The Dividend Cafe - TBG INVESTMENT COMMITTEE CORONAVIRUS UPDATE – WEEK OF MARCH 16, 2020

Episode Date: March 16, 2020

If one looks at the rapidity with which this market has sold off, the levels to which it has sold off, and the stressors that currently exist in our financial system and society at large, there is sur...ely a lot of anxiety and uncertainty that permeates. This special Dividend Cafe will get into a handful of things that just simply must be said, offers a podcast from our Investment Committee, and addresses a lot of what is going on in the world that may help explain this crazy mess. Please, if you have time, join us in the Dividend Cafe … Links mentioned in this episode: DividendCafe.com TheBahnsenGroup.com

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome to the Dividend Cafe, financial food for thought. committee. Robert Graham is not with us as he's with clients right now, but we're trying to do a special Midday Monday podcast to check in with clients on this continued bloodbath in the markets. So I have Julian and Daya and Brian all on the line, but we are for the very first time recording all at different locations, just basically based on some of the different shutdowns and remote locations and other things going on. So all of us are working. I'm actually in the office here in Newport, but many people, as you know, and are probably dealing with yourselves in your own locales, limited mobility right now, which of course ties into the state of affairs that is right now plaguing not only the markets but of course society at large as we look to some resolution
Starting point is 00:01:12 around this coronavirus scare as we are speaking the United States is at 4,100 cases of coronavirus tested positive. Italy is at 27,000. Globally, there's been about 170,000, a little more. In the United States, I believe the death count is still somewhere only around 60 or so. And, of course, they expect that to increase. But the more important thing that I am going to use our time for today, which is actually not anywhere near as important as the human toll and the basic life and health subject, is the reason you're chiming in right now. There's better sources for the medical update. But as far as the financial
Starting point is 00:02:05 market standpoint, we want to give you our most current thinking. What I'll first quickly do is announce, because I think this podcast will be going up on Monday afternoon, some of you listening Monday afternoon, Monday evening, and I do want to make sure that you know we are doing a conference call, a national call, live tomorrow at 10 o'clock Pacific time. That's Tuesday, March 17th, where I intend to do a very deep dive into all things around this episode and our most current thinking about the economy and the stock market and other financial markets. And we'll have a Q&A. People can send in questions to rsvp at thebonsongroup.com. You can just email us if you need the info for the call to rsvp at thebonsongroup.com.
Starting point is 00:02:58 We'll send you the call-in number, and you're welcome to email a question if you'd like it addressed on the national call. So to my colleagues who are on, I apologize for the long setup. I think that all of us have various degrees of things in common here. There's very little sleep right now. There's a lot of conversations with clients. There's a lot of portfolio activity. And there's also been a lot of prudence and a lot of adjudication as to what
Starting point is 00:03:26 we think is our fiduciary duty to care for our clients and the invested capital that we're responsible for in this period. This is the quickest drawdown that we have seen. A number of us have lived through markets where the drawdown was much worse than this but never where it was this quick and and so although 1987 was in one day um you know you know in my personal case i was beginning high school at that time so not um not managing client capital but but at this point we're in a position where i first want to kind of give a setup as to what we think has happened over the last several days. And I think Julian and Dan, Brian, I'll have some things that are going to be important to chime in on. Let me start, Brian, with you. Before we come back, I obviously want to comment a bit on the state of non-equity markets,
Starting point is 00:04:23 what's going on out in the total kind of financial system of our country and indeed our globe. But Brian, you've been through these stock market drops before. Why don't you share some words of wisdom about what kind of has to happen when equity markets melt down like this? Well, yeah, thanks, David. I have been through many, as you have as well. And as I've learned every time through each one of those, it never has gotten a whole lot easier to deal with it. But essentially, we're roughly 30% lower from the high about a month ago. Bond markets have rallied significantly. Treasury rates have plummeted. Yields are low. You know, the Fed did what they did yesterday and reduced that benchmark rate to zero and along with some bond purchases and all of that. And so that's sort of the situation that we find ourselves.
