Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing - Walmart’s Flywheel Keeps Spinning

Episode Date: November 19, 2024

But the retailer’s valuation is giving investors more questions. (00:14) Nick Sciple and Ricky Mulvey discuss: - Highlights from Walmart’s quarter. - What shoppers want from mac and cheese. - Why nicotine pouches may be “the biggest consumer product story this decade.” Then, (17:04) Robert Brokamp kicks off a two-part series with Christine Benz, Morningstar’s Director of Personal Finance and the author of “How to Retire: 20 Lessons for a Happy, Successful, and Wealthy Retirement.” Visit our sponsor: Check out Public’s bond account offerings at www.public.com/motleyfool Companies discussed: WMT, COST, PMI, MO, TPB Host: Ricky Mulvey Guests: Nick Sciple, Robert Brokamp, Christine Benz Producer: Mary Long Engineer: Rick Engdahl Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Don't you wish you could just hit skip on the worst parts of your life? You know, the same way you can skip an ad? I get it. I'm Siaya and I live in Ice Cove. I've made some questionable decisions that didn't end up the way I planned. And today I'm still figuring it out. Somehow things usually get worse before they get better. Apparently, that's how I roll.

So bundle up and come along for the bumpy ride. Stream a new episode of North of North Tuesdays on CBC Gem. shoppers are trading up and down it's the middle that gets stuck you're listening to motley fool money i'm ricky mulvey joined today by our returning champion nick seipel nick it's good to have you back how you been uh been great ricky i've been out on parental leave the past few months trying to wrangle two under two it's it's been fun but it's great to be back in the adult world here with you. Lots to talk about. Maybe talk about one of the places I pick up diapers more often than not. What a different conversation to come into versus two under two.

Stocks are down today. Is tensions between Russia and Ukraine increase? I mean, I think it's worth mentioning at the top, Nick, but we don't have anything smart to say here other than we hope this isn't. I don't want to look at gold and be like, traders are going to gold. But I mean, I got nothing smart to say other than this. We hope this isn't really bad. Yeah, certainly scary headlines, nuclear saber rattling by Russia is going to continue more of these same kind of growing tensions, I would say, between Russia and the West. Just like this is one of those risks Warren Buffett has talked about in the past, you can't control, you kind of have to live with as an investor. The world is always uncertain. This

is the cost of doing business. If these threats end up to anything in the real world, no advice we can give you will protect you from this sort of thing. But unlikely that these words will lead to actions, but certainly something to pay attention to. Let's go from the bottom up with Walmart earnings, focusing on the business. They reported this morning, Nick, I think the biggest highlight to me is that comp sales, the comp sales number for Walmart, more people are going to their stores, including Sam's Club. So Walmart proper, more than 5% same store sales increase. Sam's Club, 7% from the year prior. This tells me that the inflation story is not over as shoppers continue to look for value. But what stood out to you from the quarter?

Yeah, for me, really across the board, strong numbers for Walmart. You mentioned those comp store numbers. That's with inventory declining 1% during the quarter. So just classic what you would look for out of a high-quality retailer. You look under below the top line, 42% marketplace growth, 28% advertising growth, 22% membership income growth, really working across the board. If you think about what's driving all those sorts of things, marketplace growth, really leveraging Walmart's infrastructure to be attractive to sellers and really getting the right assortment to be attractive to buyers. Companies cited over 20% growth in beauty toys, hard lines, and home. My wife has called out that Walmart's apparel has made a big comeback. The more

of the folks you bring to that marketplace, that gives you opportunities to sell ads and direct purchase behavior. Also, the more folks that are buying on that marketplace, you can sell them membership opportunities. All that drives the flywheel, folks, back to Walmart. and all those revenue streams that I mentioned are high margin. So this is really a company that's firing on all cylinders, all the flywheels are spinning, and it's really a beautiful thing. Yeah, the e-commerce growth, impressive, especially internationally for Walmart. There's also a consumer trend going on. It's the trade down. So Doug McMillan highlighting that, quote, households earning more than $100,000 a year made up for 75% of our share gains,

