#72: Jeremy Raper | Credit-Based Equity Investing | Japanese Stocks | Shinoken | Gan | Nio

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