Jim Rogers, at the peak of his investment career, was always insistent on actually visiting a place and seeing it on the ground before he invested in it or shorted it. While most of us do not have the resources to do that, it is certainly sound advice if you can afford it. On his trip around the world he embarked upon post retirement, he made sure to visit the most disreputable places on the planet to see if what everyone was saying about them was true. In most cases he discovered that they weren’t as bad as everyone was saying. This is why he frequently talks about investing North Korea and Myanmar of all places.

What does this have to do with Macau and SJM Holdings? Only this: With Macau bottoming for now, SJM may be bottoming too, or at least leveling off. Among the large caps, it is the worst performing Macau stock since the 2014 top, which theoretically places it as a good contender for biggest bounce. Or, alternatively, it could just be the weakest casino company there, and any bounce that Macau may have from here may translate poorly to SJM. Here’s a Google chart comparing the falls of Galaxy (0027), LVS, Wynn, and Melco Crown since 2014. SJM (0880) beats them all in terms of pure fall.

For some reason that is unclear from public records alone, SJM has had a very hard time recovering in comparison with other Macau stocks. This does not refer only to its stock price, which is also a laggard since the January 2016 recovery second only to Melco:

It is also a laggard with respect to the recovery of its top line. The question is why. To answer that, someone who has experienced all these places first hand would need to provide a detailed score sheet. Are SJM casinos just not keeping up with the competition? Are they just not as good as others in Macau? Or are they really amazing and it’s just bad marketing or poor decision-making by executives or just bad luck? Are they perhaps too conservative with their fiscal policy, which may be holding them back from aggressively competing? These are questions that must be answered by someone with on-the-ground experience before we simply assume SJM is oversold and ready to bounce with the rest of the Macau complex.