Starting point is 00:05:25 Obviously, the human part of it all that David mentioned as well, you know, this too shall pass. And at the end of it, it's sort of up to us as far as what we're going to do in this downturn to both protect client capital and to pivot where we need to. And then ultimately to take advantage of the dislocations that will present themselves. We were talking earlier this morning about the high yield municipal bond market being a little dislocated, but there's several different things that we look at. And at the end of the day, it's about quality. It's about proper stewardship of client capital along the way and making sure that long-term goals are not impacted too severely in this thing. And then we live to fight another day and we get through this. And, you know, those sort of evergreen, you know, themes, the way that we look at it, don't change. This event, as a black swan as it is, because it certainly is one, how fast it's come, you know, this is pretty remarkable, really, is a black swan because it
Starting point is 00:06:23 was, of course, not foreseeable. And so it's not something that can really be fully insulated against, but we deal with it as it comes and we take advantage of it and we move forward. Well, that's excellent stuff. And we're going to be sending out Divin Cafe this afternoon with even more visual reinforcement of the very things you're talking about, the history of this stuff and so forth. Well, Dale, let me jump on to something Brian said about these particular markets, the dislocation, and when you have these kind of black swans, this level of drop, the right thing to go about doing.
Starting point is 00:06:59 We've had 50-something drops since the last real big one, and basically all 50-something drops since the last real big one, and basically all 50-something. There was an opportunity to buy a dip and really be glad you did really quickly. That doesn't seem to be the case here. There was buying of the dip three weeks ago, and there's been several leg downs more. This isn't a dip. It isn't a correction. We're now in a bear market uh we're gonna either have a shallow or a more severe recession um in the short term of this not the longer term but tell me right now why um why this would be a uh a bad time to rush in either in selling or heavy buying?
Starting point is 00:07:53 So apart from the reasons that you and Brian talked about, the fear-based decision-making that happens around times of great market stress, whether it be panic buying or panic selling, panic doing anything as far as your portfolio is concerned, I think we can all agree that it doesn't bode well for long-term returns. But to talk a little bit about some of the technical reasons not to make very hasty decisions in a time where the Dow's opening up down a couple thousand points and then rallying
Starting point is 00:08:21 and then it's going down. And the VIX is at 80. I mean, periods of extraordinary volatility. Some few reasons to be very, very careful in buying and selling and not trying to, well, not committing to any sort of self-inflicted wound is that you may not be getting the right price for your investments.
Starting point is 00:08:41 And you may not have a full understanding of what that fair market value price may be. And it might be the right idea to wait for a more normalized environment. So I mean, what happens generally in markets like this, when there's a lot of fear and a lot of sell-offs is that bid-ask spreads typically widen out for all risk assets. And market makers and dealers try to protect themselves. And if you're selling something, there may not be many bids out there, and you may be having to take a significant haircut in your investment. And obviously, that's something you want to avoid because it's a self-inflicted wound. If you just wait maybe a day or two for a normalized environment,
Starting point is 00:09:21 you may see a total repricing in that investment. And we saw that with especially a lot of the ETFs that we own, even on the ETFs that are essentially money good, that trade very, very high quality, very, very short term paper, many times it's coming due in seven days almost or a couple of weeks. I mean, everything in the portfolio is maturing apart, but this is trading down a percent or two, and it doesn't make any sense from a technical standpoint. So it's best to just wait things out in a normalized environment and not make any hasty decisions. And I did mention ETFs, and this is especially true on the ETF side, where you can have a disconnect from where the ETF is trading relative to the fair market value of the underlying basket that ETF price is pegged to. And you can get discounts in the range of 15% to 20% for some ETFs. So I would be especially careful for the ETFs because of the discount to NAV. But also, you have to be very, very careful
Starting point is 00:10:23 to bid astrophys and what you're getting. Just wait it out. If you don't have a proper plan in order to what to buy and sell and what price, what you think fair market value is, I'd behoove everybody to just wait things out for a more normalized environment to start transacting in your portfolio. So all that being said is we as an investment community have to be very, very clear on our path going forward for this type of environment before we start buying and selling. So that's my thought or our thought of the technicals at the moment. Well, you're exactly right. There's a lot of wisdom in that. And I think it's helpful for clients to get an idea of kind of the trading realities that exist in these sort of meltdown markets. So, Julian,
Starting point is 00:11:10 I want you to comment in a second on the opportunities when we do feel the markets have normalized and what those kind of shopping lists might look like. Obviously, people right now are very afraid to jump back in when there's still the uncertainty as to how deep the healthcare pandemic will go. But let me first kind of make a comment on the part of this that is not a stock market story, where I think that's the focus so many have. And that is the just sort of breakdown in credit markets and fixed income and even in the cash banking you know the ability for cash to be in the system to that good quality assets can be replaced for cash what you saw Thursday Friday was what will happen in these moments of really severe distress, and that is that there are a whole lot of people that need to sell something. They're over-levered. We have a leveraged financial system,
Starting point is 00:12:16 hedge funds, global macro, risk parity. There's always people that have money invested in assets when they need cash for spending. And therefore, at those moments that they have to go replace an asset with cash, they're selling into a distressed market. And it could be a very high-quality asset like a treasury bond, which is awfully rare, but even a municipal bond, a high-quality corporate bond. which is awfully rare, but even a municipal bond, a high-quality corporate bond, the effort to go sell those things piles on and you get a flood of selling where there's an inadequate amount of buyers and therefore prices get mismatched. And a bond that may be really ought to be selling, especially with interest rates so low at 105, gets sold at 100. And yeah, there's what's called a wide spread between the bid and the ask to get transactions done.
