PODCAST: "In The Arena" Episode 5 - Jay Van Sciver

"They weren't shy. Like Keith will go in and he will beat that market share away from you. He will work, he will have a better product and he will win. And that is absolutely the impression you get from everybody on the team when you come in interview. 'We don't lose.' I think actually Rory (former Restaurants analyst) one time said to me, 'I'm a warrior' and Darius said 'I don't lose.' I was like, these are my people."

Daryl - "So over the course of almost 18 years of doing research, what do you think has been the biggest change to equity research and how people do it as a job? What are the tools or disadvantages or advantages that have evolved over time and really changed the nature of the industry?"

Jay - "A couple things. Most notable recently has been the emergence of alternative data and how we use it. So for example, in Tesla we have the ability through our outstanding operations team over on the floor with us today that allows us to track test drives. We can, in my space, we've always tracked used prices, but we have the ability to collect a lot more data around used equipment. Configurations and things like that that allow us to parse it more granularly and get different insights from that. I think the growth of real time data sets used to be really unusual or hard to get thing, but today that's something you need to really understand what's going on in the marketplace. I also think that a lot, and I don't think it's necessarily new, but maybe the last couple of years, I do feel like there markets have gotten noisier or it's harder to get alpha than it used to get. And when things go wrong, you know, maybe there's a reason why macro is more important."

Daryl - "I was actually gonna ask about that how important are macro trends and policy trends for that matter to your coverage area?"

Jay - "I think it's hugely important. You know, you look at something like the Quad 4 move that we had in the fourth quarter, and so if you have an industry where it's a little crowded and it's harder to get alpha when people suddenly take risk off and in a decelerating growth, decelerating inflation environment, you're cheap stocks are going to get cheaper and your expense stocks are going to get more expensive. Why? Because people are selling the longs and taking risk off and buying shorts and taking risk off. So I think, you know, from that efficiency, I think most people would agree that in almost any scenario, for example, Tesla is going to be overvalued. But the process of that correcting is less straightforward than it might have been prior markets where you'd have more straightforward catalyst in place to do it in part because there's a lot of people crammed into the trade and if you get a risk off environment like we've had suddenly you can see Tesla in the fourth quarter outperforming even into potentially, I mean it's, it's they ramped up production into a tax credit exploration and a draw down of their backlog, like it'd be difficult to make a stupid or move, in my opinion, and the stock performed quite well during that period."