AltayCap @AltayCapital

$4628 Sk Kaken thesis: 1. The stock is currently a modest value trap. 10x earnigns with a 2% dividend that has been going up with Japan's shareholder pressure campaign. I'll arbitrarily assume that'll normalize to a 3% dividend on average - sometimes it'll be a bit worse, sometimes a bit better, but that's a fine guess. On top of that, the cash pile will grow with earings which you can discount say 70%, so another 3%. Total is a low downside risk 6%/year expected return. Not great, but honestly not that bad. 2. Founder/family control is the blocker. Shikoku Kousan owns 31.88%, and Fujii Minoru, Fujii Kunihiro, and Fujii Mitsuhiro own another roughly 9.3%, so the Fujii-side block is about 41% excluding treasury shares. The company also has 2.18m treasury shares, about 13.9% of issued shares, with no votes. 3. The relevant entity is 四国興産有限会社 / Shikoku Kousan, located in Takarazuka, Hyogo. It is listed as established on September 1, 1998, so as of June 16, 2026, it is 27 years and about 9.5 months old. That is much younger than SK Kaken itself, which was founded in 1955 and incorporated in 1958. 4. The patriarch is almost certainly Fujii Minoru, the SK Kaken founder. He is 93, turning 94 on September 1, 2026. - Heads you get a safe 6%/year turn. Tails, the patriarch passes away and you get a 15%+/year expected return. If you assign even 30% odds to tails, this is a fantastic risk adjusted bet. If the patriarch was even 10 years younger, that looks far more questionable. If anyone else has these age-as-a-catalyst plays, please comment or DM me.

@0x_Azabu1 @orrdavid 1960, 1930, 1770

@Anssi_A @psind707 Not sure Yugioh is big at all. Konami is also pretty richly priced. Pokemon TCG is so much bigger in size than everything else. Total mania in the space. Yugioh boxes haven't appreciated in value at all whereas the others have

I am bearish Kadokawa here. This is a tough biz and they need a turnaround to improve their awful margins/bloated business. Anyone who wants alternative exposure to manga/anime can consider: AlphaPolis (9467): 5.5 ev/ebit With exposure to anime/manga/light novels

AltayCap @AltayCapital

3 weeks ago

The folks at Oasis are sharp, but not sure how well Kadokawa (TYO 9468) will work. I lost patience on the co. Large trove of IPs but awful execution. Oasis is spot on in their activist pitch to replace the CEO. Even at peak ebit (fy23) though of ¥26bn it would trade at a bit

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Huge missed opportunity for the Pachinko industry is the halls inability to convert tourists into players. It's pretty low stakes vs traditional gambling, so should be less friction, but the problem is very few tourists have any idea how to play. 6417's end market would look a lot better if tourists played. Industry association failed hard here. The halls have grossly failed here. I've probably helped a dozen foreigners that looked mega confused trying to play. Every machine works the exact same way. a 1 min looping video in English at the entrance would be enough to teach people. In reality though tourists walk in, try it, turn the knob all the way (thus shooting on right side from start) and in 10 seconds the machine blares at you, and the tourist walks away confused/embarassed. The employees don't speak English, so they can't help. The pamplets are usually unnecessarily complicated. Very few tourists seem to play. I genuinely like trying all the anime pachinko machines and I'm sure many others would too if it wasn't so intimidating.

Yes. The only real risk is if market share falls due to competition. Sankyo took massive share from Sanyo in 2022. I don't see them losing though. They have scale and their releases are never terrible. Integrated resorts aren't at all the same as pachislot/pachinko, but it will surely take some business from the halls. $200 goes very far at pachinko, but can be lost in a hand or a single slot pull in a casino. There's no parallel on how much it will impact the halls since pachinko is a pretty uniquely Japanese thing.

Japan deep value getting clobbered last few days. Rough out there!

@orrdavid I find the downside to holding the value trappy names to be pretty low. I quit 3600 recently, with a marginal profit. deep net net, but it loses a bit of money. I still own 5918 which is obv value trappy, but BVPS compounds because they own massive securities portfolio + RE.

@psind707 I keep tabs on the market via AlphaInvestments/Rudy on Youtube. Man is a cardboard baron with $20m usd+ worth of cards. OP is doing well, but it doesnt have anywhere close to the mania of Pokemon

@psind707 TCGs are strong, but it's almost entirely Pokemon/MTG. Bushiroad TCGs (Weiss Schwarz) is weak. The speculative frenzy is almost entirely Pokemon/MTG. One Piece maybe doing okay, but not anything like Pokemon/MTG. Bandai's Union Arena, not sure its doing great

White Fox loses money (as does practically every anime studio). The P/L is in the AlphaPolis IR presentations. These animation studios almost never own the IPs. AlphaPolis can use WhiteFox to animate their own IPs (the ones they publish) and own more of the economics. Pure work for hire is a terrible biz and they should stop doing it entirely

@psind707 Not bullish on their gaming segment, but toys/anime is fine. It's not super expensive at ~10x ev/ebit.

@trackdalf WhiteFox doesn't own any IP, they have worked on good ips before (like Steins;gate, one of my favorites), but all work for hire stuff. They also did Re;zero. Hopefully they only work on stuff they can get some committee ownership of.

The animation business is really really bad. No one makes money in it, even the most iconoc studios lose money. They exist to get rinsed by the production committees which hold all the upside and hire them for mostly flat rate contracts. AlphaPolis says they want to own more of the economcis, so will invest more into the production committees and presumably insource to their own anime studios (WhiteFox/NIA). But this doesn't always pan out. IG Port owns WIT Studio but they don't own enough production committee rights, which is the interesting part of the business. AlphaPolis has a lot of net cash, they should use it to fund their IPs on their own. Kadokawa is bloated and seems unfocused, which gives these smaller publishers an opening.

AlphaPolis is increasingly looking to expand into anime and own more of the economics surrounding their anime. They bought 2 anime studios (which are historically awful businesses) with an aim to vertically integrate to retain more upside. These stocks aren't stupid cheap, but are much cheaper than Kadokawa.

@Quantum_Sport @joinyellowbrick I saw. He may have found the idea on the 'Stack too. Who knows. I'm more bullish today than when I did the writeup as the integration of Sumika Color seems to be going well. That was a risk when I did the writeup.

@orrdavid Recently allocated a bit into the cheaper 1xxx names. Kodensha buyout signals that control over these elec contractors is worth a crazy amount more than trading values. Even if we never recognize it outright, they pay out dividends based on net income, which is trending up

@orrdavid I too go through this same experience. I trimmed/sold out of several names up a lot despite them being net-nets. Still feels weird selling when its basically priced at free, but there are often way better opportunities. Example: sold out of 7841, 7887, 7442 entirely

@DaBao_ @orrdavid Evergreen tweet:

AltayCap @AltayCapital

a year ago

Annual reminder to the $BABA and Chinese ADR buyers.

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@JonCukierwar Claude is excellent for coding and other tasks, but asking it about specific companies and claude is just really bad. Doesn't pull specific financials/segments/etc, and when you ask to compare two companies it'll invent random narratives that don't make sense at all. It's bad.

If you aren't on one of the $100 or $200/mo plans on Claude or ChatGPT (or both), why not? Revolutionary tech that's massively subsidized in pricing. GPT Pro + Fable are worth it I'm building tools / automation for several side projects, equity research, and just messing around