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Courage & Conviction Investing details why it pays off to stay consistent in his small cap strategy and portfolio approach (1:55). Why he never doubted Carvana and why he’s been buying Zeta (7:10). CuriosityStream’s ridiculous dividend and getting into Cineverse (16:15). Really excited about BuzzFeed (30:10). Mesa, Spirit, United and the airlines industry (38:40). Recorded on November 19.
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Transcript
Rena Sherbill: Welcome back to the show, Courage & Conviction Investing. Always great to talk to you, always great to have you on the episode. So thanks for doing this.
Courage & Conviction Investing: Hi, Rena, it’s great to be with you as well. It’s mid-November here in Boston and we’ve had California weather since October. So exceptionally sunny, warm, dry. So I’m feeling upbeat. I’m feeling SoCal happy today. So it’s good to connect with you.
RS: It’s funny that you say that because I’m in SoCal, and I was looking at the ocean today and watching the dolphins, and you’re talking about sunny weather. And a couple of days ago, I was looking at the water, and I was listening to one of our previous episodes and you were setting the stage of September in New England.
So happy to kind of keep the conversation going with the seasonality because that’s a lot of what life is about. It’s a lot of what investing is about and making sure that we’re staying sane and profitable along the way in the different seasons as it looks like winter, as the sun comes out, what are we supposed to be doing.
We’ve been talking a lot on this podcast recently about portfolios and how to approach investing. We’ve had some dividend investors on, we’ve had some people focusing on stocks, we’ve had some people focusing on various strategies.
And one of the points, I think, that we’re trying to put across is with all this volatility, confusion in the markets for many investors or how to understand the macro picture or how to understand stocks narratives, something that you would put forth and that you’ve articulated in the past is not paying attention to the macro, focusing on your strategy, focusing on what’s going to gain you the most alpha.
Now that we’ve talked a few times, we’ve seen some of those truisms or strategies put into reality. I love it if you started this conversation sharing maybe how you’re thinking about your portfolio these days and if you want to get into some specific stocks to start with that you’ve been focused on or that you’d care to bring back up in conversation, happy to start there.
C&CI: Yeah, a lot’s happened since we spoke. As we talked about, I wrote a Peter Lynch article referencing Peter Lynch’s famous phrase, “If you spend 13 minutes a year on macro, you’ve wasted 10 minutes.” And I remember reading Peter Lynch back in high school. So I’m 44, high school, I graduated high school in ‘99. And I was reading Peter Lynch in the 90s.
So it’s kind of come full circle. But I’ve learned a long time ago from some really smart people that it’s just not a good bet to bet against America. It’s not a good bet to not to be optimistic on America. It’s the most dynamic entrepreneurial place with incredible incentives.
So invariably, you get these very, very successful, smart, hard-charging, ambitious people from all over the world because the streets are literally paved in gold. And so if you look back at any period of time, we’ve climbed however many walls of worry. Sir Warren Buffett has talked about this.
If you’ve read his work, it’s all free and readily available. It just takes some time and some ability to synthesize and some patience and to turn off the noise. He talked about in the ‘80s about all the stock whispers on Wall Street trying to get rich, selling new products. And his strategy has evolved with Charlie, the passing of Charlie. Charlie got him into growth at a reasonable price and so they were a dynamic duo.
But there’s no question in my mind, Buffett’s the greatest of all time. I don’t think it’s close. It’s akin to Tom Brady as the best quarterback of all time. And it’s really just not getting lost in the noise. There’s constantly this thing to fret about, that to fret about, and the debt, wars, geopolitical, inflation, all these doom and gloom stories about the consumer.
And yeah, I’m not suggesting there aren’t challenges, setbacks and what have you. But again, it just has never been a good bet to bet against America. That’s why it’s the most dynamic pool of capital. That’s why very wealthy endowments from all over the world want to invest here because the best companies are here.
And so, I mean, the S&P (SPY) is up, I don’t know, 25%-ish this year. It was – had a great year last year. I mean, people have been calling the top and the S&P since 3,500, 4,000, 4,200. And I just don’t see how there’s any alpha to be gained doing that.
Yeah, you’ll get a 2021 or it’s Q4 2021 to 2022, you’ll have a really bad year. Interest rates climb dramatically, tech stocks got smashed, market got beat up, companies went bankrupt, but that’s the creative destruction of capitalism and that’s just how the system works. The forest burns in the Serengeti, the plains, and then that replenishes the soil and then the cycle begins again.