Starting point is 00:13:11 And those are reflective of unnatural and distorted markets. But the story has always been there. And it's just as there now as ever, because we have more leverage in our financial system. And so the stress that you saw on Thursday and I think here again today as markets are selling off has a lot to do with non-equity financial assets creating an overall distress in the system. These things of course are technical and temporal and they work themselves out, and it's one of the huge priorities of the Fed to inject enough cash into the system that you can clear collateral for cash at a healthy and functional price in the market. But the question then, Julian, that I'm turning to you for is when you get normalcy,
Starting point is 00:14:02 when you get more functional markets for people entering equities at these levels, aside from the fact they're buying stocks cheaper, which is in and of itself, I guess, you know, an obvious thing, what does it look like to you for yields? How much have yields from, dividend yields from stocks gone up as a result of this movement and for people that were going to come in and buy new with new money but yeah you know that movement moved out dramatically obviously david and i remember looking at our core dividend uh you know portfolio a few weeks ago at the around the end of the year and we already we had a yield of about four percent a dividend yield when the s p was below two percent and as i look at it today we're more around you know in the six so that's been a dramatic you know 50
Starting point is 00:14:55 you know 50 percent move you could almost argue in the in yields and then and then i guess you know looking at this uh historically uh you know just wanted to share about being invested in equities and what it means when you're in the bear market. If you look at being in the S&P 500 for the last 25 years, so since January 1995, your compound growth rate, annual growth rate would be about 7% if you were fully invested and you stayed invested for the last 25 years if you if you missed the uh best 10 days you would go from
Starting point is 00:15:31 7.3 to 4.2 if you missed you know the best 30 days you would be flat so this is telling you you know if you're in there for the long long, very careful not to, you know, miss these days. So it's not the time to get out. And another statistic that I wanted to share is about the average decline in the bear market, because finally now it's official we've entered the bear market. And the bear market average decline for, again, the S&P 500 using that as a benchmark has been 38%. And we're about, you know, 30%, 28, you could say. So we're about 10% away from the average.
Starting point is 00:16:13 So, of course, it doesn't mean that it couldn't be less or more. And also the other thing is not just the number, it's the duration. And that's why we're saying we have to be patient is uh you know the average duration has been 20 months um it's it's been less the last few uh uh basically bear markets we've had but if you look at the 2008 bear market it was 17 months if you look at the 2000 one it was 30 months and only you have to go back to 87 or 90 to have a three months bear market so that gives you an idea of what we're facing. Yeah, well, so in terms of the overall realities of the bear market, Brian, do you agree with the notion that there's sort of two steps ahead of us here?
Starting point is 00:17:01 Number one, getting out of the kind of insanity of the present panic level, the high volatility, the high dislocation, the high leverage selling, the forced selling, the just kind of emotional distress of where we are right now. And then a phase two of maybe in three months, six months, evaluating economic health and macro fundamentals? I definitely do. And we're certainly in that former position at this point, unfortunately, dealing with where markets are trading. But at some point, whether there's a fiscal side to this and there's some action there that comes to fruition, you know, or whatever, or things just kind of getting, you know, oversold to a greater degree. But at some point, you know, it will come back to fundamentals.
Starting point is 00:17:50 And technically, one of the reasons the market, I think, is doing what it's doing now is because there's just not a lot of real economic data for us to sink our teeth into right now. We do know that people are not going to bars and, you know, not holding events and weddings and company events and all those things. And those things are obviously contractionary and the economy will slow. But to the degree of which we, you know, it's an unknown in some degrees. And that's why markets are uneasy. You know, the market would prefer to know something almost, even if the number was poor, rather than to just be left in the dark. And so there's, you know, this thing has happened very fast and it's sort of continuing to unfold. And so right now we're kind of pricing in, you know, something that's very bad and whether that comes to fruition or not, we'll have to see.
