The Dividend Cafe - Market Outlook w/ David L. Bahnsen - Zoom Replay - Dec 14, 2020

Episode Date: December 14, 2020

National Call with David L. Bahnsen and Scott Gamm Links mentioned in this episode: DividendCafe.com TheBahnsenGroup.com

Welcome to the Dividend Cafe, weekly market commentary focused on dividends in your portfolio and dividends in your understanding of economic life. Welcome to the Bonson's Group's national video call, Market Outlook with David L. Bonson, December 14, 2020. Our host for today's call is David Bonson, the Bonson Group's founder, managing partner, and chief investment officer, and Scott Gam of Strategy Voice Communications. For this call, all participants will be in a listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question and answer session. Please send your questions for that Q&A session to questions at thebonsongroup.com. I will now turn the call over to your hosts. Gentlemen, you may begin. Thank you, Erica, and I'm going to pretty much immediately turn it over to Scott here. Scott and I, by the way, got to spend a couple hours together over a coffee in Central Park on Friday at the end of the day, and it was great to once

again be able to see Scott in person. We are excited to be doing these calls for you together, and we were able to discuss even some plans for what the future will hold with these. Today will be the last call that we're going to be doing in calendar year 2020. We're going to do a kind of 30 to 40 minute call today. A number of questions have come in that Scott has, and of course, you can send additional ones in real time. But because of next week actually being Christmas week and the week after with New Year's, and then we really want to have kind of a big special 2020 recap and 2021 forecast, we're going to do that on Wednesday the 6th. The reason being that we want to be able to get our kind of annual white paper out. I'll be writing that and formalizing it. And then our production team,

you know, and design team does their work. And so we need always a couple of days to get all that sorted and approved. And then we'll have it out to you. And Scott and I will do an hour-long national call on Wednesday the 6th. Obviously, you'll get email invitation and social media updates and things like that. So that'll be our schedule here for the next few weeks. Along those lines, by the way, the Dividend Cafe this coming Friday, which I think is the 18th. That will be the last Dividend Cafe of the year as well. I won't dare to do one on Christmas Day. And then on New Year's Day as well, you have two holidays that are the final

Fridays of the year. We're going to keep DC Today going through the normal market days through the rest of the year, but then we'll come out with that special dividend cafe. And when I say special, I don't know if people are going to like all the things I have to say or not, but I spent quite a bit of time this weekend working on it. And I really am developing, I think, an organized vision for 2021 and the things we want to communicate around it. So I'm pretty excited about this. And I know that Scott and I will look forward to that next national call we do together. But in the meantime, there's plenty of other things happening in the world, happening in the economy and happening in the market. And

so I'm going to turn it over to Scott and let him drive from here. Well, David, thank you so much. And yes, it was great to see you in person on Friday. And the weather was great. It was 55 degrees, I think, which was quite a departure from what we normally see in New York this time of year. But, you know, David, as you know, we sat right in the area in Central Park where you lately have been kind of forced to do your morning exercise, your morning run, because there really wasn't much of an alternative for you in this COVID environment. And that is sort of the subject of Friday's Dividend Cafe and the subject of a number of questions we've been getting from people writing in just about what your morning exercise routine means for the stock market. And there is a connection there. And I'm hoping you can explain that for us right now. Yeah. Thank you, Scott. For those who read Dividend Cafe Friday, you probably know what he's

referring to. When we were sitting there talking, I actually pointed up to the building that has this huge thermometer on it through Columbus Circle that you can see from this stretch where I'm running in Central Park. And that was the picture that we put in Dividend Cafe Friday. And I think Scott's right. It was in the 50s Friday afternoon when we were there. But it's been, you know, in the high 20s and low 30s real early in the morning every day. And that's where the kind of inspiration for this theme or this story came from. But I don't want to be redundant

for those who listened to Dividend Cafe already or read it. But the reality is I wouldn't be choosing to run Central Park, even though I love running Central Park, but I wouldn't be choosing to do it in 30 degree weather. If one of the other workout options that I had and that I frequently use were or had been available. And that's sort of the story of one club not having their act together here, our office building, the fitness center, my apartment building being closed for a special