So my strategy hasn’t changed. Markets have done remarkably well, but I’m literally just sticking to my playbook, small cap values, special situations, speak to management team, bottoms-up, have a good thesis, do the work, have the conviction, take the draw downs, very concentrated, but at the same time, maybe spread out, I don’t know, 8, 10 to 10 bets, and then I do a lot of little small things, tinkering on the side like Taleb talked about in Black Swan. A lot of innovation has been through tinkering. That’s part of my process.
But what I like about my strategy too is, it’s so uncorrelated with markets because it’s a value-based strategy and value has been out of favor for so long. But there’s just – there are so many opportunities. If you do the work, you turn over all these different rocks and be willing to traverse places no one else will. And so it’s been another very, very good year so far.
RS: Let’s get into why it’s been such a good year and let’s start with the highlights if you would. Carvana (NYSE:CVNA), a stock that you’ve talked about that was out of favor, that you felt like the marketplace didn’t understand was mispricing, that has certainly come to fruition.
If you want to talk about Carvana a bit and talk about some of the other highlights of your portfolio.
C&CI: So Carvana, I did a ton of work in Carvana in the summer, June and July. I wrote a four-part free site series on Carvana. The stock was between 22 and 30. And the narrative then was they were going to 0, they couldn’t handle the debt, the Garcia’s were frauds, it’s just the business model didn’t work, the gross margin to all weren’t high enough, yada yada yada. And I love to play contrarian, but it’s an art and it’s so difficult.
Peter Thiel, who I don’t really like politically, but he’s definitely a brilliant guy. And he’s been quoted as saying “One of the most difficult things in the world is to be contrarian to be right.” So that suits my personality. I love that art and that challenge of forging into places no one else would go with this there’s incredible group think, where there’s a ton of short interest and where the narrative, the perception becomes the reality.
In the case of Carvana, it was a stock where if you did a lot of work on it, he said the consumer absolutely loves the process. My parents sold the car with them, was incredibly easy process. The dealership model people have hated, they feel like they get ripped off on the purchase. It’s just this terrible experience, especially used cars.
And so the Garcias had the vision, the foresight to say, this is a massive addressable market. It’s never been done before. We’re going to scale this business. And what people miss was when they bought ADESA, the auction business, I thought that was absolutely brilliant because it helped them in terms of positioning, saving them money in terms of the transportation of the cars.
If the site goes the wrong way, they could blow out inventory, lose some money, stick and move, kind of reevaluate. And they did a brilliant exchange offer that the Garcias pulled off the bondholders. And so that pushed the gun against their head off because the platform was literally burning. That gave them time. And then as the market got really tricky, they took tremendous market share and it’s just played out really, really well.
Now, it’s probably overvalued here. It’s hard to value it. But the market’s kind of looking at this like as Amazon (AMZN), how it’s winner take all. And when you have that type of scale, you have that type of brand, you have those type of gross margins. If you flow that through sort of a fixed cost, I mean, it’s variable and fixed a base that they’re looking at the out year earning power. And so that’s why the stock is up 10x. That’s in a nutshell what happened there.
But just recently, speaking of run into burning buildings, I’ve been buying the heck out of Zeta (ZETA). Last month, I’ve never owned the stock since last Monday. They had fantastic numbers, beat, raise, and they said, “We feel comfortable where 2025 is.” They talked about how this consensus estimates, they talked about how their RFP business quote is up 60%.
The CEO is very intelligent, David Steinberg. He gave a great conference call in excruciating detail. The stock was up on the knee jerk from like 37 to 46 and after hours and then I saw a reverse. And so that got me interested at the stock was like 35. I started buying some.
Next day, it’s 28. I’m like, what the hell is going on here? These numbers were unbelievable, beat and raise. Steinberg owns a ton of stock. He founded the company, I believe, in 2007. AI marketing. It’s just – everything made sense. They have all these great customers. The return on investment for the customers is fantastic. They have 40% of the Fortune 100.
Well, lo and behold, I was on a conference call last Tuesday with the C-Suite of BuzzFeed (BZFD), one of my big holdings with Jonah, Matt, and Amita. Get out of that call was fantastic. And Zeta, which I put a pretty decent size position on, the stock is like 23. I’m like, “What the hell just happened?”
So there was a short report by this outfit called Culper. I have no idea who the hell they are. And so that’s the next thing I know. The stock is like $20 and now I have a decision to make because I have a big – I had a big position on, it’s like, “Do I take a big loss?” I owned it at like, I don’t know, upper 20s at that point, or am I going to go big here? And I said, “I’m going to go big.”
