I'm back with a new video on
Luckin Coffee (瑞幸咖啡 $LK $LKNCY).
And this is due to the fact that many of
you viewers have been commenting on my
previous video that you actually would
like to see it still covered! Well,
as some of my Patreons sent me messages
that they want an update on Luckin
Coffee and this update,
it's going to be quite special because
I'm asking YOU as a viewer to help me
with Luckin Coffee investor relations,
but more on that later. First,
what a day yesterday, as
outlined in my last video,
I was expecting a big, healthy,
correction of the markets.
And this is what we got! This trading
range here of this tunnel, however,
already more on the upside.
So I do expect maybe this week
already some healthy pullback,
of the markets.
So despite all the good news around
NIO deliveries and Elon Musk,
visiting Berlin and other
places in Germany - well,
the stock prices of these stocks tanked,
and as outlined in my post to my Patreons,
I was trying something new with
this incoming correction that I was
anticipating:
And this time I actually went short
and try to hedge my portfolio because
my overall view is that I'm going
to stay invested in this market.
I think this bull market will continue,
but this correction was overdue.
So I went short on some Apple ($APPL)
stocks because Apple was running high due
to the stock split as well
as similar to Tesla ($TSLA),
as well as Apple due
to this big market cap.
It's a quite big company in the
index funds. So I thought, okay,
if the overall market's going to crash,
that surely drags down Apple as well.
And luckily it was quite successful.
I made 4X on my money on this hedge.
And so I made some money
on the way downward here.
If you have some experience
on hedging your portfolio,
I would be interesting to know more
about this in the comments below,
because I'm actually frankly, new to
that. Usually I don't short any stocks.
Personally, I'm just interested in
investing long in the markets. However,
in order to balance my portfolio
and have some risk management here,
like for big down days like yesterday,
I really like to make
some money on these days.
So yesterday we finally had this
correction, the markets went down I think,
yeah, we saw some buyers coming in.
So actually I think hopefully
it will be bouncing from here.
I took off my hedges. I completely
sold them already. So from here,
I'm going long into the markets. I'm
expecting the bull run to continue.
And of course now all the people who
went short from March and are sitting on
cash, they are screaming about a
possible crash coming. However,
I think it's more likely that the bull
run just continues from here and that
this just was a healthy corrections
in the markets. This, however,
it's only how I'm personally
treating the markets.
So this is not investment advice,
as everything in this video,
you need to make your own decisions
and need to come up with your own ideas
about trading. Okay. Now
finally, back to Luckin Coffee,
which had a decisive day on September
the second, because they had a new,
extra ordinary shareholder meeting.
I was writing a blog post
on Patreon about this,
and actually lots of my viewers expressed
their interest in covering the story.
And what I want to do with this video,
it's not only covering what has
happened on this shareholder meeting,
but also actually asking
you to become active!
Because I think now it is the time
to actually confront Luckin Coffee
with our questions as retail
investors, but more on that later,
because to sum things up,
what has happened so far is obviously
that there has been a fraud happening with
Luckin Coffee. And then Luckin Coffee
got delisted, lots of investors,
both institutional,
as well as retail investors got hammered
by the fact that Luckin Coffee was
delisted. And we never really
had a response by Luckin Coffee,
but that might be due to the fact
that there has been an ongoing fight
off who is actually running the
company and who has been actually the
core of this fraud. So let's say I have
a quick recap where it ended last time.
So we had a new CEO Jinyi Guo,
who is running the company,
replacing Jenny Qian,
as well as the ex COO Jian Liu,
who was also fired because he was the
operating person in charge of this fraud,
actually.
And then this is how the board was
actually looking back then with Charles Lu
Zhengyao, who is actually
the architect of this fraud.
And then the other board members
some of the early investor and
we've seen that yeah,
there was this golden triangle
between David Hui Li, Erhai Liu
and Lu Zhengyao who have previously
actually been involved in a other
venture in which they also committed
fraud. And on the operational side,
we had this operational team who was
responsible for the fraud and seemingly
instructed by Lu Zhengyao. So this
is the fraud team at Luckin Coffee.
And what we've seen in the past
is that all of those board and
advisors, except for mr.
Wai Yuen Chong have actually been
removed or have actually resigned.
So that has been the last extroardinary
shareholder meeting in which Lu Zhengyao
was actually calling for it and made
sure that those kinds of people were
actually removed or
replaced including himself.
