Cheung Chau 2023

While investing is a solo pursuit, I love exchanging and debating ideas with friends. This weekend, I hosted nineteen fellow investors for a gathering on Cheung Chau, a picturesque island off the coast of Hong Kong. We each took a turn presenting an idea, discussing and debating a range of companies across Asia and North America, including Terravest, Hilton Grand Vacations, Tingyi, Dong E E-jiao, Alphabet, Cameco, Kuaishou, Visional, Delta Corp, Luckin Coffee, Modern Dental, Oriental Watch and Coupang.

Some fun things I learned:

~ Annual job turnover in Japan is just one-fifth the global average. Workers there are incredibly loyal to their employers, making recruitment extremely challenging!

~ The median age in Africa is just 19 years old, compared with 28 in India and 39 in China! And Africa’s estimated population growth rate in 2022 was 2.4%, some 2.4 percentage points higher than China’s!

~ Luckin Coffee sold five million cups of Moutai-flavoured coffee beverages on the first day they were launched last week!

~ Indian music label T-Series is the most viewed channel ever on YouTube, with a whopping 230 billion lifetime views as of June 2023. More impressive is T-series consistency: it was number one in 2021 and 2018, too!

~ If you sign up for a Vacation Time Share, you could be on the hook to pay management fees for the rest of your life, and quitting could affect your credit rating!

My presentation was on Securities Brokerages, the companies like Charles Schwab, Interactive Brokers and Futu, which hold and manage investment accounts. Like many financial services firms, the inexorable decline of marginal price has forced brokers to embrace technology to reduce marginal costs. The best brokers are, therefore, technologists who understand how to manage balance sheet risk. There are many to choose from but IMO what matters most is that your broker has the financial strength to be there for you, come hell or high water. You can read my slides here (link).

My warmest thanks to everyone who attended, especially those who came from out of town. I’d like this to become an annual event welcoming professionals and dedicated amateurs. Maybe even a couple of LPs. Drop me a line if you’d like to learn more, especially if you’d like to join us next year!