And so I bought a bunch at 20, 17, 16. And this was like literally, there was a gun to my head because this was before Steinberg came out with this – refuting the story before all that’s happened.
Well, lo and behold, Jeff Feinberg, who was like the head trader for Soros, bought a 5% position, he filed it this morning. Feinberg is one of the smartest guys out there. He was in Bitcoin really early. I know people who work with him, so this guy is absolutely brilliant. And lo and behold, he puts up $200 million or whatever.
I don’t know what he bought it at, but he bought 5% of the company. Steinberg has been on the media circuit. He’s done a great job explaining how the accusations are complete BS. They got the auditor wrong. They don’t understand the business.
And so anyway, I own it in size, like the 20s, 23-ish. But that’s the type of trouble that I like to get myself into. But I’m willing to charge into burning buildings when I feel like I’m right, when I feel like it’s contrarian and when I feel like when I synthesize a situation, I’m getting paid to take risks.
So that’s a more relevant story to a Carvana, but I think there are some parallels to it where sentiment drives like ridiculous movements, overshoots, undershoots in both directions.
RS: What would you say about the buyback that they announced recently over at Zeta?
C&CI: Well, I mean, if you listen to some of his interviews, there was a guy on CNBC, I forget his name, that had a great interview, then he had the Tom, I believe, Tom Lee, who’s had an incredible record in tech and been bullish and been right. He’s bullish in the S&P, first to call $6,000. The S&P has been long, I think Bitcoin since $4,000, long Apple (AAPL) for decades.
So two really, really good interviews. But I think they’re saying, “Listen, this stock should be 40 on the screens based on our fundamentals, how strong the business is, how the business is inflecting, the growth of EBITDA, free cash flow, how they’re ramping up their sales force, how the product expansion, how Zeta Live had like a thousand CTOs in the audience, both live and virtually.
I mean, what is the probability that a PhD from MIT, Stanford, Caltech, some of the best places in the world, that it’s so difficult to become a CTO for a Fortune 100 company, that you’re fooling all these people? I think it’s astronomically low probability. And Steinberg came out in the board, so they’re going to be in the market buying the stock.
And so I just think it’s kind of a unique contrarian setup. But again, these are the type of situations, these special situations where you like to get – I like to get into trouble but it’s an art. And the only way to get better at this is to do that type of stuff. But again, it’s very selectively because you only have nine lives as a cat and you better use them wisely. So anyway, that’s that story.
RS: Another stock I wanted to ask you about and speaking to the point that we’ve had dividend investors and dividend strategists on, one of the stocks Edward Schneider was on a few days ago talking about CuriosityStream (CURI).
That’s a stock you’ve written about on the free site. I don’t know if it’s one that you get deeply into and Second Wind Capital, in your investing group. Care to share your thoughts around CuriosityStream and what your bullishness is?
C&CI: Yeah. So basically, I follow 300 companies and I’m a militant about – every morning, I’m up at, I don’t know, 4:30 to 5:30 and I literally check Seeking Alpha’s – I have like all these different portfolios set up, tracking portfolios and I religiously check the press releases every 15 minutes, 6 o’clock, 6:15, 6:30, 7:15, I’m sorry, 6:45, 7, all the way to 9 o’clock. And this was after hours. I forget when it was.
I was just doing my normal routine. I don’t ever want to miss anything. And I read, I said, CuriosityStream is instituting a dividend. The stock was $0.60, okay? I said, “Oh my God.” And I alerted my group and we bought the hell out of this thing between $0.69 and $0.75.
So at that time, that was a ridiculous dividend. They had tons of cash. The cash burn was getting much lessening, approaching positive EBITDA with a ton of cash on the balance sheet to fund the dividend and they have a good library of content.
So it’s just like crazy, stupid, mispriced, first-movers advantage. Now in fairness, I didn’t play it well because I was sized up at like $0.75. I want to say I sold at $1.25. I don’t know why. That was a mistake in retrospect because it hit 3, but it was a high probability bet at $0.75.
I haven’t followed it closely, but something somewhat similar and related, which I’ve written on this free site is called Cineverse (CNVS).
In addition to working with SA and running family money, I work with three advisers. I have a family office in Greenwich, then New York and there’s another family office.
