Episode summary
Korea’s Hidden Value: Activism, AI & Golfzon | Ryan Albert
The Acquirers Podcast
· · 1 hr 2 min · Hosts: Tobias Carlisle, Jake Taylor · Guests: Ryan Albert
Summary
Ryan Albert of Turtton Capital lays out a global value-investing career that moved from Princeton baseball and banking to Mexico City venture capital, Berkshire Hathaway under Todd Combs, and then public equities focused on governance-driven mispricing. He says Combs emphasized ruthless qualitative work, understanding unit economics, and boiling complex research into a few clear pages.
Most of the conversation centers on South Korea, where Albert argues the “Korea discount” is the price of being a minority investor in family-controlled companies that favor control, low share prices, and cash staying inside the firm. He says that is now changing because retail participation has surged, politics has shifted, and a wave of reforms is forcing boards to treat minority shareholders more fairly. He highlights mandatory cumulative voting, treasury share cancellation, and new rules that require fair-value analysis in certain transactions.
Albert uses Golfzon Holdings as a live example of activism in action. He says an open letter, regulatory changes, and investor pushback helped block a delisting process after a tender offer he considered far below fair value. He expects Korea’s governance reforms, if enforced, could gradually unlock value in a market that remains cheap versus Japan on book value, earnings, and free cash flow.
Key takeaways
- Albert says Todd Combs taught him to focus on qualitative research, unit economics, and concise investment writeups.
- Albert argues the Korea discount reflects family control, succession incentives, and weak minority protections rather than just cheap valuations.
- Albert says retail investors and recent reforms have made Korea’s governance debate political and much harder to ignore.
- Albert cites Golfzon Holdings as evidence that activism, disclosure, and new rules can pressure controllers toward higher valuations.
- Albert says Korea remains one of the few markets where governance reform and deep value can still line up at scale.
Notable quotes
“the main focus was purely a ruthless focus on on doing the qualitative research work”
“So if you're a familycontrolled business, this is not I mean this is not generalizing. I mean this is generalizing for all families but controlling shareholder groups think in many different ways but you want control, right”
“I think the last time I checked there's around 15 million retail stock investors in Korea now”
“hard to find other markets in the world where that's actively happening and where valuations are what they are”
How the episode opens
We're live. This is Value After Hours. I'm Tobias Carile joined as always by my co-host Jake Taylor. Our special guest today is Ryan Albert of Turtton Capital. He has a global focus on governance and we're going to talk career particularly. Welcome Ryan. How are you?
I'm doing well. Thanks for having me on. — Our pleasure. Tell us a little bit about you and your background.
Uh so a little bit about me and my background. Well, I'm based here right now in uh Newport Beach, Irvine, California. That's also where I grew up.
Um I did my undergraduate at Princeton University. I was a varsity baseball player there as well. So competitive athlete my entire life and worked in New York for a few years after graduating from Princeton.
started doing investment banking and later worked at a kind of hybrid VCP PE fund that was almost like a family office back fund and had an itch to go work abroad and actually ended up then working in Mexico City for a Mexico based venture capital fund doing early stage investing. I realized that the long-term processoriented nature of early stage tech investing was maybe not as suited for my uh for my quick more more quick-paced uh action and then felt that public equity investing was something that could be for me. I I read all the value investing books as a as a lover of Moneyball with with my baseball background.
Moneyball made a lot of sense for what value investing is and decided that's the path I wanted for me. So decided uh to go to business school. I went to Columbia business school did the value investing program there and then the past uh call it six plus years been public equities.
From the episode’s captions: roughly the first two minutes, lightly cleaned. Keep watching on YouTube →
Topics
- korea market reform
- activist investing
- ai and governance
- korea discount
- foreign investor flows
Companies and tickers mentioned
- Golfzon
Watch the episode
Watch “Korea’s Hidden Value: Activism, AI & Golfzon | Ryan Albert” on YouTube
Summary, takeaways and quote selection by Octagon. Quotes are short excerpts; the full conversation is in the episode.
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The Acquirers Podcast, this episode and its artwork belong to Tobias Carlisle. Octagon is not affiliated with the show; this page is an independent summary.
