Barry

@TokyoDeepValue As I appreciated this, I’ll add one to your list of checks. You can find out a Japanese net-nets email provider. When that changes from some archaic webmail to google or Microsoft they are finally willing to spend money to DX, or they’ve hired a young person etc

The conventional way to research a Japanese net-net is to pull the financial filings, translate them, screen for net current asset value, check the land carried on the balance sheet at acquisition cost, and look at the shareholder register for activist accumulations. This is what every American investor who has discovered the Japanese trade in the last three years now does. It works. It also misses, by some margin, the things that actually predict which names in the basket will be the ones that re-rate. The unconventional research is what nobody runs. The unconventional research is reading the company's recruiting page, in Japanese, because the language a 70-year-old president uses to describe what he is looking for in a new hire reveals more about his actual succession thinking than anything that will ever appear in a proxy statement. A president still hiring "loyal lifetime employees" is a president who will die at his desk. A president quietly hiring "young people with international experience" is a president who has begun, in some part of his mind, to think about who will own the company after him, and that thought, statistically, precedes a sale by roughly 28 months. The unconventional research is looking at the company's annual employee photograph, which Japanese small caps still publish in their annual reports, and counting the women, because a Japanese industrial company in a regional prefecture that has, in the last five years, gone from zero women in management positions to two, is a company whose leadership has begun, quietly, to absorb the governance pressure that the Tokyo Stock Exchange has been applying, and that absorption is itself a signal. The unconventional research is checking the company's electricity consumption, which is reported in many municipal energy disclosures in Japan and which is, surprisingly, publicly available if you know where to look. A factory that is reducing its electricity consumption while reporting flat revenue is a factory that is, quietly, becoming more efficient, which means the operating margin trajectory in the next 18 months is going to surprise to the upside. A factory whose electricity consumption is rising faster than reported revenue is a factory that is, in some hidden way, ramping production in advance of a contract that has not yet been disclosed. The data is free. Nobody looks at it. The unconventional research is calling the company's main bank, which is disclosed in every Japanese filing, and asking, politely, whether they have noticed any changes in the company's borrowing patterns over the last 18 months. They will not tell you anything material. They will, sometimes, mention that the company has been "more active recently," which is, in the careful coded language of Japanese regional banking, an acknowledgment that something is happening, the nature of which they will not disclose, but which you can now incorporate into your understanding of the position. The unconventional research is reading the local newspapers of the city where the company is headquartered, in Japanese, with a translation tool, because the regional press will, in a way the national press will not, report the small ceremonial events that almost always precede major corporate transitions: a retirement banquet, a new chairman of the local chamber of commerce, the opening of a new wing at the company's longtime philanthropic project. These are not material events. They are, in aggregate, the texture of what is actually happening inside a 60-year-old industrial company in a prefecture that the rest of the world will never visit, and the texture is the thesis. I have, over six years, built positions in 41 Japanese net-nets, and the unconventional research has, in my private accounting, accounted for somewhere north of 70% of the returns. The 30% that came from the conventional research, the screens and the filings and the activist filings, would have been available to anyone. The 70% from the unconventional research was available only to someone willing to spend their Saturday mornings reading a small-town Japanese newspaper through a translation tool, counting women in employee photographs, and calling regional banks to ask questions that would not, technically, be answered. Almost nobody is willing to do this. That unwillingness is, as it has always been in every great deep value trade in history, the entire reason the math still works.

I feel like everyone thinks they can desktop research easy to access information into a financial model but these are kinds of real signals you have to find and look for yourself which turn to real returns

@hidetaka_homii @usedhonda 本業の株価成長していない中、個人のお金でのエンジェル投資の実績をアピールしてる経営者にはちょっと頭を傾げてしまう

NYのMetaで働いてるアメリカ人の友人が聞いてきた。 「あの人、いったい何者なんだ？」 NYに住んでいる彼が驚くほど、場の空気をつくっていた @usedhonda さんの話。 日本からNYに注目してほしいという想いから家の購入、企画、食事、当日の音楽まで。集まったのはNYでスタートアップやるぞって本気の人たち。 マーケティングからAIまでとても参考になる話ばかり NYに来た頃、正直孤独を感じたこともあった。でもこういう日があるから、この街がもっと好きになる @usedhonda さん、最高の場をありがとうございました。

@ahmedshubber25 what do they rate most highly? The automation? The electric?