cleaning, a problem with my mask at Orange Theory. And then what was the other one? Oh, then my regular club that is my real love that I can't wait to get back to at the Peninsula has been closed for this entire time since March of 2020. So you go through all these different options. You normally look to them and say, okay, well, let's just get out there and go run in the cold. And I think that that analogy to investors saying, okay, there's different things we normally could do with money here. And we look to this, look to that. It's always going to be allocated. It's always going to be diversified. It isn't like it's all going into one place. However, probably a lesser portion

would be going into U.S. equity than is going into U.S. equity if it weren't for the fact that those alternatives are closed. And that, I think, is a significantly important theme in capital markets right now. Now, it's important to get this part a little straight because one of the things with the analogy is people might take it to say, oh, they really don't want U.S. equities. It's actually awful. But what else are we going to do? We got to do it. Where I hope people understand, do understand, I really like running Central Park. It's just wouldn't be my first choice at that temperature. Okay. And I think that's similar with the market. I think a lot of people would love to be invested in U.S. equities. They've gotten very handsome, low, excuse me, high single digit or low double digit returns on

average for very extended periods of time. There's really attractive growth rates. There's a lot of liquidity. There's various advantages. And yet, all things being equal, people probably would prefer not to be buying at these multiples. And yet, the lack of another alternative, largely driven by the zero interest rate policy of the Fed, sort of enables and rationalizes that additive allocation into U.S. equity, particularly at a time like this, when there is so much liquidity sloshing around the universe. And it's such a great analogy.

And the whole, you know, there is no alternative phenomenon in the markets has been something that we hear about occasionally, right, over the past 10 years. But is there anything in your view that has made that phenomenon more illustrative or more clear in this year, in 2020? Well, yes, there is. I think that the things that make it more clear in 2020, though, are a building or exacerbation of the things that have been real and prevalent over the last 10 years. And this, by the way, Scott, is something I've been saying about COVID quite consistently, that far more than being a disruptor, it has been an accelerator of other trends, other

conditions, other events already in motion. The relative unattractiveness of European equities has been exacerbated by COVID. of European equities has been exacerbated by COVID. The way in which all countries, including the United States, have tried to deal with the economic impact of the shutdowns and the pandemic have been through greater fiscal stimulus. And they're already far head over heels in excessive fiscal stimulus already. And so you get a really significantly diminished return on additional efforts to stimulate the economy through government spending. And so Europe is kind of a leader there, if it weren't for the fact that Japan's already kind of held that medal for quite some time. So you look at the big three of Japan, EU, and United

States. And a lot of people come to me and say, why are you always picking on European Union, Japan? We do the same thing here. And my problem is not that I'm being a homer. It's just simply that I'm recognizing the relative delineations. Japan's a 260% debt to GDP. The European bloc countries are 175% debt to GDP. America is only sitting now post-COVID at that 120 range, 110 to 120, let's say. So all three are really, really high. And on a relative basis for the United States, it's getting to this post-World War II level. None of it do I say is an optimistic or positive thing, but it is certainly true that compared to one another, those metrics are different in these

foreign counterparts. Then you add in the monetary side. And again, we're not doing anything different. Our antidote, quite frankly, the monetary is even heavier than the fiscal for a whole number of reasons. But we've gone to zero interest rate policy, quantitative easing, unlimited central bank-backed liquidity, special purpose facilities. All of these things are the kind of post-GFC toolbox. But Japan has done all that and then some. 70%. 70% of the Japanese stock market is owned by their central bank. We legally can't buy any stocks with the central bank balance sheet here from the Fed. So we're not even in the same stratosphere of monetary aggressiveness of some of the other counterparts.