end quote. So you have folks going from the higher priced grocery stores going back to Walmart. And if you're a long-term holder of Walmart shares, you have to believe that those shoppers are going to be sticking around for years and years to come. What needs to happen for Walmart to hold on to these customers for the next three to five to 10 years? Yeah, I think the real key is convenience. And the company understands that as well. You got the words convenience or convenient mentioned 16 times on the call. Walmart's really always going to win on price where it hasn't traditionally been able to have advantages is just the convenience. And, you know, something that Doug McMillan also called out on the call is, if you have higher

discretionary income, these are folks that are more likely to pay up to save time, pay for those memberships, participate in pickup and delivery. If Walmart can continue to provide the value that it's always been able to deliver as a business and at a convenience level that other companies can't match, I think it can hold on to those high-income customers. And it looks like they're doing the things necessary to do that so far. What do you think about Walmart's valuation, the price tag on this stock. We talked about price to earnings, the price tag for Walmart on this previous weekend show. Walmart's at 45 times earnings, 4.5. That's a lot for a grocery store that in a lot of ways, yes, it's getting more efficient. Yes, it's getting more sales.

It functions like a utility for a lot of people. That's putting it in the same weight class as Costco now. Do these multiples deserve to be in the same weight class? And yes, Costco is a little bit higher. So I think both those multiples, when you list them out to me, sound pretty high. But I do think Costco and Walmart are in a category of these dominant retailers from the 20th century that can really survive the competitive threats that we're seeing in today's 21st century retail landscape. Arguably both expensive here, but both are kind of growing their moat. Where I'm really worried about, if I look at retail today, is what are the companies that are getting left behind? You look at the dollar stores this year, Dollar General and Dollar Tree,

both down over 50%. Compare that to Walmart up almost two-thirds this year, 66%. Some of these companies might be getting left behind as Walmart becomes more convenient and can capture some of those areas of the market. So I'd be more inclined to be worried about some of these other segments of retail that Walmart is capturing than I am concerned about Walmart itself. Although, is it going to be trading at 45 times earnings five years from now? Probably not. But I think there's a decent chance the stock is higher. And there's also something happening at Walmart It doesn't really impact it as much, but something, a phenomenon happening at the grocery stores. There was an article in Bloomberg about it today. And that's that these brands that are

sort of in the center are getting cut out by shoppers. So basically the example they use is mac and cheese. So more people are buying store brand cheap mac and cheese. Then you have your healthy-ish, allegedly healthy options that are the higher end that more people are gravitating to. And in the middle, you have your craft mac and cheese, which is seeing sales declines. But you, as a shopper, as you're going around the Tennessee grocery stores, have you noticed this yourself? Are you gravitating up or down the value chain as a shopper? So for me, I've always been the store brand guy.

I think it's a trend along millennials as a whole, but I was just raised that way to always get the store brand milk and the store brand cream cheese and that sort of thing. So for me, it's kind of a habit I've always grown into. I have noticed more in my household, the willing to pay up for more of the, quote unquote, the healthier versions of snacks, so you don't get the goldfish, you get the organic version of goldfish, that sort of thing. With the protein-added products, I think those have had some success in capturing segments of the market. I think if you look at some of these big consumer package good companies, your Kraft, your Procter & Gamble, they're really super-efficient,

built for the traditional retail model where you had the eye-level shelf space and that's how you attracted consumers. They're having to transition just like everybody else to this new purchasing model. And I think those companies are still going to have to adapt. I do think long-term though, these businesses have such scale and are so sophisticated, even if they're getting attacked by some of these new emergent, healthy or other brands. Long-term, these are acquisition targets for the big CPG companies. These aren't companies that I think are going to take down the big mammoth. Yeah. And in some cases, the store brand is the brand now. I mean, Kirkland is beloved. I love me some Kirkland coffee. I've got my Kirkland laundry pods. I'm

happy with it. You mentioned it as an acquisition target. I'm going to dig into the numbers a little bit more. So Kraft, year over year, 6% decline in mac and cheese. Their stock has been basically flat over the past five years as well. The store box mac and cheese, Bloomberg reporting, that's a 6% bump. So the trade is pretty direct there. There's also this higher end option called Goodles, which is the protein added one that you were talking about. You also mentioned Procter and Gamble, Kraft Heinz, these consumer package goods companies. When we talk about this trend where the middle is getting cut out. Is this a temporary thing? Is this an investing we like to say it's a dark cloud that can be seen through? Or is this a long-term problem for these companies?

