Thematic Review (Part Deux)
Less than a year has passed since our write-up on the reflexive nature of the Bitcoin Treasury trade. As Kuppy likes to say: most outcomes in finance seem obvious – it’s the timing that’s difficult. In this case, we have to give props to our analyst who wrote this up as a short in September of last year.
Despite VC spending tens of billions of dollars on finding a use case for Bitcoin, we still haven’t met someone who bought bitcoin with a use case in mind. People buy it because they think it will go up in price (in dollars), and then brag about their intelligence and great fortune during the family Christmas dinner.
Furthermore, we discussed a business that is known as a Futures Commission Merchant (FCM) as our favorite way to play the theme in discussion.
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Kliff Note of the Week
Cluster Buying Notes: Not an official Cluster Buy but nice to see the first insider purchase at Vistance Networks (VISN). Vistance is the renamed CommScope. The company has been basically dismantling itself through a series of major divestments (CCS, RUCKUS) over the past year and returning cash.
What’s left is the core Aurora Networks (cable/broadband infrastructure) business on a clean balance sheet. Aurora just posted a rough quarter, missing on earnings and cutting guidance due to memory-chip cost inflation and order-timing issues.
Buyback Notes: Life insurer Globe Life (GL) popped a $2.5bn buyback, ~21% of the current market cap. If there’s one thing you can be sure of at Globe, it’s that they’ll be buying back shares. They’ve now retired close to a quarter of total s/o over the past 5 years.
Investor Day Notes: Speaking of ugly charts, check out Nike’s (NKE). Down over 40% YTD, >70% in five years and >10% in 10 years. Yuck. But that’s also why their November 16-17 investor day could be an interesting catalyst.
If we recall correctly, the last one was back in 2017/2018; they planned an investor day back in 2024 but postponed it during the CEO transition. Anyways, they really need to come up with something good. Or just stop getting their butt kicked by Adidas (ADS GR).
Golden Handcuff Notes: B&G Foods (BGS) is trading near multi-year lows after years of margin pressure, dividend cuts and elevated leverage (roughly 7 turns of leverage at the end of Q1 2026).
The new CEO, Mills, received options on 900,000 shares at a $3.40 exercise price, with one-third of the award vesting on December 31, 2026, 2027, and 2028. At share prices of $7, $10 and $15, the options would be worth $3.2m, $5.9m and $10.4m, respectively. BGS last traded above $10 in December 2023.
13D and Activist Notes: Marketing and eventco TOW (4767 JP) recently popped on Murakami’s disclosure of a new stake in the company (~5.4%).
This looks like yet another interesting small Japanese company; roughly half the market cap in cash and investments, net of total liabilities, <5x LTM EV/EBITDA, solid FCF generation, retiring shares (~10% soon).
And with the recent move, the shares are back to the level of a few months ago.
Disclaimer. KEDM is provided for informative purposes only. No due diligence has (yet) been performed on the names on this list. The list might change strongly on a regular basis. This overview does not constitute advice; always do your own due diligence. For the full disclaimer, please go here.