The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 24 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Baran: Japan's governance reform is driven by domestic pensions, not foreign activists
“This is not a CalPERS, CalSTRS, Hermes problem. This is a Japanese pension fund problem that the Japanese have to decide for themselves To start paying their beneficiaries properly.”
Baran: Believing liquid stocks trading $10M daily are mispriced is arrogant
“If you think something that trades ten million dollars a day is going to be mispriced, your own arrogance is just too big.”
Baran: Japan's pension reforms forced price-insensitive liquidation of equity portfolios
“Because for some god unknown reason, the government said, we don't want to take your assets, we'll take your cash. So everything was converted into cash, and there was no price sensitivity at all.”
Baran: Early hostile activists failed in Japan because society resisted their methods
“The business culture and, you know, society was not ready for the kind of hostility and just pure greed that it looked like in these transactions.”
Baran: Trillions of dollars sit idle on Japanese corporate balance sheets
“There's trillions of dollars sitting on Japanese balance sheets that are owned by Japanese pensioners who need the money.”
Baran: Japan's governance shift spans 15 years, not just five
“And that has made a Very substantial sea change in direction in Japan over the past, really, 15 years, not five.”
Baran: Planning the exit is far more important than finding cheap stocks
“Because thinking about getting out is way more important than thinking about getting in. I can give you a 150 cheap names that you can buy, but once you've bought them, it's like, okay, what causes the share price to go up and you get out?”
Baran: Symphony holds Japanese companies with 60% EBITDA margins
“We own companies that have like 60% heavy down margins. I mean, I'd be hard pressed to find that in the U.S. Market. And they're making money. They're profitable.”
Baran: Post-bubble Japanese stock market was ineffective at discovering fundamental value
“The stock market was not the arbiter of price. Trust banks trading or insurance companies trading around had nothing to do with what's this company worth.”
Baran: Symphony does not want to turn around or fix operations
“Good businesses. We don't want to fix businesses. We don't know how to make anything. We're comfortable in that position.”
Baran: Most cheap Japanese companies listed for legacy, not capital
“Unlike in the U.S. Or in Europe where I'm listing because I need a liquidity event or I need to raise cash, that's generally not the case for the large majority of the cheap companies. They're listed as some kind of legacy.”
Baran: Cooperative activism beats hostile campaigns in Japan over long time horizons
“This is going to take a long, long time before you get a real market for corporate control, and it's going to take a long time to digest all the companies that could be digested even after that's understood. So let's not play the hostile game and have people a…”
Baran: Symphony operates with zero leverage and no shorting
“We never lever. We're a terrible prime brokerage client. We don't short, and we don't borrow money.”
Baran: Nagao's inventory resale value was 8x its market cap
“The interesting thing about this company was when we found it, they were trading at a discount to the value of the units that they owned. If the company at the time said we're going to sell all the units, And take the cash and dividend it out. It would have be…”
Baran: Symphony has held Nagao for roughly a decade, returning 10x
“We've owned this company for probably close to 10 years now, and it's up 10 times.”
Baran: Symphony convinced portfolio company Zico to issue a 48 bps bond
“We just were able to steer management of Zico, which is one of our big portfolio companies.
They're building a new factory, and they were like, they got tons of cash on the balance sheet, and they were getting ready to go and use it.
And we're like, no, no, no…”
Baran: Symphony helped replace Zico's founding family with a new president
“We helped put the new president into the company and move the family out, which let me tell you, that's no small feat.”
Baran: Japanese corporates, not other funds, drive Japan's valuation changes
“The competitive landscape for us is not really other funds. It's Japanese corporations. Because other funds are great, they can go out and do things, but the best buyer and the biggest proponent of change in valuations in corporate Japan is corporate Japan. An…”
Baran: InfoMart is probably worth $5B to $7B
“To give you an example, when we started investing in InfoMark, I remember the first day it had a market cap of sixty million dollars. And I couldn't understand for the life of me, like, what is this? It's like a series B round in the valley. This is a profitab…”
Baran: Hundreds of Japanese companies traded at a discount to cash
“I spent quite a number of years actually trying to understand both how and why the stock market was discounting so many of these companies, and there were literally hundreds of them”
Baran: Historical Japanese accounting did not require marking securities to market
“For example, you didn't have to mark to market your securities portfolio. So these companies had massive amounts of stock that had gone up five times from when they bought it 50 years ago. It was on their book at acquisition costs.”
Baran: Japanese non-real estate firms need not mark up property values
“Even now, if you're not a real estate company, you don't have to mark it up”