It's not a dark cloud that I would say that I can see through today. It's not the area of the market that I would be aggressively looking for opportunities. I think these are sophisticated businesses with talented management that can adapt over time. But I don't think the vision of the future for these companies is ultra clear that craft mac and cheese is going to be as relevant five or 10 years from now as it is today. So for me, I would be more comfortable looking at segments of the market that customers are moving towards that are growing segments. We might talk about one here in a second. Those are the areas I'd be looking for in consumer goods, as opposed to trying to catch the falling knife. Let's get there, because there is a

surprising consumer product that has had a heck of a year, and that's nicotine. Altria and Philip Morris are both up almost 40%. And these are mature companies that pay very healthy dividends. So Altree, I think, pays over a 7% dividend right now. And this is, for outside observers, may be surprising. It's at a time where fewer people are smoking cigarettes. You shared an article with me that even Sweden is going smoke-free. There is a move to pouches, but man, this move must be big. What's happening with the nicotine industry in 2024? Yeah. So you mentioned the nicotine pouches really has been the big story this year. I think it's going to be the biggest consumer product story this decade. Smoking has

been declining for quite a while. I think pouches are what's going to really drive growth in nicotine consumption. The global market for nicotine pouches is expected to grow from $7.4 billion in 2023 to $25.2 billion in 2028. That's according to Euromodern. That's on top of really triple-digit growth CAGRs we've seen over the past several years. This is a segment of the market it just doesn't get talked about that much because of the nicotine-tobacco stigma. I think it's probably the first time this year it's getting talked about on Motley Fool Money. And I understand why. The smoking causes cancer, it kills people, and we've certainly, it's been a big public health consciousness drive over the past 50-plus years to spread that. And smoking is predominantly how

people have consumed nicotine throughout history. Back from the 1500s, people smoked pipes, then cigars became popular. In the late 19th century, cigarettes became popular, still become popular today. Along the way, governments have taxed, punished, tried to ban nicotine use, but it's still persisted today. I think likely to continue in the form of these nicotine pouches, other reduced-risk products that have opportunity to deliver nicotine with fewer harmful chemicals. You mentioned Sweden as a market where you're really seeing smoking decline. Part of that is because Sweden is the market where nicotine pouches really first gained prominence. Launched there in 2008, descended from traditional Swedish snus tobacco,

It's been used for hundreds of years. Last week, Sweden announced it became the first country in the world to reach smoke-free status. That's with less than 5% of your adult consumers smoking at 16 years ahead of EU targets and really has been driven by policy that's made these products more attractive than cigarettes and education that's focused around tobacco harm reduction as opposed to just totally eliminating nicotine use. You see it in health statistics for the country. Sweden has the lowest percentage of tobacco-related diseases in Europe and a 41% lower incidence of cancer than other countries. It's the second biggest market for nicotine pouches. The U.S. is number one, and there's been rapid growth. We can talk about some of

the brands. Ricky, let's do it. Yeah, I'm going to go back on something you said. We haven't talked about it and why we haven't talked about it. I programmed some of the show. Maybe we should have, especially if you think it's the biggest consumer product story of the next decade. Ultimately, I think our job on the show is not to tell you what to invest in, what not to invest in based on our own moral inclinations. I think the farthest I will go on that is you get started investing, we encourage you at The Motley Fool to find maybe one company or one industry that you will never invest in, no matter how well it does, because it goes against what you believe in morally. It doesn't agree with your beliefs. We talk about alcohol. We'll

also talk about cigarettes sometimes, and it's up to you what you want to do with that information. Let's talk now about the nicotine pouches. Philip Morris, which owns Zinn, that is the most popular nicotine pouch. There's a story about it in the New York Times a few weeks ago, giving it what I will generously describe as mixed coverage. But what it talks about is they don't really market this product. Philip Morris has not really been marketing Zinn, but it has this online legion of fans, and it's become the number one brand in the US. So how has Zinn specifically gotten so popular? Yeah, so a few things. I think nicotine pouches in general are a good product relative to kind of traditional nicotine delivery systems. It's discreet. You don't smell bad like