And so I started talking about Cineverse privately to my group on October 18th, where I broke it, the stock was 2.10 and I teed up the situation. We own about 4% of the business across all accounts, excluding my Seeking Alpha members. So I have no idea how many shares they own. And this is one of the most incredible setups in micro caps.
What basically happened is they own the rights to Terrifier 3, which did $54 million at the box office domestically.
The way the math works just kind of synthesizing what you can find on Google and reading Reddit posts and whatnot is when you sell a movie at the box office, you get 45% unless you’re a big Hollywood studio of the money of the box, of the gate, so to speak. And the way the math, I believe, worked here was they had a loan for like $3.7 million with interest. And then they had marketing expenses to market this.
And so the first $12.5 million at the box office, they get 45%. They get, I believe, get 100% of that, where they can pay back their debtholders and they can get reimbursed on the expenses. And then from $12.5 million to $54 million, you multiply that by about 20% or 19%.
So for a company, and we were buying at like a $33 million market cap, they had like maybe $5 million of debt. Now granted back on October 15th, they hadn’t done $54 million in at the box office. But that to me, it looked like a pretty good bet, given how strong they came out of the gate.
And so this is a company that’s going to get a $14 million cash windfall, okay, with a $33 million market cap. And then when I read the conference calls and I synthesized it, I said, “All right, they took $9 million SG&A out of cost past year. They own Match Point, which is an incredible technology.
So they have the ability because they own $40 million library of film, of content. Because they run 30 different fast channels, including Bob Ross channel, Dog Whisperer and whatnot. So they spent tens of tens of millions of dollars to build this technology. It’s unmatched, it’s unrivaled.
And so with AI, when these AI engines want to ingest this data, the video, it doesn’t work for Hollywood studios and that was a great explanation of that on the conference call.
Corsair is a $0.5 billion fund. They took a 5% stake. Jay was on the conference call and they explained it. So the other thing is if you think about the ecosystem, they own all these FAST channels, so there’s 80 million views I believe, and they have cineSearch, which they’re working on Google (GOOG), which should be very valuable.
They own Bloody and Disgusting, which is I believe one of the top 20 podcasts in America. They got a great podcast business and they also own a streaming business called Screambox. So they should dominate the horror genre and they can replicate this playbook what they did with Terrifier 3. They already signed another deal for next Christmas. So it’s an incredibly exciting business.
No one knows about it. I put it on the free site with a lag. No one’s ever heard of the company, everyone’s looking backwards and I’m like, “This is a layup, okay?”
The business is literally inflecting. This thing could be a $10 stock. How the hell will we be able to buy, what do we buy, 600,000 shares of this thing, between 175 and 230 or 240, whatever the heck we paid for it. And so it’ll be very interesting to watch what happens, but they just reported last week, they had a good Q2, their fiscal year ends starts April 1st.
So the Q3, which is December 31, 2024, they’re going to blow the doors off of numbers. And the analysts, the two analysts that cover it, Benchmark and Alliance, they’ll take their numbers up. That’s, I think, why it’s one of the stocks having a nice move today.
But what’s so lucrative about this stuff? When you get these things right that no one knows about, no one’s thinking about, is there’s only 15.7 million shares outstanding and management owns a ton of stock. Corsair owns 5.5% of the company.
So there’s not a lot of float available. So that first-mover advantage is incredibly valuable. But if the stock moves up a point, that’s 50% on your original basis, thereabouts, right? And it’s only a $15.7 million change in market cap.
Because of the tremendous free cash flow, they’re going to pay off all their debt, they’re going to license Terrifier 3, I believe, to Amazon, because Terrifier 2 is on Amazon 2. And then they’ll have ancillary revenue through that share. They have first right of refusal Terrifier 4, and they could put it on ScreenBox, which is $4.99 a month. And then they can sell DVDs to Walmart (WMT). So bundle Terrifier 2 and Terrifier 3.
Those are the gems. I try to find one or two of those a year. I’ve been better at finding. And this idea came from the guy I work with in Greenwich who’s had a family office for 20 years. His fund got up to $180 million and he’s got a big Wall Street network. He said, “Hey, take a look at this thing. I think you may like it.” And then I dropped everything. I spent like eight hours working on it that day and I said, “Oh my God, this is amazing.”
Those are fun. Those are special. And again, if you get two of these a year, and I’ve been good about finding two, three, four sometimes, that’s how the serious, serious money gets made. The only issue is the liquidity has stepped up a bunch now, but it’s still a small company.