@nrms6zhkzx @TokyoDeepValue The company’s sole interest is to keep existing. Business is an infinite game.

@TokyoDeepValue Major flaw, company is not his is owned by shareholders, huge cash pile makes companies lazy and slow to change as they feel protected by the cash. Not saying you need to levered up to 5x Net Debt, but having 180% of market cap is a sign of weakness not strength

I flew to Osaka with a 14-page activist letter, a translated copy of my proposed slate of independent directors, a slide deck on capital allocation reform, and what I believed, at the time, was a clear and reasonable demand: that the company, which was sitting on cash equal to 180% of its market cap, return a portion of it to shareholders through a special dividend. I had been working on this campaign for nine months. I had hired a Tokyo-based proxy advisor. I had built a 6% position through patient accumulation. I had, by every framework I understood, done the work. The chairman, who was 81 years old, received me in a tatami room above the company's headquarters, which sat over a soba restaurant that had been in the same family for four generations. He was wearing a navy suit. He bowed at an angle I could not, with my Western training, accurately reciprocate. He gestured for me to sit on a cushion. I sat. A woman of approximately his own age entered, silently, and placed a small ceramic cup in front of me. The cup contained tea. The tea was lukewarm. I did not yet know that the lukewarm tea was the entire negotiation. I began with the deck. I had prepared it carefully. I had translated the headers into Japanese. I walked him through the capital structure, the unproductive cash, the historical return on equity, the peer comparison, the proposed dividend. He listened. He did not interrupt. When I had finished, he said, in soft but clear English that I had not been told he spoke, "Thank you for traveling so far." Then he stood up, slowly, and gestured for me to follow him. We walked down a set of wooden stairs that creaked in a way I cannot adequately describe, through a hallway lined with black-and-white photographs of men I did not recognize, and into a small workshop attached to the back of the building. In the center of the workshop was a lathe. It was old. It was, the chairman explained, the original lathe his grandfather had purchased in 1923 to manufacture the first product the company had ever sold, which was a specific kind of brass valve fitting used in steam locomotives. The locomotive industry had been gone for 60 years. The lathe was still running. "My grandfather operated this machine," he said. "My father operated this machine. I operated this machine, as a child, before school. The factory you visited yesterday produces components that descend, in an unbroken line of design, from the work that began on this lathe. The cash you wish me to distribute is the result of one hundred and one years of refusing to do anything that would shorten the life of this company. I cannot distribute it. I am not, in the deepest sense, the owner of it. I am the custodian of it. The owner is not yet born." I did not have a response. I had prepared for many possible responses from him. I had not prepared for this one. We returned to the tatami room. The tea was refreshed. It was, again, lukewarm. The chairman asked me about my family. I told him about my wife, my two children, my parents in suburban Connecticut. He listened with what appeared to be genuine interest. He asked the ages of my children. He nodded gravely when I told him. He asked whether I had ever shown my children the work I do. I had not. He asked whether I would, when I returned. I said I would consider it. Four hours passed. I was served, at various points, three more cups of tea, a small dish of pickled vegetables I did not recognize, and a single piece of mochi that the chairman's assistant placed in front of me with both hands. Nobody mentioned the activist letter again. Nobody mentioned the dividend, the directors, the deck, the proposal, or the 6% position. We talked about the cherry blossom season, which was apparently late this year. We talked about American baseball, which the chairman had followed since 1962. We talked about a poet I had never heard of, whose work he recited a single line of in Japanese and then translated for me, slowly, into English, and which I have, in the three years since, been entirely unable to locate again. At the end of the meeting, he stood. He bowed. He thanked me, again, for traveling so far. He said he hoped I would visit again, perhaps with my family, perhaps in the spring, when the city was at its best. He did not, at any point, acknowledge the proposal. He did not decline it. He did not engage with it. He simply, through a series of small and almost invisible movements that I am still trying to understand three years later, allowed the proposal to dissolve into the air of the room, until by the time I left the building, it had ceased to exist as a thing that had been said. I flew home the next morning. I withdrew the campaign two weeks later, in a quiet letter to the proxy advisor that cited "ongoing discussions" and was technically not a withdrawal at all but was understood, by every party who received it, to be one. The position I sold over the following six months at a small loss. The chairman is still alive. The lathe is still running. The cash is still on the balance sheet. I cannot, even now, explain what happened in that room. I went in as an activist, with a deck, a translator, and a six percent position, and I came out as a guest who had been thanked, very politely, for visiting a man's home, and who, somewhere in the four hours between the first cup of tea and the last, had been quietly, gently, irreversibly, and without a single raised voice or harsh word, defeated. I think about him often. I do not think he thinks about me at all. This is, in some sense I am still working out, the entire lesson.