Starting point is 00:18:34 I suspect, you know, whether those numbers are good or bad, just having some more data here over the next couple of months will be helpful. And then ultimately, you know, as we start to look at where companies are trading, to your point on dividend yields being so attractive and great businesses that have slowed down because of the virus, but not necessarily because of an organic demand decline, you know, we can have some recovery at a later point when those fundamentals sort of kick in. Absolutely. Well, in terms, guys, of the present state of affairs, does anyone have any comments on the risk reward of buying equities? You know, a bottom we can't say is in. We believe we're much closer to bottom than a top. Jay has commented on the wisdom of not jumping in right now, but risk reward history.
Starting point is 00:19:33 Where is this going to go for equity investors that ride this out three, six months, longer? I could jump in. As far as the risk reward goes, I do, for a few reasons, think that the risk reward skew is positive. I think that there is a lot more upside than downside, primarily for some of the reasons, like Brian said, this isn't really this downturn in economic activity isn't as a result of some organic decrease in demand. It's precipitated exactly by this coronavirus situation
Starting point is 00:20:03 that we think is a transitory event. Obviously, it's impacted global profits, but there is a path to progress going forward. I mean, we've seen progress in Korea and China. I mean, a lot of the measures that they have taken have worked. There's been a plateauing of cases, and we know what we have to do. Obviously a vaccine isn't something that that is on the table. I mean, obviously that has to go through trials. And if there was a vaccine to be about a year and a half before,
Starting point is 00:20:36 before it was usable. So it's most likely not going to be that, but mainly the, the, the tested method of tested method of societal scale and distancing and quarantining. Although it is painful, it does help markets understand that there is a plan and reduce that uncertainty. society can do as far as the quarantining goes. And the more we can kind of take from the playbook some of these other countries where they've been able to combat this thing with some success, I think we'll give that market that at least alleviate some of that uncertainty and allow some of that maybe pent up demand to come back when we do start seeing a reduction in cases. when we do start seeing a reduction in cases. Yeah, absolutely.
Starting point is 00:21:28 Julian, let me ask you this. Down 2,000 points today, down 2,000 points on Thursday, up 2,000 on Friday. Is this the new normal? you know, do you get to a point where the heavy volume and also the heavy swings will go away? What do you think people need to count on? You know, my view is that it's one of the reasons why it's almost counterproductive for regular investors who do not need access to their portfolio other than dividend cash flow, that it's counterproductive to be looking at the day-by-day price swings because they're so dramatic and so overstated. But, you know, to the extent some people can't help it or want to,
Starting point is 00:22:18 are these swings going to be here for a while? What's your expectation there, Julian? going to be here for a while? What's your expectation there, Julian? I think that this extreme volatility is not going to last forever. I think we are probably a few weeks away from normalizing, and I guess the liquidity that's being put by the Fed is going to help that. And I think in the short term, it's really driven by liquidity. You know, you have like hedge funds like Citadel and other names that I know exactly what they're going through because I was there in 2008. And when they are 10 times leverage and they need to raise cash
Starting point is 00:22:57 because, you know, their marks go all different directions and they're losing so much money, they have to sell whatever they can. They go where there's liquidity. And sometimes that means going into the equity market, even though they don't think it makes any sense to sell, they have to raise the cash and they go where they find the liquidity. But I think this is what's happening at the moment
Starting point is 00:23:16 more than anything else. And that's what's going to create an amazing opportunity if you're a long-term investor, because we don't even know yet if you're going to have a recession. I mean, Q1 is probably going to be flat because this happened around, you know, the economy is really being hit around the mid-March. So you just have two weeks, probably three weeks in Q1 where you could say that the U.S. economy is going to get hurt. So to have a recession, you need two quarters of negative growth. I think it's fair to assume Q2 is going
Starting point is 00:23:45 to be bad. I think Gomez is saying it could be minus 5%. But Q3, it's not clear yet. I guess by trying to flatten the curve on the epidemic, what we are doing is that we are deepening the economic impact. So that's the price to pay to save lives. But, you know, if you have to keep an eye on these numbers in Europe and see how quickly they turn the curve, and that gives us an idea of how quickly we're going to get out of that.