So it’s not anything any big players could size. But for retail investors, like, I’m sure I have members that bought 5,000 shares, or maybe 10,000 shares. It’s a good one, right? You buy it at $2, $2.25, $2.40, and I think it was pushing $3.90 today, and I think it’d go a lot higher. But again, it’s going to be very volatile, but that’s the magic.
That’s what I’m trying to find. That’s what I’m trying to get back to. And it’s really just a function of bandwidth. Like how do you spend your time? Bandwidth is incredibly valuable.
You never know when you’re going to see a great idea. But if you’re not in the trenches every day, learning, reading, synthesizing, getting better, learning from mistakes, you’re going to miss these things. Because there’s no bell that rings and says, “Oh, there’s a great opportunity like you have to go and get them.
You have to go find them. You have to be on a quest.” It’s an adventure. You’re going to have setbacks, but you have to stick to that North Star. And that’s what we’re trying to do.
RS: Keep going Frodo, keep going. When you get a recommendation on a stock, what’s the first thing you look at or is it stock dependent?
C&CI: It’s bespoke. I don’t do any quantitative screens ever. It’s an organic thing. I’m looking for inflection points. So value can take shape in two ways. It can be growth at a reasonable price or it can be ridiculously cheap and mispriced.
For instance, Regis (RGS), which owns the franchise rights super cuts, I had covered it. It had done well for a while then it kind of struggled. I was actually out of the stock because I didn’t think they could handle the debt. They had $180 million in debt, $25 million EBITDA, cash interest was 20%. I thought they were going to file bankruptcy.
I think it was June 25th, I woke up doing my work, doing my work, 6:30. I see this 8-K that Regis refinanced its debt. I was like, what? I read the 8-K, Bank of America forgave like $80 million in principal.
Now, some of that was PIK interest and they had been paying them for a while, a lot of cash interest, but they literally walked away from the debt and they got TCW, a private equity fund, to basically take the debt over at $90 million and then they TCW out of their fees.
So overnight on a company that had a market cap of like $20 million, they got $80 million of debt forgiven. So I said, “Oh my God, I read the 8-K like five times. I was like, what the hell – what am I missing? And we bought the hell out of it between 5 and 6.25, 6.50. I sent out multiple alerts to my group. We loaded up on the thing. The thing opened at like 14 and hit like 24 that day.
In fairness, I sold it at 12, because I doubled my money and I had a huge position and ended up hitting 35 because I don’t like the business. And I had some people make 3x, 4x, 5x, which is great, all good.
But it’s that first-mover advantage of playing in companies and in situations and having that situational awareness. So you can synthesize news much faster than any algo because you know the business, you’ve read the conference calls, you know the drivers of how these businesses move.
Again, you don’t get these that often, but when you do, you print money, right? If you get two or three of these a year, it’s just stupid the type of returns you put up.
I had a slump that I broke out of in a massive way recently, but I was literally in a slump for like a couple months, just making a little bit of money, but grinding, nothing happened, losing on this, making on this, trying to keep my head above water, fighting through it, wasn’t seeing the baseball, just was, I was like Aaron Judge in the World Series hitting like 120 or whatever he hit or two.
But all of a sudden, you stick to your process right and then all of a sudden you start to see the baseball again and you start knocking it over the fence and then you see another ball and the ball looks like a watermelon, right? It looks like it’s in slow motion, a watermelon, and you knock another one over the fence.
And you feel so good after that because these slumps are nasty, and they drain on you and they wear on you, but it’s all par for the course. It’s all part of the process because there’s nothing linear, right? Just two steps forward, one step back. And that’s just kind of how it is. But again, it’s all slugging percentage. I think I mentioned that in the last call that we had.
And so if you can hit two, three big hits a year, you are going to destroy the indices, right? That’s just how the math works. And you can strike out and you can miss stuff and you can have management teams lie to you and you can get fooled. But as long as you hit a couple of long balls, net-net, the math just works out where you’re going to compound at very good rates.
And so that’s what this year’s been. It’s been another great year. And I got a couple of really exciting things that I’m waiting on that could play out, especially BuzzFeed between now and year-end.
I’ve been in BuzzFeed since February of 2024 and I was buying the stock at like a $1.5 in the Connecticut sleeve, family sleeve, sleeves and I literally saw a thesis that no one else saw they thought I was crazy, they were going to default and I was like “No, no that’s absolute nonsense. This business is inflecting, they own great businesses with BuzzFeed, with HuffPost, you have the election coming.