So that was actually his plot twist and
his trick of trying to get a grasp of
the company, because what he also
did is that he instilled Jinyi Guo,
who has been an old friend of Lu
Zhengyao and who was the new acting CEO,
as well as new independent
directors that got in voted by the
committee that are basically shills or
actors on the request of Mr. Lu Zhengyao.
That was actually his plan of
going away from this company,
but at the same time, staying
in control of what is happening,
even though he actually has
been removed as a person,
and he lost lots of his shares due to
this margin call and so on. However,
as outlined in previous videos, I was
always hoping for a management clean up,
so a new start for Luckin Coffee.
And I find it interesting that actually
the CFO and CIO Reinout Hendrik Schakel
so far seems to be not
affected by the fraud.
Of course you could allege that
here must have known of the fraud,
but so far there are no
accusations against him.
And it seems like he just
didn't know about it,
but this is all speculation. I don't
know it for a fact. And in general,
there has been no news on
what is his role in the fraud,
but so far while he doesn't
seem to be affected.
So what has happened in between? Well,
we see that the new independent directors
that have been put in place by Lu
Zhengyao have both resigned.
So there is a cleanup
of the board happening.
And then Luckin Coffee announced actually
that they're going to do this meeting
the Extraordinary Shareholder Meeting
(ESM) on the 2nd of September,
which obviously happened now. And since
then, we've seen a couple more changes!
So, We see that the new
independent director,
Sean Shao who has been
previously, already on the board,
he has been the lead of the internal
investigation of Luckin Coffee.
So he was actually pushing forward
cleaning up and investigating the company.
And he has now been voted back
into the board as well as new
independent directors replacing
the shills of Lu Zhengyao.
And we also see that Jinyi Guo,
who is still part of the
connections of Lu Zhengyao,
he is not the managing director of
Luckkin Coffee, Beijing Ltd. Anymore.
He still is the managing director
off the holding the Luckin Coffee
China entities. So that is a different
entity though. However, we also see that
Gang Wu as well as Wenbao Cao are now
also managing directors of the company!
So in general, this looks a little bit
like a clean up is happening here, right?
Because we see that important positions
that have connections to Lu Zhengyao
actually being removed.
So the last man standing
that has connections to Lu
Zhengyao actually it seems
to be Jinyi Guo. However,
here seems to be losing
his acting stake as a CEO
here becoming partly replaced,
or at least other people are also
filling the managing director
role. And in the middle,
we still have Mr. Reinout Hendrik
Schakel who is signing off all the SEC
filings. However, we don't
know anything new about him,
even though he is the CFO, he's the CIO.
And we haven't heard
anything about him yet.
So this is what this video is all about.
So I still think there may be a slight
chance that Reinout Hendrik Schakel is
actually organizing this clean up in
the background here of Luckin Coffee.
So far, he hasn't been affected,
as I mentioned, however,
he's also not coming out and speaking
about it possibly due to the fact that
ther are investigations going on,
maybe due to the fact that Lu Zhengyao
was still controls partly the board and
that acting CEO and so on. However,
for retail investors this long months
and weeks of silence have been actually a
complete disaster because we are
actually, you know, in this black box,
we don't know what's going
on to the company. We don't
have a actual financials.
We don't have to investigation report.
And also the SEC filings are not enough
without any public relations of Luckin
Coffee. So I think this has to change.
I think Luckin Coffee has finally
to come forward and to provide more
information to investors.
And what I actually did is I was reaching
out to the company that is actually
running the media relations, as well as
to investor relations of Luckin Coffee.
As you can see with all of those filings
and press releases at a bottom of each
release, you can actually find the
investor relation and media contacts.
And this is run by a company
called ICR inc. And yeah,
if you go to the company website,
you will see that day supported
a couple of US IPOs from
Asia, including Luckin Coffee.
And this is a company that is
running strategic communications and
advisory. And to be honest,
I'm totally not satisfied of how
this investor relations has been run,
especially during the times when Luckin
Coffee was actually delisted and,
you know, everything has been
quite chaotic to be honest.
So reached out to them with the goal of
connecting and actually being able to
talk to investor relations and asked them
more details on what is actually going
on behind the scenes with Luckin Coffee.
As I didn't get a reply to
my emails to the company,
actually it was digging a little bit
deeper and was looking at who is actually
running the operations here on the
China sites for Asia Pacific it's Mr.
