Turn Around Investing 101.

Most of you that followed me over a decade ago at Landshark know that back then I was mainly focused on trading price-action patterns and exploiting the edge in high-beta equity flows (simple terms: meaning just trading Mag 7 names long and short) that existed, not because that’s what I wanted to do but because that’s the strategy set that fit my bankroll back then and I also was not managing money for other investors - plus doing that was a ‘faster way to build returns’ v. having to wait years to get to full valuation of a ‘value investment’.

However, since starting my first LP in 2020 (and since the RIA in 2024) I’ve switched toward more value investing via turn-arounds and re-orgs with the occasional event-driven investment as well mainly because the viability of it with larger sums of money just makes more sense. In fact, I went through one of these in the ‘real-world’ in 2020 with the old hedge fund I worked with in turning around a bankrupt golf company called Jack Grace USA and the similarities to public equities is effectively the same.

What I am going to do in this post is discuss Turnaround Investing 101 using two examples from the newsletter this year we covered. One, you can learn the basic markers to look for in turn-arounds and two, once you understand them, you can start trading the cycle of that turn-around over and over v. having to do what most institutional investors do which is having to hold through the entire cycle.

As a retail investor you’re actually at an advantage (and I’ll show you in this post) because you really don’t have to do any of that if you can take the turnaround and just apply price-action setups (if you allow yourself to use that lens) and can get away with some other themes to run a repeatable investment approach — shameless plug, we cover a lot of that in the Active Trader Lecture series.

One of those themes is within turnaround investing and whether you’re using a $50,000 portfolio or a $5,000,000 portfolio there are simple markers you can use to spot ideas that are worth your time: even if you don’t want to hold through the entire turnaround cycle which can take years, you can trade around them which I am going to discuss in detail in this post, so this one is worth the read and something that all of you can use as we get into 2026.