Summary
In this episode of The Intelligent Investing Podcast, Eric Schleien and Jeremy Raper sit down to discuss everything from Jeremy's personal growth into a 'credit-based equity investor' to specific long (Shinoken, Gan) and short (Nio) ideas and how he generates ideas like these.
Discussion of investment philosophy
- Pursue a methodology I term 'credit-based equity investing, or 'thinking like a creditor but applied to stocks'
- It means using the skeptical, 'downside before upside' mentality of a creditor to pick stocks, rather than the typical equity mindset (which emphasises growth/blue sky/optimism)
- Method derives from time spent in Japan, where due to decades of low rates/QE the fundamental discipline of credit analysis structurally disappeared from the market
- This created an opportunity to identify investment ideas using a credit skill-set
- However, the true opportunity lay not in applying those tools to fixed income/bond markets but to equity markets, given the excess liquidity in the system provided by QE/central banks meant typical bankruptcy restructurings were not common
- Instead, the equity market was serially used to recapitalize troubled/distressed issuers
- This pattern is now being replicated, to an extent, in other markets like Europe and the US (since these markets are, from a monetary perspective, looking more and more like Japan)
Stocks we discussed
Shinoken (Tokyo listed, 8909)
- Small cap Japanese part real estate developer, part RE management/recurring revenue stream business unfairly sold down last year t0
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