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Friday, November 13, 2026

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Calvin Blissett on X

The Korean preferred (the one with the SpaceX stake $SPCX ) reported this week, and the headline was a loss. I read the filing, the call coverage and the first round of broker notes. Here's my takeaways: The loss came from marking investments to market. SpaceX dropped in the quarter and a few other positions went against them. Take that out and the brokerage still made good money in a quarter when Korean trading volumes fell hard. That was the test I cared about. The boom ended and the core business still earned roughly what I'd assumed for a normal year. Growth: On the call, management said they’re preparing to enter Singapore, the US and Australia as well as Japan. They gave no names, prices or timing for those three. Japan, through the Sanko Securities deal, comes first. The plan, in their words, is to buy local brokers in developed markets and use them to offer online wealth management to local retail investors. That’s the same model they run in Korea, sold through an app rather than branches. They said online is much cheaper to run than offline. The long-term goal is one platform where clients hold both regular investments and digital assets, which is why the Hong Kong unit already offers crypto trading. Separately, they’re folding their Shanghai and Beijing offices into Shenzhen and Hong Kong. They also just agreed to buy a small licensed Japanese broker for a modest sum, aiming to launch an online wealth app there within about two years. Japanese households keep an enormous pile of savings in cash and are only starting to move it into markets. If the playbook that works in Korean pensions carries over, it’s a cheap option. The parts that contribute to baseline earnings held up: Pensions and wealth management barely moved while trading fees fell sharply. Retirement money doesn't leave because the market had a bad month, and the company is still #1 in the part of the pension market it competes in. Pricing held on overseas trades while competitors keep giving trades away for free. The overseas businesses are having their best year ever. The SpaceX stake is still worth several times what they paid. Management said on the call that gains get returned to shareholders once they're actually realized. With the lockup ending next month, that money is close to being real. What management has done for shareholders this year: Its largest buyback ever, a big chunk of it spent on the preferreds, including the first preferred for the first time. The largest share cancellation in its history in July. Over the last two years it handed back more than the policy required. This week it said it will cancel about 60% of the treasury shares left over from an old merger right after the March shareholder meeting. The new three-year policy keeps the same minimum payout, with extra returns once SpaceX gains are realized. They've also said in writing that part of the reason for buying preferred was to narrow the gap between the common and preferred prices. Companies are rarely that explicit although I have seen it before Why the prefs could be the next thing they buy: the new policy dropped the fixed yearly commitment to cancel preferred shares, which I didn't love at all, and nobody on the sell side seems to have noticed. But the wording changed in a way that helps. The cancellation of the old merger shares sits outside the payout policy. So every year, the minimum payout has to be met with dividends and fresh buybacks. That money has to go somewhere. With the prefs at about a 63% discount to the common, each won spent on them retires roughly 2.7x as much of the company as the same won spent on the common, and the prefs get exactly the same dividend. If the goal is shrinking the share count, the prefs are the cheapest place to do it. Management already acted on that in June, at almost twice today's price. The negatives: management plans to sell some treasury stock over time instead of cancelling all of it. One broker puts the dilution at under 2% a year. Next quarter will carry a regulatory fine plus another SpaceX markdown. REGULATORY RISK IS SOMETHING TO WATCH BECAUSE OF AN INVESTIGATION! Most of the brokers kept their buy ratings. One estimated returns on equity in the low teens without giving SpaceX any credit.

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