building a picture of a company from the outside in, the way an archaeologist builds a picture of a civilization from its midden heap. Eighth, the discipline. I do this maybe four times a year. Per company, maybe twice in a five-year holding period. The point is not to do it constantly. The point is to do it once or twice with enough care that you confirm or refute a thesis you already had. The trash is a tiebreaker, not a starting point. If you have to dig through a company's trash to form your initial thesis, your initial thesis is bad. If you have already built the thesis from filings and proxies and earnings call transcripts and one bin confirms three things you already suspected, you have an edge nobody else on earth has, because nobody else on earth was willing to be there at 3:47am in nitrile gloves with a printed copy of California v. Greenwood in their back pocket. Ninth, and last, the cost. The cost is that you become a person who does this. The waitress thinks you are having an affair. The cop thinks you are unwell. The neighbors on the company's street have started to notice the car. Your wife, if you have one, will eventually find the gloves. The wife I had until 2021 found the gloves. That is part of why she is the wife I had until 2021. The trade is real. The edge is real. California v. Greenwood, 486 U.S. 35, 1988. Look it up. The law is on my side. The rest of my life is, increasingly, not.

@kingdomcapadv @leevalueroach Of course, the crux of our idea relies on the ability to successfully remove and interpret trash before the first spark of a dumpster fire...

@EightTrack180 @leevalueroach Imagine how many of these would be parked at $SNWV customer locations

@kingdomcapadv @leevalueroach Forgive us, Lee. We've hijacked your thread to brainstorm entrepreneurial alpha generation.

@EightTrack180 @leevalueroach

@kingdomcapadv @leevalueroach A group of us should work together to purchase $QRHC and develop another, ahem, income stream.

Embrace the Jason, embrace the shenanigans.

@SmallCapVal @MoS_Investing From Sun Tzu’s lesser known book, The Art of Interior Design.

@EightTrack180 @MoS_Investing That’s from Sun Tzu right?

My definition of rich is still having a couch in your house that doesn’t back up against a wall.

Will check in a year to see if $AVN.V Avanti Helium truly are Venture Exchange cotton candy fries.

Don't be the Cotton Candy Fries guy. Not at the stadium and not at the Venture Exchange.

"Mijnheer, thank you for this commission. Shall I paint the Temptation of Christ? A portrait of the mathematician Christiaan Huygens? Or perhaps a bucolic pastoral scene for your collection?" "No, no, no, Teniers. A smoking monkey. With a funny red hat, something frenchy."

"We do not need your American counsel on marketing. Antwerp, jewel of the Low Countries, has thrived as a nexus of commerce and culture for centuries before your upstart republic even stirred from its colonial cradle." "Well, let's agree to disagree."

I bet Swedish squirrels have migrated to nicotine pouches.