you do smoking tobacco. Unlike traditional smokeless tobacco, dip and the like, you don't have to spit. So it's a better product for those reasons. But Zen was the first to the market in the U.S. In 2014, Swedish Match was just the owner of Zen until Swedish Match was acquired by Philip Morris in 2022. It was really the first on the market. Also, if you look at the quality of the product relative to some others on the market, just a higher quality product. So Altria sells the On Nicotine Pouch product, British American Tobacco sells Velo, both of those products similar to Xen, but you end up having a lot more quality control issues than Xen has, just a better product. Also, just for whatever reason, historically,

nicotine products have always had a super high brand affinity and a concentrated market leader. You'd see it with Marlboro and cigarettes, you'd see it traditionally in the type of pipes and things like that, that people smoke. For several reasons, the quality of the product, the first to market, the virality that you get as more and more people use the product, and just the natural way nicotine products end up being concentrated. Zen has become the market leader today, over 73% share in the category by retail value in the most recent quarter, 149 million cans shipped last quarter alone, that's up 40% year-over-year, triple what it had shipped in the first quarter of 2022. That's in an environment where sales were restricted

because the product was stocking out in retail stores across the country. This is an environment where they're raising price as well. And Zinn isn't the only product that's seeing growth. I mentioned the On product from Altria, that had 46% growth in the most recent quarter. British American Tobacco's product growing 48% in the first half of 2024. So really across the board, massive growth. You're seeing kind of similar patterns to what you've seen in traditional nicotine products. And again, growth not likely to slow down anytime soon. You've also got a celebrity endorsement recently with Josh Brolin admitting on the WTF podcast with Marc Maron that he has a Zin in a pouch in his lip 24 hours a day, emphasizing that he's not lying about that. As we wrap up here, anything else on tobacco's comeback that you want to hit? Yeah. Well, you talked about celebrity endorsements. Tucker Carlson also getting

into the nicotine pouch game, which I think is interesting. You know, Zen, obviously the leader in the market, don't have to be the market leader to be successful with a market category. It's as big and fast growing as we're seeing in nicotine pouches. It really doesn't take that much to be successful in the market. And you can think about, you know, you mentioned earlier comparisons with alcohol and things like that. I think about celebrities getting involved in nicotine pouches in the same way that George Clooney getting involved selling tequila or Ryan Reynolds getting involved selling aviation. Jen, you don't have to take down Jack Daniels or Jose Cuervo to be really significant in the market. The reason I mentioned that the Tucker product,

his partner, publicly traded company that we've recommended in Canada in the past, Turning Point Brands, it's a billion-dollar company. It takes lots and lots of sales for these products to be impactful for a company like Philip Morris or Altria, not the same for a company like Turning Point Brands. It's really built a business around being a small, going after small profitable segments of the tobacco industry, whether that's chewing tobacco or others. And nicotine pouches, they're already showing success with their free brand. They've tripled sales year over year. That stock's over 130% this year. So, whether you're looking for, you know, these big established companies with reliable dividends that, you know, have been

around for a long time, we're looking for small cap businesses that there's lots of ways to get involved in this trend. And, you know, if you can open your mind to the idea that nicotine can persists as a product while health outcomes for use continue to improve, I think this is a category that you should consider investing in. And sometimes products that hit that stimmy button for the user, these can turn out to be good long-term investments. We'll see. I'm going to keep an eye on it. Appreciate you bringing it to my attention, Nick Seipel. Thank you for your time and your insight. Thanks for being here. Thanks, Ricky. Anytime.

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they talk about distributions and why retirees may need less in stocks than they think. Let's start with research on withdrawal rates in retirement, you know, because it attempts to answer a key question, right? How much can I spend and be reasonably sure my money is going to last as long as I do? Plus, you could sort of then use that to back into how much you have to have saved before you retire. This year marks the 30-year anniversary of the research report that established 4% as a safe withdrawal rate written by a financial planner named Bill Bengen. Since 1994, all kinds of studies have come out, many saying that 4% is too low, some saying it's too high. Morningstar jumped into the game a few years ago. The most recent publicly available report

was published toward the end of last year and it brought us back full circle to 4%. 24%. So what's your take on how someone should choose the right withdrawal rate for them when they retire? Yeah, you know, this whole thing about safe withdrawal rates, in a way, Robert, when I think about it kind of rests on what I think of as kind of a straw man. So like the formula that we use to even do our research, our kind of base case, safe spending research at Morningstar, is that we assume someone's looking for kind of a social security equivalent or paycheck equivalent in retirement. So they're going to take the same amount out every year. Inflation adjusts that dollar amount. So they'll take a little bit more if inflation's up, maybe