So when we talk about that there is an alternative, we are aggressively doubling down on past playbooks, some of which are necessary and some of which have been unsuccessful in the past and I think will be unsuccessful now, all of which invite other problems that have to be dealt with later. But relative to other developed countries, United States is still in a better position than Japan or European Union. And that's played out in market multiples over the last 10 years. It's played out in economic reality. It's played out in organic growth. Well, I'm glad you mentioned market multiples because that's been another

topic people have been thinking about over the past couple of weeks, maybe even since the election, the post-election rally, because multiples, at least on the S&P 500, are higher than they were at the start of the year, pre-COVID. And so I'm wondering if there is no alternative theme has contributed to those moves in multiples. Definitely. It's hard right now to do a lot of evaluation on multiples without a lot of clarity of apples to apples. Are people looking at forward-looking multiples before there was COVID compared to current forward-looking multiples? And then where are they? What E in the PDE are they using? Are they trying to adjust for a post-COVID earning reality? Or are they looking at right now trough earnings?

So the COVID moment disrupts or disturbs and complicates our ability to do that analysis. Because first of all, so many companies stop giving guidance. You can see consensus expectations, but as we've seen with companies far outperforming earnings expectations in Q2, but really more profoundly in Q3 where there was a bit more clarity. So it's difficult to measure all this. But if we just did as much of an apples-to-apples comparison as possible on forward-looking earnings. And you look at current price level divided by that earnings level that the aggregate S&P is expected to make, let's say from the beginning of Q4 this year through the end of Q3 next year, then you get a market multiple that is in the low 20s. I've continued to point out, though, because I do think it's important,

unless you're invested in the market cap weighted S&P 500, that isn't necessarily as relevant. So a lot of people have trepidation, fear about their entry point in markets, and they point to the S&P multiple. But I just have to point out that that elevated S&P multiple is much less elevated when you take out four companies, five companies, seven companies, 10 companies. The S&P 490 is still trading 18 times, but not 23 times. It's literally five to 10 companies that are adding that much of a boost to market multiple. And I speak here, obviously, of big tech and FANG type names. So, you know, at the end of the day, that may not be relevant if you're not buying at that capitalization weighting methodology that is prevalent in the index. I think that the really big story, though, in how we get to market valuation, and that is kind of the more important part to extract out of your question, pre-COVID multiple to where we are now. had a 10-year at about 1.75% and a Fed funds rate that was still over 1%.

And now you have a zero interest rate Fed funds rate, and you have a 10-year that might be at 75 to 85 basis points on any given day of the week. So the re-rating of risk assets as a result of just the price of money, the zero bound in monetary policy, let alone the repricing of risk assets around QE and federal reserve liquidity, that's a game changer. And that story is not going away. And that story, frankly, began being priced into markets well before we knew of the positive late stage clinical trials from our vaccine makers. So if that story is not going away, and that's such an important point about interest rates, is there anything that you're expecting from the Fed's meeting this week, I mean, is there anything that they might say that would give markets a hint that maybe the vaccine would sort of affect their outlook? I'm just trying to think of like anything that the Fed could either say or do that could catch markets by surprise, maybe some sort of upgrade to their dot plot or their economic forecast that could suggest that the accommodation might be limited in the year going forward? Not really. I mean, which, by the way, you said a very important word, anything they can do to spice markets, which is different than anything they could do

to generate media attention. The media could very well try to find a sentence here or an excerpt there that they wanted to run with. But we already know that we're debating between whether or not the Fed is going to start talking about tightening up a little bit in 2023 or 2024. And some of us might even say the debate's farther out than that. I would be one of them. So 2021, 22 into 23, you can put up whatever dot plot you want. They're not touching that zero bound and they've told you that. Now, I think at some point in time, it probably won't be this meeting, but there will be a time at which they, and if they do get the curve to steepen enough to really point to some healthy economic activity, but then it starts raising cost of funds on the long end of the curve, they may end up having to start, you know, winking and nodding toward yield curve control. yield curve control. So outside of the policy rate tool, there are other tools in the toolbox that I think will be market moving when we get there. And I do think we will end up getting

there. But the Fed's posture right now is very well known by markets. And so when we talk about how markets want to price that in, I come back to GFC. And when you're at the great financial crisis apex, and they go into QE1, in 2009, the market's been getting pummeled, January, February. And then from March 9th, the rest of the year, markets go 25%. Okay, well, that's kind of priced in. But then they do a Q2, not a very small one, a QE2. And then they do a massive QE3 that goes 2012 to 2014, and they start kind of tapering that down to use the old Bernanke nomenclature. Well, again, 2009 up 25%, 2010 up double digits. 25%, 2010 of double digits.

