Hedge Fund Alpha Interview

I recently spoke with Hedge Fund Alpha for its Q2 2026 edition of Hidden Value Stocks. The interview includes an update on Longriver, but the part I expect will be of most interest to readers is the pair of company case studies: Hikari Tsushin in Japan and Plover Bay in Hong Kong. For compliance reasons, we agreed to frame these as examples of my process rather than stock tips.

Hikari has built a distribution platform to sell subscription-like products and services with recurring cash flows, like bottled water, small-ticket insurance and utilities. But over time, it has also built an admirable track record investing surplus cash in other companies, either outright or through their listed securities. What interested me was how the whole organisation seems built around disciplined capital allocation, an enduring quality that’s hard to compress into research notes or Excel.

Plover Bay is similar. At first glance, it looks like a small hardware company. But that misses the point. It is a disciplined, founder-led, high-return, asset-light business solving a real connectivity problem, with a growing software and recurring-revenue layer that the market was slow to appreciate.

These two case studies capture much of what I look for in Asia and around the world: good businesses, sensible stewards, and situations where the label attached to the company is too narrow for the economics beneath.

With Hedge Fund Alpha’s permission, you can read the full case studies here (link) once you’ve registered. For the full interview, including the broader discussion of Longriver and the rest of the issue, I would encourage you to subscribe to Hedge Fund Alpha and read it in full here (link). A big thanks to Michelle, Jacob and the team at Hedge Fund Alpha for having me!