The Odds

The odds on politics, sports, finance, culture and more.

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Marco Rubio is now the odds favorite to win the 2028 presidency

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60% chance Chipotle total restaurant count in Q2 is above 4170.

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There is a 84% chance $NVDA hourly price on the H200 is above $4.50 in July.

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53% chance $TSLA deliveries grow above 500,000 in a single quarter.

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NOW: 13% chance members of Congress are banned from trading stocks this year

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There is a 16% chance Gamestop acquires eBay this year

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There is a 49% chance Bitcoin hits 50K before 100K

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JD Vance is the odds favorite to win the 2028 presidency

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There is a 11% chance Philadelphia 76ers win the 2027 NBA championship

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There is a 53% chance Tesla delivers more than 1.75 million cars this year

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There is now a 18% chance Gavin Newsom is the 2028 Democratic presidential nominee

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76% chance the Federal Reserve maintains rate in July

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59% chance Stripe acquires PayPal this year

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Her: “Say something in Korean”

Me: “지주회사” (holding company)

Her: “What does it mean?”

Me: “It means a 50% discount to NAV and I own six of them”

There was no second date.

[The Odds @TheOddsFeed]

New article just dropped

Get off the subway at Hagye station on Seoul’s Line 7, in the northeastern district of Nowon, and you walk almost directly into a department store. It is not a glamorous one. There is no Chanel boutique on the ground floor, no valet stand, no atrium with a Jeff Koons hanging in it.

What there is, instead, is last season’s outdoor apparel at 60% off, a food hall doing brisk business in the basement, a sports center, a parking structure, and a steady river of middle-aged shoppers from the apartment blocks that surround the site in every direction.

Nowon is one of the densest residential districts in one of the densest cities on earth. Roughly half a million people live there. Land next to a subway station in a district like this is, by any sane reckoning, one of the more valuable things a company can own in Korea.

The company that owns this building owns it outright, along with the land under it, along with five other department stores on similar transit-adjacent sites in Seongnam, Bucheon, Gwangmyeong, Daejeon, and Jeonju, along with five separate investment properties. Its market capitalization is about ₩95 billion. That is roughly $68 million. For the entire company. All six stores, all the land, the cash, everything.

The real estate alone sits on the books at ₩418 billion, last revalued in 2009. Korea Economic Daily looked at it in 2022and concluded the property was worth over ₩1 trillion at market prices. A 2020 press estimate, speculative but instructive, put the theoretical liquidation value at ₩3 trillion or more.

Take the conservative number. The market is selling you a trillion won of prime Korean commercial real estate, plus a profitable operating business, plus net cash, for ninety-five billion won. Nine cents on the dollar, before you even argue about the aggressive case.

There is, of course, a catch. There is always a catch. But the catch here is not that the assets are fake, or encumbered, or in the wrong place. The catch is a question about human intent, and for the first time in two decades, Korean law is starting to answer that question for the humans involved.

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There was a South Korean YouTuber who was stabbed because his stock picks went down. This might be the biggest bull sign ever. This is a bottom signal.

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2/3 of Korean stocks trade below book. Japan was less than half before its rerating. Korea just made shareholder fiduciary duty hard law and tied tax breaks to Value-up plans. The 2025 rally was basically two chip stocks. The cheap two-thirds hasn’t moved yet.

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I’m shaking right now. It’s over. Someone please shut the market down and never reopen it.

[TrendSpider @TrendSpider]

BREAKING: The South Korean stock market falls nearly -8% on the day to its lowest level in over 2 months.

The S.K. markets close in ~2 hours.

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I wrote up a new company. It looks extremely cheap.

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I ate an entire 32-ounce jar of kimchi in a single sitting on a first date to impress a woman and she has not texted me back and I refuse to believe these two events are related.

I want to walk you through my logic because I think it holds up. We met at a wine bar. The wine bar was her idea. I countered with Korean food because I had a plan. The plan was to demonstrate, in the first hour, that I was not like other men she had dated. Other men would have taken her to the wine bar. I took her to a Korean grocery store two blocks from the wine bar and bought a 32-ounce jar of Chongga kimchi and a pair of wooden chopsticks and we sat on a bench outside and I opened the jar in front of her.
She said “what are you doing.” I said “watch.” I started eating. I ate for 47 minutes. She sat next to me on the bench. She did not eat any of the kimchi. She asked twice if I was okay. I said I was more than okay. I said I was demonstrating something. She asked what. I said commitment. She said “to what.” I said “to whatever I decide is worth committing to.” She got quiet. I interpreted the quiet as being impressed. I have since revised this interpretation.

Around the halfway point of the jar I decided to escalate. I took out my phone. I said I wanted to show her something. I pulled up my brokerage. I said “these are the seventeen Korean small-cap value stocks I own.” I walked her through them. I explained the chaebol discount. I explained the Value-up program. I explained that Chongga, the company that made the kimchi we were currently eating, was a subsidiary of Daesang, which was publicly listed at 0.6x book, and that this was, in a sense, the most meta first date ever conducted. She said “the most what.” I said “meta.” She said “I have to make a phone call.” She walked away from the bench. She came back nine minutes later. I had eaten more kimchi in her absence.

I finished the jar at minute 47. I stood up. I felt magnificent. I said “so.” She said “so what.” I said “when can I see you again.” She said she would text me. She has not texted me. It has been 11 days.

I have spent the 11 days conducting a review of what could have gone wrong. I have ruled out the following: my appearance, my conversation, my career, the wine bar substitution. I have not ruled out the following: the jar. It is possible the jar was the issue. It is possible that eating a 32-ounce jar of fermented cabbage on a public bench in front of a stranger while explaining Korean corporate governance reform was not, in fact, the demonstration of commitment I had intended it to be. I am willing to consider this. I am not yet ready to accept it.

Here is what I will say. Chongga is up 4% since our date. The parent company Daesang has announced a modest buyback. The position is working. The thesis was correct. The jar was, if you calculate it out at the retail price of $8.99, one of the cheapest pieces of primary research I have ever conducted. I now know, from direct sensory experience, how the product tastes, how the packaging feels, how long it takes to consume a full unit under duress. This is information most analysts do not have. This is information the market has not priced in. This is edge.

She has still not texted me. I will not text her. I have my dignity. I also have, in my apartment, a second 32-ounce jar of Chongga that I bought on the way home because I liked it. I am eating it now. It is 2am. I am on the couch. The kimchi is still excellent. The stock is still cheap. The date was, by every metric I care about, a success. I have not slept in three days. I do not know if these things are related. I suspect they are not. I suspect she just wasn’t ready for a man who knows exactly what he wants and is willing to eat two pounds of cabbage in a single sitting to prove it.

That is her loss. That is the market’s inefficiency. That is the trade.

I will text her one more time tomorrow. I will send her a link to the Chongga buyback announcement.