2011 was flattish in the S&P, but that was with Europe almost collapsing in the summer. And so you had a 20% drawdown followed by a full entire recovery of that. But then 2012 being another single digit positive year in markets and 2013 being a huge positive year. I believe near 30% in the S&P and that being the year the QE3 came on hot and heavy. There's different circumstances. It's not going to be

perfectly analogous. The point I'm making is the central banks of the world don't have a great history of one and done. They go all in and then they stay there. And once you fired your bazooka, you don't have an option of saying, okay, this didn't really work. Let's be kind of precise and tight here. You got to just keep doubling down and doubling down until you eventually make it. And I think that's where our central bank is. So I expect a very aggressive monetary posture, So I expect a very aggressive monetary posture, aggressive on the accommodation side for many companies and the Fed's backstop of these companies and your thoughts on those and kind of how that may or may not alter your worldview on the markets? Well, first of all, my worldview doesn't believe that we should be backstopping zombie companies.

But this is a little bit complicated because I absolutely believe that's what the Fed is doing, but I don't believe that's why they're doing it. I think that the Fed accepts it as an unfortunate collateral consequence to their greater objective. And so ultimately, I believe allowing companies that should otherwise fail to stay alive and then therefore sacrificing throughout the economy the optimal allocation of those resources. I talked in Dividend Cafe about capital's relentless pursuit of its most optimal allocation. And when capital is left in a suboptimal allocation, that's only half the story. The other half is where that capital didn't go, that it could have gone to generate a better return for itself, whether it be in debt or equity markets. And so that was and kind of ought to be engraved in the annals of time, the story of Japan and the immediacy of their bubble burst

out of the late 80s and early 90s and the deflationary trap they found themselves in. And they found themselves in their inability to let dying companies die, and particularly dying banks die, added 10, 15 years to their disinflationary debacle. And so I believe that it is true. It's hard to measure which company here, which company there. But to the extent that a company is being left alive by access to low cost of funds, and yet out of that is not able, they're not just simply bridging a gap, a period of distress, that they have a broken business model, and yet low cost of funds and access to such gives them a survivability. My worldview is such that we need to avoid that equity investment.

My worldview is also such that we need to recognize it, that there are not going to be debt defaults when the Fed's not going to let there be debt defaults. So you have to identify what the safe zones are and what aren't. And then mute, to some degree, your economic growth expectations, because you get less economic growth with the perpetuity of zombie companies than you would if markets were allowed to run their course and that sort of accompanying creative destruction. Another question we have, this one about M&A and that theme in investing and how you approach M&A in the portfolio? Well, there's a couple of comments, positive and negative ones. The positive comment would be that I believe we're entering a period of robust M&A. And I'm more and more wondering, I spent, I got bored out of my mind at some point last night with Sunday Night Football.

And so naturally, I started reading some old Michael Milken stuff from the 80s. And I'm sure a lot of you were doing the same thing. But when you go back and read corporate finance history from the 80s, which every person who studies markets really ought to do, it's because you're just talking about unprecedented M&A driven by activity in capital markets, not driven by strategic objectives of companies. Okay. And it's sort of M&A for all the wrong reasons. And yet the capital was never the issue. And it's a famous line or certainly a famous teaching of Michael Milken that capital is never the scarce resource. There's scarcity that makes markets work.