@TMFOtter @TokyoDeepValue It’s because the Japanese understand that business is an infinite game. There is no winning or losing. To keep existing is the whole point. May investors are there for 6 months to 2 years max. Why should we listen to them?

@TokyoDeepValue This is why many of the world's oldest companies are a) Japanese and b) not universally financially rewarding. The primary responsibility for the management of Japanese companies is to ensure the survival of the business. It's why M&A is so rare in Japan.

@shinyaneco 非常に解像度が高い笑

@point28fm 社会人ストックピッチですか？

Oligopolies tend to emerge in industries where high fixed costs are a barrier to entry.

@komaspi ご返信いただきありがとうございます！

@Findyourcallop1 はい、ご提供されていらっしゃいます。

ご好評いただいておりますストラスアイラ、明日12時半発売です。 試してみたい、という方は有楽町キャンベルタウンロッホさまにぜひ。 ストラスアイラ 2005/2025 20年 バーボンバレル 58.7% Handpicked by WhiskyNAVI for キャンベルタウンロッホ komaspi.com/?p=178

@adi_yogi_1 @KobeissiLetter It’s their land… What if I was like don’t mind me going through Texas but fuck your tolls and rules

@KobeissiLetter In other words, Iran wants to dictate global energy flows while charging a $2 million premium per vessel. These are impossible terms for the West to accept. This is setting the stage for major volatility in energy markets tomorrow.

BREAKING: Iran has delivered its highly anticipated "10-point" response to the US' "15-point peace plan." Iran's 10-point plan includes: 1. Guarantee that Iran will not be attacked again 2. Permanent end to the war, not just a ceasefire 3. End to Israeli strikes in Lebanon 4. Lifting of all US sanctions on Iran 5. End to all regional fighting against Iranian allies 6. In return, Iran would open the Strait of Hormuz 7. Iran would impose a Hormuz fee of $2 million per ship 8. Iran would split these fees with Oman 9. Iran to provide rules for safe passage through Hormuz 10. Iran to use Hormuz fees for reconstruction instead of reparations President Trump's "deadline" for a peace deal with Iran is 25 hours away.

The best part of accumulating wealth is that you can start saying increasingly insane things and people begin treating them as insight instead of retardation

みずほちゃんとSpaceX IPO入れてる模様

常務取締役まで務めたゾス山本さんの口から語られる光通信、経営戦略があまりにもシンプルかつ合理的で、改めて「組織」として強すぎる。

@kimarukundayo @shoichirosm Feriaが懐かしいですね

@shoichirosm おっしゃる通りそれだけなんですよね。 Alife とか懐かしいです☺️ まだあるのでしょうか

六本木がﾀﾋんだし、どんどん外に移っている感はある。 若者は都心に住まないので、千葉系は上野・錦糸町、埼玉系は池袋に集まるが、渋谷が高くなりすぎたので、その周辺部に分散してる感じはあるよね。

When banks couldn’t take on the risk and the shadow banking system said let’s roll

Your resume is just a catalog of all your suffering

Karma is just you, repeating your patterns, virtues, flaws until you finally get what you deserve

Look for talent in undiscovered places. When they already have pedigree, the award or the money they won’t care. Find the tinkerers, the enthusiastic and rebellious.