take a lower inflation adjustment if it's not up so much. But that's sort of how we assume that someone marches along for however long their retirement is. The baseline assumption that we use for our research is 30 years. So when we look at the research on this, it's not really how people spend, that people do tend to spend less throughout their retirement life cycle, sometimes for reasons of uninsured long-term care costs. Mainly, we see health care spending flare up later in life. Then that inflates the averages for everyone, even though it's a fairly small segment of our population that has that catastrophic long-term care spending need. And so anyway, it doesn't really factor in real world spending.

And another thing that we know when we look at this problem is that ideally you would pay a little bit of attention to what's going on in your portfolio. So in a good year, you can take more. So in a good year like 2024, in a bad year like 2022, you'd probably want to take a little bit less. And the basic intuition there is that you're preserving funds if in a downturn, you're preserving funds that will be available to recover when the market eventually does. So I definitely prefer that people think about flexibility if they possibly can.

And one thing I liked in the book is that John Guyton, who's a financial planner and has also done some work in this realm of retirement withdrawal rates, he notes that it's like a rare thing where our behavioral instincts, which is to spend less when our portfolios are down, actually align with what's good for our portfolios. And in many cases, that's not the case, right? We feel like selling oftentimes out of our portfolios when the market's up, spending more feels better than spending less. This is a time where actually those two things are in alignment. Yeah. One of the points made by Jonathan Guyton and at least one other person that you interviewed in the book is that 4% is a worst case scenario, right? It's survived the worst conditions we've

seen since the 1920s. In most situations, someone who filed the 4% rule would actually die with more money than they started with at retirement. So some of the suggestions from the experts, as well as the research from Morningstar is like, you could, for example, instead of assuming that you just take an inflation adjustment every year, whenever your portfolio is down, you just don't take an inflation adjustment. And that moves up, that adds like 0.4 to 0.5% to the safe withdrawal rate. Or if you use the actual spending of retirees, which tends to go down over time, the actual beginning safe withdrawal rate could be 5%, especially if you are willing to cut back during times when your portfolio is down. Yeah, no, it's absolutely right

that this is particularly important for people with tight financial plans where there are real quality of life issues in underspending, that if they wed themselves to this 4% guideline in many market environments that would prevail over the subsequent 25 or 30 year period or shorter period, perhaps that would be too low. And so ideally you would revisit this. You'd think about how your portfolio has performed. You'd be willing to be a little bit flexible. And I think another factor that has gotten underrated that we're addressing in the 2024 retirement income research that we're working on is that most people have other sources of cash flow in addition to their portfolios.

So most of us will come into retirement with the stabilizer of Social Security. That's going to make me more comfortable making those adjustments. My portfolio isn't my sole source of spending. So if I'm able to kind of look at Social Security as providing my baseline living expenses, I probably am willing to tolerate a bit of volatility in my portfolio cash flows, or at least that's how I think about it. We'll get to Social Security a little bit later. But one of the other benefits of the research on safe withdrawal rates is that it gives an indication of what asset allocation seems to best enhance portfolio longevity. It depends on your assumptions and frankly, which withdrawal rate strategy you're going to follow. But the research seems to indicate

that there's like this Goldilocks amount of stock you should aim for. Not too much, not too little. What's your general idea in terms of a range of a reasonable asset allocation based on the research you've done on safe withdrawal rates? Yeah, it's more balanced, I think, than many people might think. I frequently run into retirees who say, you know what, I just own dividend paying stocks, forget your bonds, I own maybe a little bit of cash, and I call it a day. When we look at the research with sort of our base case, where again, we're assuming someone wants kind of that fixed real withdrawal throughout their retirement years, it very much points to the value of balance. In fact, when we did the 2023 research, in light of the fact that yields had

gone up pretty decently on cash and on bonds, our model, because we're asking it to provide this fairly stable stream of cash flows, our model was basically saying back to us, I see that here today, and it's mainly in fixed income security. So the recommendation like the highest safe withdrawal rate, somewhat counterintuitively to all of us until we took a step back and thought about it, pointed to like a 20 to 40% equity allocation, which is pretty light for most retirees. I think many, especially investor type retirees have more ample equity weightings. And I think the reason our model gravitated to that is because we are basically saying we kind of want to lock down our cash flows and we don't want a lot of volatility in those cash flows from year

