End of the Season

My co-host Tamanna Suria and I had an amazing time this year creating episodes of The Special Situations Report Podcast for 48 weeks in a row. We are now going to take a break for the rest of the year and plan to come back with a new season of the podcast in January.

I was pleasantly surprised to receive a Spotify Wrapped for Creators that claimed:

• Your debut season was more popular than 95% of other new shows
• Fans listened to you for longer than 92% of other shows

Before I could get excited by these lofty claims, Tamanna quickly brought me back to earth and reminded me that unless we are in the top 1% of shows, it almost doesn’t matter. I was then reminded of how the show Acquired toiled in relative obscurity for the better part of a decade before it experienced its hockey stick like growth.

The likelihood of us getting to the top 1% of shows is remote considering our niche focus on special situations but that was not our objective when we launched this podcast.

We wanted to share our thoughts about the rapidly evolving world of event-driven investing that included bidding wars (Pfizer and Novo fighting for Metsera), strong shareholder opposition to announced deals (TaskUs and STAAR Surgical), insider buying in a battleground stock (Sable offshore) and even family drama (Danone’s attempt at acquiring Lifeway Foods).

However, our favorite moments came from the conversations we had with our eight guests that ranged from hedge fund managers to authors of best-selling books.

For our guests, we decided to do six episode themes covering:

• special situations focused investors
• authors
• emerging managers

… and so on.

We are currently in the midst of our authors theme and are looking forward to recording our next episode with Columbia University Adjunct Professor Ehsan Ehsani regarding his upcoming book Finding Value in Numbers in January.

In case you missed it, our last author episodes were with Brett Gardner who discussed his book Buffett’s Early Investments and the international best-selling author Gautam Baid who talked about A Masterclass in Investing Frameworks.

We are also thankful to our first six guests that included:

• Chris DeMuth Jr. who discussed Busted Biotechs and Pricing Risk

• Rich Howe who talked about Differentiating Toxic Waste from attractive spinoffs

• Luis Sanchez who covered Netflix’s Competitive Moat and the impact of AI on CROs

• Julian Klymochko who was the perfect fund manager to talk to about the new SPAC Resurgence

• Andrew Walker who discussed Crypto Relative Value Arbitrage

• And Evan Tindell who shared with us his journey From Professional Poker Player to Hedge Fund Manager

Hopefully our listeners enjoyed these episodes just as much as we did.

Happy Holidays!