Lococo. And I actually tracked him
down on LinkedIn and I wrote him a
personal message there on LinkedIn,
and I'm not going to publish my private
conversation with him due to privacy
issues here. However,
what I can tell you is that he
actually denied that he is working with
Luckin Coffee,
which I have found to be a blatant lie
because I was seeing on his LinkedIn
page,
he was actually posting about an event
where he invited Mr. Reinout Schakel
to speak to investors. So that was
clearly managed by him and his company!
In the end this guy even blocked me on
LinkedIn when I was confronting him with
the fact that his company is actually
signing off the Luckin Coffee investor
relations here.
So the work that they are doing here in
my point of view is kind of useless for
investors like you and I,
and this is why I think we need to
take this issue in our own hands,
and this is what I'm going to do today!
So instead of going through this
advisory and investor relations firm,
I will be contacting Luckin Coffee,
and to be exact, CFO Reinout Schakel,
directly. And I want you to be part
of that! And in order to do that.
I prepared a little survey because.
Want to pool us as retail investors
here and asking anonymously,
like how many shares of Luckin
Coffee are you holding right now? So,
so if you are going to
go and do the survey,
you can enter the amount of shares
you're holding for instance, 10,
and then let me know at whatever average
costs in US dollars, you're holding it.
So say you bought them
at 30 US dollars a share,
and maybe some of those investors are,
they're already sold some
of the shares for instance,
when Luckin Coffee got delisted.
So I want to know how many shares
have you've been selling so far.
So for instance,
you've sold 1000 shares at
a price of 4 US dollars a
share.
And then I am asking you about what
would be your question to the CFO
and CIO Rainout Schakel. For instance,
you want to know what are the prospects of
relisting at NASDAQ?
So you can write anything that comes
up to your mind here and let me know.
And if there's anything else that I
have forgotten with the survey do let me
know here otherwise you can just
send it off and then finish the
survey here. And I already
posted a survey with my Patreons.
And so far we've got 10 replies.
So a couple of people have posted like
how many shares they are owning and which
price, and also a couple of questions
already to Mr. Reinout Schakel.
So for instance,
when is an expected date for disclosing
the latest results what are the plans to
come up with a new cleaned up board of
directors and then somewhat questions
are, when does he expect for Luckin
Coffee to get relisted on NASDAQ?
Any timeframe for the
financial update and so on?
So all of the questions you
have basically sent them to me,
I will be pooling those questions
and take the most important ones,
as well as to information about how many
shares we are actually pooling here as
retail investors. And my idea
here is to confront Luckin Coffee,
and Mr. Reinout Schakel
directly with this information.
I hope he will take it seriously as I'm
sure that we can actually find quite a
significant number of shareholders here
and also quite a substantial amount of
shares being owned here
by retail investors.
And then I will let you know how
it goes. Will he reply to it?
Will he even possibly be able to
come on this channel and maybe make
a quick Zoom video meeting and
discuss those questions openly?
As you know, my channel
has been quite fair.
I am not following the short seller
narrative on Luckin Coffee here.
So there is no better way
of actually coming out and
building up a new trusted investor
relation of Luckin Coffee with a broader
audience, retail investors first,
maybe institutional investors second.
I think this should be the way forward.
And now with the changes possibly of the
board and also under operational staff
and possibly hopefully a cleanup
here happening this should be the
right time for Mr. Reinout Schakel
to finally informe the investors,
because this has been silenced
for too long and I hope now we can
actually break the silence.
And what this means for Luckin Coffee
and possibly you as a shareholder or for
other investors. I cannot tell you,
you need to come up with your
own thoughts and views on that.
What are the prospects of
this company in the long run?
What is actually the value of Luckin
Coffee in case that they really
clean up the management team? Is
there a possibility for a new start?
This is all up to
speculation for now. However,
I hope with this step of actually
reaching out to Luckin Coffee,
to Mr. Reinout Schakel directly
to the CFO, to the CIO.
I hope that he will reply to us and that
this could actually be one of the first
steps into the right directions. So
let's see how it goes. And with that,
I hope you have a good weekend and stay
tuned for more content on NIO ($NIO 蔚来),
on Luckin Coffee
on other Chinese IPOs and companies
that have a really big exposure to the
Chinese market. So thank you guys for
watching. See you in the next one ..
and bye!
