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 32 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 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
Japan's Middle Market Is the Largest Pool of Cheap, High-Quality Businesses
“Well, I submit to you today that that biggest pool of high quality businesses on low multiples, great entry points, exists in Japan in the middle markets. It's basically a US private equity playbook that exists for weird quirks of how the Japanese financial sy…”
GPIF Relied on Foreign Investors to Break Domestic Financial Conflicts
“It's GPIF that needs equities to perform to deliver on their pension obligations. So they realized that all of these complex relationships and conflicts in the Japanese financial services market meant that only outsiders could come and constructively cut some …”
1,000 Japanese Public Companies Will Likely Exit Within 10 Years
“And I would say over the next 10 years, a thousand of the 4000 listed companies are likely to be exited in one way or another.”
Japanese Family Firms Suppress Valuations to Reduce Inheritance Taxes
“Being listed and managing it with cash on the balance sheet is our way of handing the company off to the next generation. And if we can do that at .6 price to book, we save 40 cents on the dollar in terms of the inheritance tax.”
Kaname Capital Files Derivative Lawsuits Against Boards Over Insider Self-Dealing
“We exercise all of our rights as shareholders. We bring shareholder proposals. We bring derivative lawsuits against the board in cases of obvious self-dealing.”
Japan Will Not Retreat From Openness to Corporate Takeovers
“We don't think that Japan is going to run and hide, but watch this. This is where the thesis is playing out and where the friction point is.”
Japan Welcomes Takeovers of Chronic Value-Destroying Companies
“Japan isn't going to offer everything up for sale, but the bad capital allocators, the companies that have defaulted on their cost of equity, we're being told that that's game on.”
Japanese Banks and Transfer Agents Now Support Unsolicited Takeover Bids
“Konami Capital today can make a bid for a company and expect every part of the unsolicited bid chain from investment bank, share transfer agent, Japanese bank and lender to provide financing services to get it done.”
Japan's 1989-1990 Bubble Was the First Emerging Market Bubble
“Japan and its. 1989, 1990 equity bubble was really the first emerging market bubble. That was our argument. You had a mispriced currency and poorly sterilized forex reserves pouring into that economy and no one wanted to hear it.”
Japanese Capitalism Is Fundamentally Designed for Insiders
“Japanese capitalism is fundamentally different. It is designed for insiders. It is designed to benchmark domestic products against foreign products, figure out how to keep foreign products out, how to keep foreign capital out, How to keep things uniquely Japan…”
Sell-Side Research in Japan Functions Solely as a Cheerleader
“I tried to write sell notes, and that's when I learned that the role of research in Japan Is to be a cheerleader, nothing more, nothing less. That people didn't want your opinion, they wanted stocks to go up.”
Trust Bank Stewards at GPIF Drove Japan's Corporate Governance Upgrades
“A lot of these stewards of the companies, primarily from Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Bank, ended up becoming the insiders in the GPIF, the Government Pension Investment Fund in Japan. These guys were the drivers of the governance upgrade in Japan.”
Corporate Governance Fails Without the Threat of Unsolicited Bids
“Without a market for control, everything is fine words without fine deeds. Until a management team suffers an unsolicited bid from someone who will run the assets better, you won't get the type of change you're looking for.”
Foreign Managers Backed by US Endowments Drove Japan's Stewardship Code
“It was really the emergence of the foreign manager with strong research capabilities, largely backed by U.S. University endowments that led the ultimate upgrade and the transmission of the stewardship code into reality.”
Japanese Domestic Institutions Are Following Activist Leads on Proxy Voting
“And what we found is where a lot of these outside firms have pushed, domestic institutions are following. So this is why this time is different. We're seeing very constructive voting finally coming from the domestic investing complex.”
Japanese Corporate Disclosure Is Great if Read in Japanese
“People accuse Japanese companies of having awful disclosure, and it's true. It's awful disclosure in English. It's great disclosure if you read Japanese.”
Japan Finally Has a Viable Market for Corporate Control
“One of our main really headlines for why this time is different in Japan is there is a market for control.”
Japan's Market Slumber Created Arbitrage Opportunities in Corporate Governance
“I saw on the horizon that Japan was finally waking up from a thirty-year slumber, that a governance breeze was blowing, and that true to form, what Japan didn't understand, and that I could arbitrage into this market, was accountability and governance.”
Japan Adopted Poison Pills to Block Mid-2000s Activist Asset Stripping
“So out of this came a spade of poison pills, and Japan circled the wagons and shut down governance reform to basically prevent the looting and the asset stripping of a Japan that was finding itself undervalued at a very weak point in its recovery from the prev…”
Japanese Listed Companies Doubled From 2,000 to 4,000 Over 20 Years
“In Japan, we had the same 4000 listed companies, but we got there from 2000. That over the last same 20 years, we've added a lot of people during a period of a negative equity risk premium that were told that they could be a listed company with no strings atta…”
Tokyo Stock Exchange Publicly Shames Companies Failing Cost-of-Capital Disclosures
“It takes the TSE to literally publish a list of companies that are not publishing a cost of capital and proof that the management team is managing the business with a cost of capital mindset.”
Roughly 3,000 Japanese Public Companies Have Zero Analyst Coverage
“By our analysis, still roughly 60, 70% of listed Japan, roughly 3000 companies remain totally uncovered by the street.”
Hardline Legal Activism Builds Credibility for Friendly Shareholder Partnerships
“And what we find is that these two strands of our strategy are complementary, that in both instances were principle-based, that we're looking for properly functioning boards to deliver companies composed of the highest return assets with the lowest cost of cap…”
Japanese Quality-Value Equities Have Historically Compounded at 12%
“Japan has shown that it compounds at about 12%.”
Rising Japanese Interest Rates Will Enforce Corporate Capital Discipline
“We think it's positive because what it does is it finally puts a price tag On the cost of debt, and it means that what was being offered for free, you're now going to have to pay for. And anytime you put a price tag on decision making, people start to act. So …”
Japanese Companies No Longer Benefit From Yen Weakening Past 140
“When the end went through one 40, Japanese companies started saying, you know, this is not good for us anymore. So they've already been signaling that they don't want the end to go to one 60. So they're prepared for even our round tripping back to the one fort…”
Japan's Equity Market Previously Operated Like an Unbuyable Museum
“Up until this market for control, the market really wasn't functioning. Japan was a museum. You could come, you could look, you could examine, you could read about, you could be interested in, but you couldn't buy anything.”
Japan Routed 20% of GDP Through Banks in 1997-2003 Cleanup
“20% of Japan's GDP was run through the Japanese banking system between 1997 and 2003.”
Half of Listed Japanese Companies Still Trade Below Book Value
“By most counts, still half of listed Japan trades at less than one time priced a book.”
300 High-Quality Japanese Companies Trade Under 5.5x EBITDA
“Then we just ask that we're able to get those stocks on less than five and a half times EBITDA, And lo and behold, there are still 300 of these companies in Japan.”
Kaname's Top Holdings Trade at 3.5x EBITDA and 9x Earnings
“We're still with 50% of our weight, sub four times EBITDA, about three and a half times EBITDA, nine times earnings, three percent dividend yield.”
Kaname Targets Companies Avoiding Japanese National Champion Protection Risks
“I would suggest that where we're operating though still offers another path and that the average size of our companies are distinctly middle market and nothing that we're bidding on or areas we're operating on is quote unquote essential and would fall under th…”