to year in light of higher yields, the Monte Carlo simulations that we run gravitated to that more conservative asset mix. If you're looking at a more flexible strategy where you are going to make changes to your spending on an ongoing basis and you're up for that, then if you look at something like the guardrails strategy, which is Jonathan Guyton's strategy for kind of dynamic withdrawals, it points to a higher equity mix, but still in the realm of balance, not 90-10 equity versus fixed income. It's more sort of 60-40 that delivers the highest spending rate with a guardrail strategy. That's generally consistent with many of the other studies that looked at historical returns, as opposed to your study, which is more prospective,

and that you don't want to go too much over 60% or 70% when it comes to stocks. Right. And the reason is pretty intuitive. You don't have to be a market guru to understand the importance of, if you're going to be spending from this portfolio, you basically want to, and this gets to the bucket thing that I often talk about, but you kind of want to lock down a stream of cash flows that you could pull from without disturbing equities. If you happen to be super unlucky, retire headlong into a market environment that, you know, where your stocks immediately drop, you would want to be able to withdraw from safer assets and leave those equity assets to recover. All right. With your bucket strategy, that's, you've often talked

about three buckets. That's one super safe bucket of about two years of retirement income in cash, maybe years two to eight, uh, corporate bonds, maybe some safer stocks are then years 10 and beyond our, our stocks. So when you're working, you're probably going to be mostly in stocks, but at some point you, you have to de-risk. At what point do you think people really have to start taking that seriously? Is it 10 years from retirement, five years from retirement? And do you have any particular suggestions for how they should do that? For sure. Uh, within a five-year window, I would be thinking seriously about de-risk. And I think sometimes people hear de-risk and think that we're saying, oh, you're going to flee equities entirely. No, it's just that

you probably have been neglecting safer assets in your portfolio. You might have that emergency fund. And if you're using some sort of all-in-one fund, like a target date fund, it's tipping you into more bonds. But if you haven't been paying close attention, well, we've had a great equity market. your equities are probably hogging a bigger share of your portfolio. So I think the best way to address that is to perhaps turn your new contributions on to fixed income. That's probably the simplest, most painless way to approach it, where new contributions into your company retirement plan or maybe into your IRA, if you're building an IRA, would go into fixed income assets. And then within, I would say, probably a couple of years of retirement,

then you would want to start building out that cash position. But there's definitely an opportunity cost to having too much in cash too early, even though inflation has moderated a little bit. I think you want to be careful about the kind of peace of mind that you get with cash because there really is a significant opportunity cost over time with inflation just kind of taking a bite out of that purchasing power. Yeah. One of the points, one of your experts made, Fritz Gilbert, that we talk about series of withdrawal risk often in retirement and that often conceived of as the series of returns you get in retirement, but the sequence of returns risk actually starts before retirement because you don't want to get three years for retirement

and then the market drops 50% and then your plans have changed. Yeah. I love that point that sequence risk, I think, is, you know, something that we understand to be like this, some sort of big market drop right after you retire. But Fritz is absolutely right that it's important if you encounter that, you know, just before retirement, you want to build a bulwark against having to come in. You want to let your portfolio fully recover. And I also think that inflation risk is maybe an under-discussed aspect of sequence risk. It comes up in the book a little bit, but I think Wade Pfau talks about it,

where if inflation's really high in your early years of retirement, that's meaningful too, right? Because I don't imagine that we'll be going back to like 2021 prices on cereal and hotels and all that stuff. We're probably kind of here to stay, even though we will see the inflation rate

moderate a little bit. So you need to be thinking about sequence of inflation risk too. Yeah, because it raises basically the floor of your spending for the rest of your retirement. Right, exactly. As always, people on the program may have interests in the stocks they talk about, and The Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against, so don't buy or sell anything based solely on what you hear. All personal finance content follows Motley Fool editorial standards and are not approved by advertisers. Motley Fool only picks products that I would

recommend to friends like you. I'm Ricky Mulvey. Thanks for listening. We'll be back tomorrow.