Innovation is scarce. Certain products are scarce. Certain intellectual capital is scarce. The secret sauce of some companies is scarce. Scarcity drives profitability, but capital is never what is scarce. There is unlimited capital in the universe. The question is how it's going to be allocated. And M&A that comes from poor capital allocation is not good M&A. But if one were investing in the companies facilitating M&A, they would have done very,

very well. And I certainly believe that's the case now when you look at both private lenders that specialize in producing, in making capital available in the private debt markets, some of the private equity companies that are general partners or sponsors that help facilitate a lot of these deals. And some of the investment banks that are going to be at the hub of them. And we actually now have publicly traded midsize investment banks that are not real balance sheet sensitive businesses that are interesting and that our investment committee is taking a look at. Not all of them have the dividend growth necessary for them to be investable to us. But my point is M&A, when you're talking about the sort of infrastructure of that activity, looks to me

like it's going to be a very appetizing environment for some time because of the amount of capital that is available towards such and because of the strategic imperatives that are going to be revealed coming out of the COVID economic slowdown. Now, then the other side to it is M&A being like a business objective. Do we want to go buy companies hoping they get acquired or even worse, do we want to buy companies that we think are going to go do acquisitions? And worse, do we want to buy companies that we think are going to go do acquisitions? There is always attractive and accretive M&A. And in particular, again, I can't get into individual stock names right now, but some of the companies in our technology portfolio have made very good use of M&A as a means

of increasing their free cash flow generation. increasing their free cash flow generation. Oftentimes, M&A is, first of all, an ego play for the C-suite. It can be really thoughtless, and it can lead to incredible capital destruction. And so M&A, meaning us being involved in companies that are buying or selling, it's really bottom up. And it's something our investment committee looks at very heavily to understand if we like acquisitions or don't like them. But then the M&A theme that I've talked about a lot is more the first part of my answer, part of my answer, meaning we like the idea of being invested in companies that are about to see a surge in fee revenue as a result of the secular theme of increased M&A activity. Yeah, no, it makes a lot of sense. And I think that's an important segue to the energy sector

because we have oil prices sort of firmly in the mid 40s per barrel, which, you know, usually over the past couple of years, the story had been about collapsing oil prices, not buoyant oil prices. But somebody wants to know, in your view, if the midstream energy sector is participating in the market rally, and are investors discounting the future of the industry due to the new administration subsidizing alternative energy and taxing fossil fuels? What do you think? Well, if the question is specific to its impact in midstream, I mean, obviously, midstream is participating in the rally. It's been one of the biggest months in the history of midstream from a performance standpoint. By midstream,

we're referring to oil and gas pipeline companies. Often they have big storage businesses as well, but they're kind of in that energy infrastructure space and they're participating in this rally. Yet those concerns that one may have from a policy standpoint, I think are significant. We certainly know from a Biden presidency that you're going to have a greater interest in so called green energy, renewables. And he has talked about limiting some of the activity in the fracking space and in upstream energy production that can lead to greater volumes of oil and gas. Now, the golden years of midstream companies were the first term of the Obama-Biden presidency. They did not allow it on federal lands. And he's saying he will not allow it on

federal lands now. But that's not a big game changer in terms of the business models of these companies now, where there's a lot out of the Permian Basin, the Marcellus Shale. There's kind of regions of the country where there's this almost infinite amount of oil and gas under shale rock. Look, I've made this point several times when you talk about taxing greater level fossil fuels, the so-called carbon tax. I think that would be negative to some of the smaller businesses, but I think that anything negative to the smaller businesses becomes positive to the larger businesses. That's kind of the way we're positioned in our energy portfolio. When we look at the integrators, we own the two largest names in the world. When you look at our midstream space that I think the question's about, I guess I don't know for sure if one of them is

the second largest. It might be third, but we basically own two of the top three names by reputation, brand, and market capitalization out there. And so that's by design. We think that they not only have greater financial metrics and survivability, but we also think that they're more immune from some of the policy decisions that may be forthcoming that could hurt smaller players as the subsidies become more problematic in subsidies to renewables. And then I think it really does work its way up as a benefit to the larger companies. So that's our angle right now in the energy industry. And it's one we believe in very strongly. And David, as we kind of move to the end of our discussion here, I figured it would be good for us to sort of end on anything that we should be watching in the markets between now and the end of the year. Obviously, we'll do our larger debrief in the new year. But anything as it