Starting point is 00:24:13 But then, you know, the bottom-up investor in me, if you think about the long-term intrinsic value of these businesses, I don't think they've been really hurt. I mean, even the airlines,
Starting point is 00:24:24 you know, we don't own airlines,, even the airlines, you know, we don't own airlines, but even the airlines, people will fly again eventually. So it's about survival. And then when, you know, we pass the survival point in the next few weeks, you'll be back to more like the fundamental values of these businesses. Well, I agree. I agree wholeheartedly. I think that's a great point. Now, you're right. We don't own airlines. But even in that space, it is not something, you know, you can make an argument, and I'm not sure I would, but you can make an argument that there may be a very long-term impact to the cruise line industry. You know, there's something rather unnerving about some of the visuals of what, you know, had taken place from some of those quarantines and situations. The casino industry, I think, is highly cyclical and highly feast-famine-oriented. Airlines are highly cyclical, but also highly mandatory.
Starting point is 00:25:31 And I suspect that that would be an example of something that would end up coming back. But again, they have a risk-reward characteristic embedded in them that is not really attractive to those of us who want stability in the dividend, and that's why we've largely avoided the sector over the years. But I think you make a good point that even in that space, you could see a Q3 GDP spike. The events being canceled right now are almost entirely being postponed and rescheduled. There are some things that will not come back, and we know that. March Madness, the College Basketball Tournament, that's gone, and that's a come back, and we know that. March Madness, the College of Athletics Tournament, that's gone, and that's a tragedy economically.
Starting point is 00:26:08 In a lot of categories, actually, it's a tragedy. But I think that a lot of the corporate events, travel, vacations, things that are going to just suck the wind out of Q2 GDP have a chance to either really come out as pent-up resurfaced demand in Q3 or Q4. So that's something that is important for us to keep our eye on. We all got to get back to work. We have an awful lot of clients to talk to and portfolios to be addressing. So I'm going to ask Brian, Daya, Julian, in that order, give us a closing comment, and then I'll close this out. Okay, thank you. Yeah, I appreciate everybody listening. My closing comment would be for those
Starting point is 00:26:54 that are listening, that do have other questions or want to talk about this a little bit more in detail, please do give us a call. We do want to hear from you very much. The other thing I would say is just, if you look at, for example, the 50 best days in the S&P 500 over the past 20 or so years, most of those big daily moves happened actually in bear markets when things were really tough. And my point to saying that is that it's times like this where you sort of have your metal tested when markets are down like this, like they are today. But, you know, there's also these big kind of upswings in it too. And so it really, with the dislocations that they have mentioned, it really, really doesn't make a lot of sense to try to get overly involved in trading in and out of this market for those reasons. And so I would say reach out and those are some perspectives.
Starting point is 00:27:41 Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And as far as, you know, I know there's been quite a sell off. I know that there's a lot of clients and a lot of listeners might be seeing this as a buying opportunity. And we believe it is. I do think that the sell off in some industries and sub sub industries has been discriminatory in a rational sense. And I would be careful to maybe pick certain companies without really understanding what their balance sheet looks like, if they're going to be able to remain solvent through a couple quarters of, essentially for some companies, looking like very, very, very little revenue. And I'll give the cruise lines, we'll talk about them for a second. I had a friend who wanted to say, oh my God, they declined. They're down 20%, 30% a week. You know, is this a buying opportunity? Can't you just close your eyes and buy this? And looking at their balance sheet, you know, it's like, it's pretty clear that maybe some
Starting point is 00:28:38 of them might have to cut their dividend, you know, and who knows if they're going to be able to have enough working capital on hand. So in some senses, the sell-off might be rational for certain companies, so I'd be very careful and really understand that you're investing in quality companies. Like Julian mentioned, where the intrinsic value is still there, where they're going to be able to remain solvent through any tough times and be able to get back or be able to revalue. So I would make sure to do your homework,
Starting point is 00:29:09 invest in quality companies and be in the long haul. Yeah, I would say that I feel like, you know, these we don't even know yet if we're gonna have a recession. I mean, the market is, I think everybody's saying, you know, at least the implied probability is 2,000 chance. It's early, a bit early to say, but usually recessions come from imbalances in some sectors. So we had the housing sector in 2008. You have the tax sector in 2000.
