Jim Odersman

Most investors follow markets. I find value in the change they misprice.

[Jim Odersman @EdgsCGroup]

August was a busy month.

Nvidia. SpaceX. Nike. SAP. Spinoffs. AI. Insider buying.

Different stories, same question:

What is the market missing?

I wrote through the month on the structures, incentives, and catalysts underneath the headlines.

Free to follow my Forbes page here

[Jim Odersman @EdgsCGroup]

The older I get, the more I realize adulthood is mostly just being able to buy the big bag of Haribo without asking anyone’s permission.

Financial freedom.

[Jim Odersman @EdgsCGroup]

5% changes everything—not because stocks suddenly became bad investments, but because investors no longer have to own them.

When Treasuries pay 5%, every stock has to justify the risk.

Great companies will still win. Stupid prices won’t.

My latest for Forbes:

[Jim Odersman @EdgsCGroup]

Anthropic could go public at $2 trillion.

That doesn’t mean public investors are getting the best deal.

Amazon, Google and Nvidia can profit from its spending before IPO buyers see a dollar of cash flow.

The public may be arriving after the economics have already been divided.

[Jim Odersman @EdgsCGroup]

We have better tools now. Faster data. Real-time alerts. AI summaries.

Human nature has not upgraded. That's the edge nobody can code away.

[Jim Odersman @EdgsCGroup]

Japan's activist campaigns jumped 53% in a year. The stocks were cheap long before that.

Japanese stocks have looked statistically cheap for years. Cheap can stay cheap for a very long time.

What changes the investment is when someone finally has both the ability and the

[Jim Odersman @EdgsCGroup]

Wall Street has a new qualification: WiFi.

Only 2% of social-media finance influencers are actually qualified to give advice.

Yet millions of people take investment advice from someone because they have a ring light, a podcast and 400,000 followers.

Followers are not a track

[Jim Odersman @EdgsCGroup]

The selling patterns too:

Panic when volatility rises and headlines darken
Buying hope, selling fear
Riding losers because ego turned a position into an identity
Nobody plans to be exit liquidity. Every cycle, someone is.

[Jim Odersman @EdgsCGroup]

Investors used to reward bigger AI spending. That phase is ending.

Once capital commitments reach hundreds of billions, AI stops being a technology strategy. It becomes a capital allocation decision.

Investors stop asking how much a company spends and start asking what it earns

[Jim Odersman @EdgsCGroup]

The losing patterns are always the same:

Buying comfort (what everyone already loves)
Buying narrators (vision instead of execution)
Buying validation (agreement instead of research)
Buying activity (boredom disguised as strategy)

[Jim Odersman @EdgsCGroup]

Air Liquide isn't struggling. Elliott is pushing it anyway.

Air Liquide's operating margin sits around 21%. Linde's sits around 30%.

The activist argument isn't that Air Liquide is a bad company. It's that a strong company may be capable of much better economics.

A collapsing

[Jim Odersman @EdgsCGroup]

NYC: Well … that’s the end of human delivery drivers … 🙄

[Jim Odersman @EdgsCGroup]

The Pentagon just committed $450M to Elmet.

In return: preferred equity, warrants for up to 19.9%, and access to the boardroom.

Washington is becoming a customer, financier, and shareholder.

The shares surged. Who captures the return? Chart
@Barchart

$ELMT

[Jim Odersman @EdgsCGroup]

I've watched smart people lose money in markets for 35 years.

Almost never because they lacked intelligence.

The market is a machine that transfers wealth from the emotional to the disciplined and it runs on predictable behavior.

[Jim Odersman @EdgsCGroup]

No takeover. No activist filing. Just customers quietly buying less.

A catalyst does not need to be a takeover, spinoff or activist filing.

Sometimes it's simply the moment the market realizes the old valuation no longer matches what customers are actually doing.

The market

[Jim Odersman @EdgsCGroup]

The market isn’t ignoring the risks.

It’s making a bet.

That $100 oil won’t stay high long enough to hurt margins.

Those 5% rates won’t stay high long enough to crush refinancing.

And that earnings will keep carrying the load.

That’s the real setup investors should be

[Jim Odersman @EdgsCGroup]

The next great AI stock may not look like an AI stock at all.

It may be an ordinary business quietly using AI to cut costs, lift margins and grow earnings faster than Wall Street expects.

The opportunity is not where AI gets mentioned most.

It is where AI changes the numbers

[Jim Odersman @EdgsCGroup]

Insiders don’t always wait for the headlines to turn positive. Sometimes they’re buying when everyone else is focused on what went wrong.

That’s why I pay attention when a CEO starts loading up on shares after a rough quarter. It doesn’t guarantee what happens next, but it tells

[Jim Odersman @EdgsCGroup]

An activist showing up isn't the catalyst. The timeline is. And almost nobody reads it correctly.

Most investors buy the headline and sell during the quiet period, right when negotiations go silent for months. That's usually a mistake the real re-rating tends to come later, at

[Jim Odersman @EdgsCGroup]

Gucci didn't lose China with a scandal. It just quietly became less compelling.

Kering admitted Gucci grew complacent in China: outdated stores, weaker locations, and too much discounting, while consumers got more sophisticated.

Nothing exploded. The customer just moved on

[Jim Odersman @EdgsCGroup]

After 35 years investing on both sides of the Atlantic, the biggest cultural difference is this:

Europe asks, “How cheap is it?”

America asks, “How big can it become?”

American investors often overpay for the future.

European investors often refuse to pay for it.

A low