pertains to stimulus negotiations or the so-called Santa Claus rally that we tend to see towards the end of the year? Anything you want to tell people about what to be looking for as we have about, I don't know, what, 10 trading sessions left in the year? Yeah, isn't that surreal to say? You know, there's no question that even as we're sitting here talking, there's a lot happening behind the scenes on a potential stimulus relief deal. I'm writing about it in DC today. So it'll be in your inboxes later. But the way they're setting this up is there's a reasonably bipartisan support for taking all the things that neither side has said they want to push back on. In other words, the stuff that everyone says, yeah, we do want that. And creating one bill with all those

things in it, the price tag is about $700, $750 billion. And then another bill they put forward at the same time for just $250 billion that has liability protection for businesses, which the Republicans say they want, the Democrats say they don't want, and then $150, $160 billion in direct relief aid to states, which the Republicans say they don't want and the Democrats say they do, and put both those things in the bill. So it avoids a poison pill that kills the other thing, but it allows legislators who so choose, including Senator McConnell at the Senate majority level, to say, okay, well, we're going to kill that smaller bill. We're going to keep the bigger. That's not generally how legislation gets done.

Usually you get the stuff that a lot of people don't want by attaching it to the stuff everyone else does want, and it sort of forces its way out of the funnel that way. But all I can tell you is that there's been so many head fakes along the way, going back months on different levels of stimulus, that I don't want to go out on a limb and predict it will happen. I don't think the market cares a huge amount. All things being equal, the market would rather see a bill get done because included in the everyone wants to see it section is some PPP extension. That kind of support to small business is very targeted. It has a very high multiplier effect, meaning the stimulative benefit is exponential in the economy, far more so than some of the other things that are on the table.

So I think that the market would like that. But again, the market is expecting it anyways. It's just a matter of March versus December, January. Certainly, if you're one of the businesses who's been shut down again, you'd rather get it done sooner than later. And so I'm just answering into the grand scheme of macro equity public markets. I don't expect a lot of other big surprises, but you never know. The Santa Claus rally is tough. I've broken my own rule this year, Scott, like probably 10 times. Hopefully it's a little less. But at certain points throughout my COVID and markets missives,

and even in DC today, I'll include certain seasonal things or calendar historical deals. And I always give the caveat of how worthless what I'm posting is. But the problem with the Santa Claus rally is if you say, I'm making up a number right now, but let's just say that eight out of 10 times the week of Christmas has been positive for markets. Well, and then this week isn't positive for markets. What happened in eight out of 10 times doesn't mean anything unless the correlation has a causation, which I absolutely assure you it does not. It's a meaningless issue. And for those of us who are old enough to remember 2018, so two years ago, that was a horrific Christmas period. And everyone got to make all the jokes and so forth around Santa Claus rally having a lump of coal and it's stocking and all this stuff.

People are really creative in financial copywriting. But my point is this. I don't know how the year will end. The technical barometers are all very, very strong. There's a lot of breadth. But, you know, we kind of right now know where the major news events are. We're preparing for a new inauguration. There's still the Georgia Senate seat hanging out there into the first week of January. There is some question about a stimulus relief bill being agreed to, and then another issue beyond that. I do believe there's plenty

of questions around what U.S. trade policy with China is going to be. I wouldn't ignore that. There's some tariff exceptions that are set to expire. And if the new administration, well, if the current administration doesn't extend those, then you're going to have some issues there. The new administration has to come in and kind of formulate an opinion on some of that. So there's some current events, things worth keeping an eye on. But for the most part, the really major market narratives that people should care about, we're aware of, and that's high Fed support into liquidity and credit. And that's the distribution of a vaccine across the society to allow people to start functioning like normal human beings again. And that brings back with it economic fatality.

