UK stocks are dirt cheap. Why won't the boards act? $ZIG $CRW | Undervalued-Shares

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Andrew Walker (0:32)

All right, you're about to listen to Yet Another Value Podcast with your host, me, Andrew Walker. Today we've got a podcast I am, you'll hear, I'm fired up. As they would say in Louisiana, I'm all fired up. I don't know if I can do that accent, but I'm fired up about the podcast and topic we're going to talk today. We have Sven Larsen from Undervalued-Shares. He has been publishing letters to a lot of UK companies talking to them about capital allocation, fixing their undervaluation. If you've listened to this podcast for the past three years, you've heard me joke that the UK market is an emerging market. The stocks are so cheap there and the only solution so far has been huge takeouts by private equity companies or strategic partners. It's nice if you own the company that gets taken out, but as a whole, I found the experience of owning UK stocks hasn't really generated that much return because you get the big return from the takeout, but what about the 80 percent of companies that aren't taken out? Anyway, Swen has been publishing a lot of letters, working on them. We're going to talk about the UK market overall, what ails the UK market, what the fixes for the UK market are, and then we're going to talk about two specific companies that he's published letters on and the issues, the opportunities, everything facing them. One of them is Zigup. The ticker there is Zig. Disclosure, I own a little bit of the company.

That is the disclosure. There's disclaimers, everything at the end of the podcast, not investing advice, all that, but we're going to get there in one second. But first, a word from our sponsors.

Today's podcast is sponsored by fiscal.ai. fiscal.ai is the modern financial data provider for global equities. Look, that's what they have me tell you, but let me tell you how I've been using fiscal.ai. I'll remind you, I'm a customer. I paid with my own money to connect to the fiscal.ai API. There's two things that I've really found it useful for. Number one, this is something super unique. They've got a huge database of fund letters, and the fund letters are connected by the API. Whenever I'm researching a company, whether it's researching the company because I'm interested in them, or looking up an event, or prepping for a podcast, the first thing I have my AI do is I say, hey, I'm prepping for a podcast on hymns.

The first thing it does is it says, hey, here's all the recent letters on fiscal.ai of people talking about hymns, and here's their thesis, here's their bare thesis, all that sort of stuff. That's the first thing, and that is really unique, and that is really fun. Then the second thing I do is I use it for edited financials. I've got my model, and I say, hey, I'm looking at hymns, go build me a model. And it says, sure, I'll build you a model. And every line in that model has a link, so I can see, oh, they're pulling this EBITDA number, they're pulling this segment number, they're pulling this number from three years ago. I click on it, and it takes me right to fiscal.ai, and it says, hey, here's these company-specific KPIs, here's these ratios, and I can see exactly where they're getting it, and exactly where they're coming from. So it is a super reliable data provider that can connect to your AI. I found it super helpful. I'm a big fan of the podcast. If you want to try it out, you can use my link at fiscal.ai.yav to get 15% off their AI connector. That's fiscal.ai.yav, and there'll be a link in the show notes.

All right. Hello, and welcome to the Yet Another Value Podcast. I'm your host, Andrew Walker, still sporting a mustache, and with me today, I'm happy to have Vaughn. I think this is actually the second time. My friend, Swen Lorenz. Swen, how's it going?

Swen Lorenz (3:36)

Good, good. Great to see you again. Last time I saw you in New York at my conference. Good to be on your podcast now for a change.