I was on the phone with Jonah and Matt multiple times after earnings calls. My sense is Jonah wants to win. Jonah’s very intelligent. Matt’s a great CFO. And I said, “No, I’m not buying into that narrative”. They also own Hot Ones, which is an incredible show with Sean Evans. For instance, before the Wolverine Deadpool movie, Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman came on to Hot Ones and they went through the Hot Ones of Death Gauntlet and they had 30 million views on YouTube.
You have A list stars like Ariana Grande wanting to go on Hot Ones. A celebrity has a new book, they have a new movie, they have a new podcast. They want to go on Hot Ones. They love Sean Evans, right?. And so I’m like, “Okay, yeah, you got $120 million of debt, you got $45 million of cash.” But then I said, “Well, wait a second, they’re going to crush it, Q4 with HuffPost, with the election spend, you’re going to get higher CPMs on the programmatic side. They’re crushing it on the affiliate business with Amazon.
We saw that in Q3. They just had an incredible Q3 if you model it. And I said, there’s no way in God’s green earth, Jonah is going to default because his sister is married to Jordan Peele, who’s one of the biggest directors in Hollywood. He probably knows Reed on a first-name basis because there’s talks that Netflix (NFLX) wants to do something with these guys.
So I’m like, there’s 28 ways to Sunday I’m going to win. Now it hasn’t been decided yet because the debt is puttable December 3rd and it remains to be seen if they can navigate it. But I literally bought this thing at 1.5, added it. So I had my basis was like upper ones.
Vivek Ramaswamy bought an 8% stake, stock spikes to 4.5%, goes to 2% in my face. You idiot, Courage & Conviction, why didn’t you sell it? It was at 4.5%. Because I said, “Well, I did sell some, a third of it or maybe 40%. But then I reloaded all in the 2. I said, “I’m betting on my thesis.”
I think it’s a brilliant thesis. I don’t care about the stock prices. I don’t care if it’s $2. The tail doesn’t wag the dog. And so we’ll see. I’m hoping it happens before Thanksgiving. They may take this thing to the wire, but I’ve learned the hard way and you play in distressed debt, distressed equity. If the business is inflecting, the terms of leverage are less than 4x, especially if it’s less than 3x, on modeling, they’re going to do monster Q3, Q4 free cashflow.
Let’s conservatively say EBITDA is $25 million, $30 million. Net debt, they just reported Q3, $54 million in cash, $120. It’s not that levered, plus you could sell Hot Ones. There’s a possibility of Netflix.
It was just one of those sweet setups, and we’ll see, I think it’s like mid-3s today, it’s super volatile, a lot of hot money day traders, but I’m playing this thing out, and we talked about it, right? I’ve been in it since, again, 1.5 and averaging up. And I think if I’m right, it’s going to be 5-plus.
The trifecta would be blow out Q4, so that’d be $30 million EBITDA. So $25 million free cash because they have to pay the interest payment on the debt, 8.5% convert. Then get a refi, then get Netflix, a Netflix Live Miniseries with Evans.
Now that would be perfect. We don’t live in a perfect world. I’m not betting on that. That would be the best-case scenario. A good scenario would be they do at least $25 million EBITDA, they get a debt extension, they get some type of refi and maybe they don’t get Netflix. They’ve been trying to sell Hot Ones, but I know they want to get the right price.
So again, there’s just multiple ways to win. But when the stock, you buy a stock at $1.5 goes to 4.5, you’re up pretty big, then it goes back to $2 in your face. But there’s only 37.5 million shares outstanding. So again, a $1 move, $2 move in the stock price is nothing in market cap.
And then you have the optionality of becoming more of an AI company. They’ve shown signs with Shrek and Minions and Vote Kamala, AI tools. And so, I don’t know, that’s the stuff that works, that I’m looking for.
And again, I mean, some of the names we talked about before, they’ve struck out, like I got smoked on Red Robin (RRGB), completely smoked. Owned it at 11. Stock went to 15, didn’t sell it. And I just felt like management completely lied to me, they haven’t delivered. And I was sold half at 8, then the rest in the 4s. I got smoked on that thing.–
RS: Is that part of the game? Is it speaking to the Red Robin affair and management lying to you and not always being able to suss that out? Is that just…
C&CI: The mistake I made on Red Robin is this.
RS: Yeah.
C&CI: They have their first quarter 16 weeks versus the traditional 13, 13. And Q1 of ‘23 was amazing. They crushed it. But what happened was it was a unique period of time where there was benign competition. You had record food inflation, but it was in the second derivative decline and labor was very tight.