Starting point is 00:29:33 We don't really have imbalances this time around. So it's really just a black swan. And then I think basically the answer really depends, I would guess, on how, you know, flattening the curve, what it means, you know, how long we're going to live like that and how much it's going to impact the economy. And the second thing is, I want to talk about is the fiscal bazooka. Are we going to get a $1 trillion, you know, basically help from Washington in various budget stimulus to weather the, you know, that storm. So I think we've had the monetary bazooka that was sunday now we need the fiscal bazooka and you know the us gdp is 22 billion
Starting point is 00:30:12 so that's about five six billion a quarter so if you think about one uh sorry it's 22 trillions if you think about uh one trillion that's you know five percent of gdp so that's we are talking about big numbers and that could really make a difference. So, you know, for me, I'm going to really, from a time down point of view, that's key. And then, you know, as we look at the companies we own and the companies we want to own, just being very selective on the quality of the businesses, entrenching value of these businesses and the quality of the balance sheet. And that's the one that will survive, basically. Let me make a couple closing comments. And a lot of the stuff I'm going to be saying again on the conference call tomorrow, but there's going to be a whole lot of things on the conference
Starting point is 00:30:53 call tomorrow address that we're not getting here in the podcast today in the interest of time. I do want to unpack more for people what the good, bad, and ugly was of the Fed's bazooka stimulus. more for people what the good, bad, and ugly was of the Fed's bazooka stimulus. Julian's right. It was a bazooka. We did not expect it to go into mortgage-backed securities. We did not expect that they would, you know, last week they announced providing liquidity in the repo market, which is bond buying, and it is cash injection, but a long-term and heavy intervention in the reserves of banks with the Fed's balance sheet, where they intend to keep these bonds on their balance sheet, $500 billion of Treasury bonds, $200 billion of mortgage-backed securities. This is financial crisis QE1 level intervention. It was a big deal. People can say, well, it didn't help the stock market today. And that's true. We're down 2,000 points. Maybe we
Starting point is 00:31:51 would have been down 4,000 without it, though. You don't really know. What I do know is credit markets have tightened up to some degree and improved. And the QE was not intended to help the next day in the market. It was intended to help the next month and three months to allow there to be liquidity in the system and market clearing transactions to take place. And then ultimately, what's very different is that they were not using QE here to manipulate the long end of the curve down and keep borrowing costs low. Borrowing costs are plenty low it was entirely a liquidity driven issue. And a vote of confidence that kind of Mario
Starting point is 00:32:32 Draghi in Europe you know seven eight years ago. We will do whatever it takes and so that that fed put has been reiterated it's not evident in the stock market today I understand that. But there are a lot of things behind the scenes that were a bigger concern than the stock market.
Starting point is 00:32:55 And I have a feeling you're going to see some of that trickle into risk assets in the days and weeks ahead. But to the degree that I'm going to close you out with anything practical to kind of take home, because we're going to wait to get more info on fiscal stimulus. We obviously day by day want to get more info on the flattening of the curve that they're going for regarding the diagnoses of COVID-19. But if there's anything that is kind of practical and material that I can leave you with, it is that even though the prices of some really wonderfully run companies and great brands and great operating enterprises in the American economy have been hit hard through this stock market saloon in the last several weeks, see some of the companies that then run into a pinch in their income statement, they then come out and announce what? That they need to suspend stock buybacks, not that they need to cut dividends. That's by design in our portfolio. We never have believed that the types of companies we own are incapable of running into distress or trouble. That's just not the way the world works. But we do know that stock buybacks are far easier for companies to walk away from temporarily when their cash position and cash flows require than dividends.
Starting point is 00:34:27 then dividends. And I'm not going to say any names on this podcast, but that's something I would focus on, that the dividends are being maintained. And we honestly understand that that may not feel like great consolation in a period where stocks are dropping 20% in a week, and you have two days that are half of Black Monday in the last week. I mean, it's been a roller coaster that I can't even believe. However, I really do want to reiterate the fundamental necessity of high-quality businesses. And if that's of any consolation to you, it's not a psychological or emotional or kind of semantic trick. It is an economically fundamental difference in the way that bonds and group clients are positioned versus various alternative mechanisms. of operating businesses, and they are paying us cash flow that we are going to expect in perpetuity. And in these difficult times, we hope that represents some consolation. Thank you to my whole investment committee, colleagues that have been on this call.
Starting point is 00:35:37 We will look forward to your participation in our conference call tomorrow, rsvp at thebonsongroup.com. If you have the information on the call and you don't have a question, there's no need to send an email. We'll have infinite capacity. But if you do have a question, send it to that email. And if you need the information sent to you,
Starting point is 00:35:57 send it to that email. Thank you for listening to The Dividend Cafe. Thank you for listening to The Dividend Cafe. Thank you. sources believe to be reliable. Any opinion, news, research, analyses, prices, or other information containing this research is provided as general market commentary. It does not constitute investment advice. The team at Hightower should not be in any way 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 reference 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 team and do not represent Thank you.

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