RaymondsIndex

There is a moment in the life of many a good company when the income statement and the balance sheet start telling different stories. The business hums along — margins intact, brands strong, customers loyal — while the capital behind it slowly stops working. Last month gave us a clean example of that divergence, and an activist willing to name it. The case. Quad Asset Management, a long-term shareholder in Youngone Corporation — the Korean OEM behind outdoor labels including The North Face — published an open letter on June 30, 2026, asking the board to respond by July 31. Its central figure is the kind that reframes a company in a sentence: Youngone earns a 17.5% return on invested capital in the apparel operations it actually runs, but only 2.1% on its financial assets. As of end-2025 the company held ₩1.1 trillion in net cash (about 36% of market capitalization) and ₩1.5 trillion in non-operating assets including financial holdings and investment real estate (about 48%). Quad'...

Two stories from the past week describe the same structure in two languages. In Tokyo, on July 17, the Liberal Democratic Party's project team on corporate governance circulated draft proposals warning of suspected collusion between activist investors and private-equity buyers in take-private deals. The document flagged cases where activist shareholders were suspected of "securing unfair gains" by reinvesting part of their sale proceeds into acquisition vehicles set up by the PE buyer, and floated tighter rules on calling extraordinary meetings, on shareholder proposals, and — borrowing from Delaware — on appraisal-rights claims by investors who bought in after a deal was announced. The backdrop is a market that has become one of the busiest for activism outside the U.S.: Japanese private-equity deals jumped 47.8% last year to $42 billion, and this year features a bidding war between EQT, SoftBank's LY Corp and Bain Capital over Kakaku.com, plus Elliott's stake-...

In 2026, U.S. companies are on track to buy back a record amount of their own stock — close to $1 trillion across the S&P 500, according to S&P Global. On the surface, that looks like strength: firms returning cash to shareholders. But look at the arithmetic underneath. Index revenue grew roughly 8.8% this year, while earnings per share grew 14.2%. A large slice of that "earnings growth" — by most estimates two to four percentage points — didn't come from selling more goods or services. It came from dividing the same profit across fewer shares. That gap is the reason our Capital Efficiency Index (CEI) exists, and it's a good lens for understanding what the index actually measures. What CEI reads CEI is not a verdict on whether a company returned cash. Buybacks and dividends are neutral facts — a healthy firm with genuinely no better use for its capital and a firm hollowing itself out can post the exact same payout line. CEI is built to tell them apart. It weig...

Two data points arrived from opposite ends of the same pattern this month, and almost nobody put them side by side. The first is Korean. As of June 19, 2026, Samsung Electronics and SK hynix together accounted for 54.76% of total KOSPI market capitalization — ₩4,162 trillion combined. What makes this remarkable is not the number but the path. When the index first crossed 5,000, the pair was 36.31%. At 6,000, 38.47%. At 7,000, 44.51%. At 8,000, 48.79%. The two names passed 40% for the first time only in March, and 50% by late May. Along the way, SK hynix overtook Samsung Electronics for the top market-cap spot — a reversal roughly 25 years and 7 months in the making. The second is Japanese. Listed companies there announced ¥16.2 trillion of share buybacks in January–May 2026 alone, up 34% year on year and a record for the period, closing in on the whole of the prior year's total. Fiscal 2025 announcements reached ¥22.32 trillion. The engine is the unwinding of cross-shareholdings,...

 Start with a number that doesn't behave the way you expect. This month the SEC filed proposed consent judgments in its case against Robert Alan Yedid, Andrew Kaufman, and Mark Jacobs. Yedid was a managing director at LifeSci Advisors, a firm that handles investor communications for pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies. In that role he obtained material nonpublic information about the firm's clients — drug trial results, financial and regulatory developments, pending mergers and acquisitions — and, from 2019 through 2024, passed it to two long-time friends. The SEC charged the three in August 2025; combined illegal profits exceeded $500,000. Under the proposed judgments, Kaufman disgorges $391,580, Yedid $167,820, and Jacobs $36,138. All three consented to permanent injunctions. Yedid additionally accepted a bar from associating with a broker or dealer and from serving as an officer or director of a public company. The judgments remain subject to court approval. The numbe...

1. Two numbers, two ends of the same process On 10 June 2026, the Bank of Korea released its 2025 Corporate Business Analysis. Among 34,456 externally audited non-financial companies, 39.9% had an interest coverage ratio below 100% — up from 38.5% a year earlier, and the highest figure the series has recorded. The share of firms running an operating loss reached 28.2%, also a record. Separately, the Federation of Korean Industries reported on 30 June that 27.6% of listed Korean companies now qualify as marginal firms — three consecutive years of interest coverage below 1 — against 11.8% in 2017. On 9 July, Tokyo Shoko Research reported that Japan recorded 5,346 corporate failures in the first half of 2026 , up 7.1% year on year and above 5,000 for the first time since 2014. Ninety percent of those firms employed fewer than ten people. Total liabilities of failed firms reached ¥734bn, up 6.3% — the first increase in four years — and large failures (over ¥1bn in liabilities) hit 114,...