So in a highly competitive dog-eat-dog market share hunt business, there was a placid, ceasefire olive branch, not in the collusion type of way because this is so fragmented, where the industry was so battered by this inflation, you could pass through the food inflation and some of the labor inflation. And then given the amount of sales this thing had, they put up a monster cute quarter.
And so then you throw that in with a fancy narrative that management have, we talked to them multiple times. And I just feel like they completely lied to my face, just completely lied to me and I wasn’t smart enough. I did see signs, like I saw the like Applebee’s $9.99, burger deal, Bacon Burger.
I saw the fast food wars kind of ramping up and I just kind of ignored it because I said the valuation is so cheap that the – it’s looking backwards. And they’ve absolutely whiffed and it hurts because you do all this work, you believe in it, you believe in a team and they completely fail.
Now there are some activists involved now I have no idea what they’re going to do to turn around this business. I haven’t a clue. I took my medicine and I kind of move on. So, it is par for the course. You are going to swing and miss. You’re going to think you have a good thesis and you’re going to miss something. There’s going to be an oversight.
But again, if you’re playing 8 to 12 names, okay and again better risk management, we should have sold all of it at 8. So it wouldn’t even have been that big a deal. You were in at 11, goes to 15, okay, great, you give back a big gain. You’re out at 8, you lose 3 points, no big deal. But the second tranche selling it in the 4s, that hurt, and that was just an unforced error, but again, par for the course.
So you learn from it, you try to get better and it’s just part of the game, but in small caps, it’s literally pretty much 90% management. You can have a great concept, great inflection point, but if management cannot execute, then usually nothing good happens.
RS: Something that you did seem to see was Spirit Airlines (OTC:SAVEQ), which has been in the news for bankruptcy and some really heavy bad news over there. Anything to point out there in terms of what you saw or what you were able to see or how investors should be thinking about that part of the market?
C&CI: So what happened was, I did a ton of work on Mesa (MESA), which I still own. I bought Mesa originally like, I don’t know, a while ago at like, I don’t know, 1.50. It hit like 3.5. I think I got sold a little bit and then I forget. I might get stopped out for like, I don’t know, maybe at even.
But I did a ton of work on Mesa and then I got back on the horse and I figured I listened to all the United because United is their big sponsor. So Mesa gets paid a fee to fly regional traffic to connect the United’s hub-and-spoke business.
And United (UAL) has the best CEO in the business and the best team and they had the foresight to make massive investment five years ago when no one else is making that investment. Forget about that. They’re crushing it internationally. But they basically drank Spirit Airlines and the low-cost carriers milkshake.
And so when I synthesize all those calls, because United is such a big backer and been an incredible partner for Mesa Air. I basically synthesized and worked out because the CEO and the upper management explained what they’re basically doing in a competitive landscape to the spirits of the world.
And so they were flying bigger jets and it’s a little bit complicated. But I saw that and I said, “All right, there’s so much debt, the pilots are so expensive, all the costs were going up, jet fuel was expensive, and I saw the debt. And once the JetBlue (JBLU) deal didn’t work because of antitrust, I said, “If you looked at the balance sheet, it looked very, very unlikely that these guys weren’t going to file.
And Dave Portnoy of Davey Day Trader, he’s a brilliant entrepreneurial guy. but he knows nothing about stocks, okay, literally nothing. And he’s telling all his followers, his millions and millions of followers to buy the stock. I’m like looking at this balance sheet, I was like, what the hell is this guy talking about?
And so unfortunately they filed this morning. And it wasn’t that difficult to see if you just looked at the trajectory, if you did any work on the industry and you looked at the balance sheet.
But the real tell on the key was with the work that I did on United to get comfortable. And again, Mesa is high risk. Don’t get me wrong. I think they’ve worked incredibly well to support Mesa, United has. And so I think they get to the other side, but it may not. But I do still own some of the stock.
But because I did all the work on United as part of my Mesa work, I was able to synthesize the changing wins in the industry. And then you layer on top of that the balance sheet and I was like “These guys aren’t going to make it unlikely. I don’t short stocks. I occasionally buy a put – a couple of puts here, small money, but I’m not a short seller.
And so unfortunately it looks like a lot of retail people got hurt here and it’s too bad. And look, Dave is a real entrepreneurial guy, but he has no business giving stock advice. So it’s too bad.
RS: Are there times with Second Wind Capital with your subscribers over there that they’re pushing to short stocks or that they want to short stocks or that you’re – that they’re pushing against advice? Do you run into that at all?