And then that allows people like myself to make forecasts for next year that could be right or wrong. Everyone's going to predict that once the sort of COVID moment is in the dustbin of history, that there's going to be more economic activity than there was during a shutdown. That part's really easy.

The question is, how vibrant? Do you just get like a really big resurgence of normalcy, or do you get something even bigger than really big, this kind of pent-up demand theme? I'm in that camp. I'm studying it intently right now in preparation for my 2021 white paper, but that's not something that's going to be known or visible into markets in the next couple of weeks. So my visible into markets in the next couple of weeks. So my recommendation is everyone enjoy the next couple of weeks with their families, with their friends, enjoying this holiday time of year and into the new year. And I'm not going to go through all the cliche things of saying and bid adieu to this awful 2020. And the reason I'm not going to is I try to be a more positive person than that, but also it's overdone.

I think everyone knows of the challenges that 2020 has represented. And yet, hopefully, you know, we're going to enjoy the next, what, 16, 17 days of this year. 16, 17 days of this year. And as difficult as 2020 has been, I can tell you that my beloved USC Trojans beat UCLA on Saturday night in historic, unbelievable comeback fashion. That is really the defining trait of what it means to be a Trojan. So even that happened in 2020, my friend. You just made it, David, before 2021 with that. So there you go. Well, is there any other questions that have come in? Are we ready to wrap this up? No, David, I think we are ready to go. And thank you for all your insights as always. And thank you for having me on these calls over the past several months.

And I've been very grateful to be working with you and your team. Our partnership is almost a year old and it's been and is a blast. And I'm grateful to you. So thank you, David. And happy holidays to you and your family as well. Thank you, Scott. Appreciate that. And same to you and yours.

And for those who don't know, I've given the background in the past, but it was right one year ago that Scott left Yahoo, where he was a successful TV anchor and had been in media on that side of the fence for some time and started his own business. And not many people start a business and then two months later have the whole world shut down. But as he and I were talking in the park the other night, you get a decade's worth of entrepreneurial education in one year in moments like this. And Scott's doing fantastic. I really appreciate him very much. And same for all of you. Thanks for listening. Thank you for taking part of your time to listen in. I hope you've gotten something out of the call today. I actually feel good about today's.

I feel like we covered a lot of things that are genuinely important and hopefully avoided some of the distractions. Please do reach out, though, if there's any itches you want scratched. There may be other topics or follow-up items you'd like us to unpack. I'm very happy to do that. And so with that, I'll say goodbye and we'll look forward to being on another national call together on Wednesday, January the 6th. In the meantime, enjoy this holiday season. And Erica, I'll turn it over to you. This concludes today's conference call.

Thank you all for attending. The Bonson Group is a group of investment professionals registered with Hightower Securities LLC, member FINRA and SIPC, with Hightower Advisors LLC, a registered investment advisor with the SEC. Securities are offered through Hightower Securities LLC. Advisory services are offered through Hightower Advisors LLC. This is not an offer to buy or sell securities. No investment process is free of risk. There is no guarantee that the investment process or investment opportunities referenced herein will be profitable. Past performance is not indicative of current or future performance and is not a guarantee. The investment opportunities referenced herein may not be suitable for all investors. All data and information referenced herein are from sources believed to be reliable. Any opinions, news, research, analyses, prices, or other information

contained in this research is provided as general market commentary and does not constitute investment advice. The Bonser Group and Hightower shall not in any way be liable for claims and make no express or implied representations or warranties as to the accuracy or completeness of the data and other information, or for statements or errors contained in or omissions from the obtained data and information referenced herein. The data and information are provided as of the date referenced. Such data and information referenced herein. The data and information are provided as of the date referenced. Such data and information are subject to change without notice. This document was created for informational purposes only. The opinions expressed are solely those of the Bonson Group and do not represent those of Hightower Advisors LLC or any of its affiliates.

Hightower Advisors do not provide tax or legal advice. This material was not intended or written to be used or presented to any entity as tax advice or tax information. Tax laws vary based Thank you.