The cavalry isn't coming: UK stocks, relistings, and AI analysts | Ben Isaac, Brizo Capital

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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Andrew Walker (0:17)

All right, hello and welcome to Yet Another Value Podcast. I'm your host, Andrew Walker. Today's episode, we have a really fun one. One of my favorite people in the investing business, one of my favorite people in New York City, my friend, Ben Isaac from Brizo Capital. We have a wide, wide-ranging conversation. Ben teaches at Columbia, he's a hired intern. We start off talking about, hey, AI, how is it changing the analyst role? How is it changing the internship role? How is it changing their jobs, their outlook, all that stuff? Then the thing Ben and I have bonded the most over historically over the years is corporate governance, UK markets, and we're going to talk all things, corporate governance, capital allocations, UK markets. At the very tail end, we talk a little bit about the South Korean market reforms. So we just have Ben invests internationally, and we have a wide-ranging, a world-ranging conversations on all things, stocks, AI, investing, capital allocation, corporate governance. So we're going to get there in one second. But first, a word from our sponsors.

Today's episode is sponsored by Trata, trata.com.

Look, I've been saying it for the past 12 months, 18 months, whatever it is. If you like this podcast, you are going to like Trata. Why? What is Trata? Well, Trata is two buy-side investors who hop on an anonymized call and they talk about a stock that they're interested in. Generally, it's two investors who are along the stock, but sometimes it is investors long and short. Sometimes it's two investors who are thinking about it, but you're going to hear from, they hop on, they talk about it for about 60 minutes, and then try to anonymize the transcript and publish it on the website. So when you get it, you can go read and see what investors who are actually thinking about investing in company, what they're really talking about, how they're thinking about the overall space, how they're thinking about the risks, rewards, opportunities, opportunity costs, all that sort of stuff.

So again, if you like this podcast, this is going to be a match made in heaven with you. I'll try it. I love it. It trata.com, trata.com. Thanks to them for sponsoring this. And now onto the episode.

Ben Isaac (2:07)

All right. Hello.

Andrew Walker (2:07)

Welcome to Yet Another Value Podcast. I'm your host, Andrew Walker. With me today, I'm excited to have one of my favorite people in the whole industry. I finally got them on. My friend, Ben Isaac from Brizo Capital. Ben, how's it going?

Ben Isaac (2:17)

I'm doing well, Andrew. How about you?

Andrew Walker (2:20)

Doing great. Super excited for today. Before we get started, disclaimer, remind everyone, nothing on this podcast is investing advice. Full disclaimer at the end of the podcast, in the show notes, always true, but Ben and I have a lot of things we're going to talk about, and a lot of them are in international water, so maybe particularly true today, but you can see the full disclaimer at the end. Ben, if I can just set the table, I think we're going to talk about a lot today. You have a lot of different seats. Obviously, you're at Brizo Capital.

You teach a class at Columbia. I believe it's Applied Securities Investing. You can correct me if I'm wrong. But I want to talk to you about so many things.

But to start your class is you're teaching, again, correct me if I'm wrong, first-year MBA students, how to analyze a company, spend a semester diving deep into a company. A lot of these students are looking for jobs in an internship or analyst role, and some of them just want to go in investing, and some of them just want to go out into the world, but have a capital allocation and investor mindset.

Past three years have been crazy, AI and everything. I'd love to just talk because at Brizo, you've had 30 interns. You're training all these people through the class. How has the analyst and internship role been evolving over the past few years as AI has come in? If you'll give me a five-minute intro set up for that question. Yeah.

Ben Isaac (3:34)

By the way, just to acknowledge, the course I teach, Applied Security Analysis, there are two other professors as well, Evan and Zach, they do great work as well. I wouldn't want to make it sound like that's just me, but between the internship program and the opportunity that I have, to work with these students, I do think maybe we've got something interesting to say about that.