C&CI: I just don’t short stocks. I will occasionally buy some puts. I got some puts on CAVA. I had some puts on one or two other things, but it’s really not what I do. I’m not a short seller. I hate how short selling is done.
I’ll give Hindenburg credit. He has done some very good work. He’s been right three out of four times. Outside of Hindenburg – and then the guy who actually ironically shut down his fund, I can’t think of it, channels. I just think it’s an incredibly difficult business. I get that long short hedge funds have to do it to be market neutral. I get the pod shops that are five, six times levered have to do it.
I just – I’m not into shorting. The math doesn’t work for me and I hate thinking like a short. Look if you want to be right because you have a brilliant thesis and it’s part of a long short portfolio, that’s fine. But I hate the hit reports of a Zeta, right? It’s just a hit report. You did a bunch of hyenas, they all team out, they all coordinate. They all get short ahead of the report. The report comes out, they put more pressure on it. People retail, get whipsawed.
I had people in my group saying, “You’re crazy, why you’re buying this? And I said, “Listen, I don’t care what these people think.” If it was Hindenburg, I’d have to really think twice because they’ve had some great calls. But I’ve never heard of [indiscernible] (45:01). I don’t really care who the hell they are. The arguments didn’t really make any sense to me.
I mean we’ll see how it plays out. But I think unless you’re a highly sophisticated family office hedge fund or very wealthy individual maybe running a long short book makes fund sense, I don’t think it makes sense for the average person, and it’s a dirty hedge for a small-cap portfolio. Like if you’re long 10 or 12 idiosyncratic names with different industries, different catalysts, different risk parameters, shorting the S&P is so stupid. Shorting the Russell is stupid. The median market cap of the Russell is like a billion dollars.
So if you own companies that have $50 million, $100 million, $200 million, $300 million market caps, it’s not a good hedge. You get $2 billion, $3 billion companies in the Russell 2000, right? The NASDAQ, you can’t short the NASDAQ against a small-cap book. It doesn’t make any sense.
So I don’t – you always hear about someone gets a great short call, right, they had puts or they did this, they look like a hero, it garners all this media attention. But in the media, it’s a place where we hear about winners, we don’t hear about the strikeouts, we don’t hear about the losers and very few people actually boast their performance.
It’s again, it’s a boastful, belligerent at times, a bar room wild west atmosphere where everyone’s just banging their chest about how they’re so wonderful and how they’ve never missed a – they’ve never bought a stock that went down and never made a mistake. It’s just kind of comical, unfortunately.
RS: Well, thank you for another great conversation for listeners interested in more. There’s Courage & Conviction Investing, the profile on the free side of Seeking Alpha. And there’s Second Wind Capital, your investing group that investors can find more personal and detailed attention.
Anything else you want to leave investors, listeners with before the end of this conversation. And again, really appreciate it.
C&CI: Thanks, Rena. I would just say where I’m trying to evolve, if anyone’s considering the service, I’m trying to get away. I would do a lot of tactical and I’d have a long book and I’d run it in parallel.
I’m trying to get back to the more of the six-month to 12-month type of ideas where you can make some good money on the tactical side, especially around earnings season, you know the companies and you synthesize them well, but it just takes an incredible amount of bandwidth. And so I’ve been blessed, I’m working with this guy that’s worth like, I don’t know, let’s just say, well in excess of nine figures, he’s brilliant.
I’ve met him through Seeking Alpha, so I’m grateful for that. And I’m learning a lot from him, but I’m still running the group and have three kids and my wife’s got a huge job. And so I’m drinking from a fire hose. But what he’s trying to get me to think about is like, let’s focus on ideas where you have really high conviction, where we can put $5 million in an idea.
It’s fun to bet here or there and it’s fun if it works. But you’re spending all this bandwidth and all this energy and all these ideas and even if you’re hit for 70%, you’re going to make money. But the serious, serious money is getting a couple of ideas right and making them multi-baggers and that’s how you compound.
So I’m kind of really getting away from the tactical stuff. I’ll still do it. So if anyone’s considering it, I don’t want to misrepresent it. It’s more of trying to find the BuzzFeeds the Cineverses, the Arq (ARQ), which I’ve owned for years.
Those type of bets, I’ll probably sprinkle in a few tactical things. But I just don’t have the bandwidth to try to come up with a new winning idea every day. And I just don’t think it’s something that can scale and you can consistently compound that formula.
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