Yet Another Value Podcast - $FOUR: Shift4 at 6.5x EBITDA. Is the organic growth real? | Emeth Value Capital

Episode Date: September 22, 2026

Shift4 trades around six and a half times EBITDA while the company tells you organic growth is 11%. The stock was $120 eighteen months ago and it is $42 today. Andrew Carreon of Emeth Value Capital argues you are paying for zero growth or less, and he points at the piece almost nobody is tracking: the gross equipment under lease line buried in the footnotes, which has gone from a nominal $40 million before 2021 to a $400 million run rate today as Shift4 Dine gets deployed. More than 80% of those installs are net new merchants, not migrations off the legacy POS systems Shift4 already owns.I push back on the two things that keep value investors out of this name. First, the growth wall: the easy share gains from mid-sized restaurants running 1999-era on-prem systems are supposedly gone, and once that funnel empties you are in a churn fight with Toast and Square. Second, and more common, the distrust of management: they pulled the billion dollar free cash flow guide, they paid 12 to 13 times for Global Blue, they cut the buyback in Q2 after retiring 10% of the shares in three quarters, and they still will not name the acquisition they signed. We also get into what it means that Jared Isaacman is running NASA while owning 28% of the company and buying stock in the 40s, why he might be a back pocket activist, and the $1 billion mandatory convert that explains a real chunk of the 25% short interest.Andrew's write-up on Shift4: https://www.emethvaluecapital.com/letters-1This episode is sponsored by Trata: https://www.trata.com/four. Trata is two buy side investors hopping on an anonymous call and talking about a stock they own or follow, and the real issues they see in it. Go to trata.com/four to see the sample transcripts I used to prep for this episode.Chapters:(0:00) Intro(1:03) Sponsor: Trata(1:53) Why Shift4 keeps attracting value investors(3:12) What Shift4 is: restaurants, hotels, stadiums, luxury retail(5:14) Payments has been a value investor graveyard(9:23) Isaacman leaves for NASA. Is the magic gone?(13:07) Card present, card not present, and what integrated payments means(19:25) Restaurants: how Shift4 assembled the vertical(24:07) Shift4 Dine: the balance sheet line nobody is watching(27:00) PAR, Toast, and the competition pushback(33:12) Credit card surcharging and the 0% processing pitch(37:24) International: buy the sales team, do not build one(41:31) Is organic growth about to hit a wall?(47:34) Do you trust this management team?(53:31) SaaSpocalypse, AI, and why payments has not bounced(57:05) The M&A history, and the bids they turned down(60:14) The 2029 catalyst if Isaacman leaves NASA(61:19) How to build your own organic growth number(63:17) 25% short interest and the $1bn mandatory convert(66:30) DisclaimerAndrew Carreon / Emeth Value Capital: https://www.emethvaluecapital.com/letters-1Links:Yet Another Value Blog - https://www.yetanothervalueblog.comSee our legal disclaimer here: https://www.yetanothervalueblog.com/p/legal-and-disclaimer

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you're about to listen to yet another value podcast with your host me andrew walker today we've got a really great one for you why because there are two andrews on the podcast my friend andrew carri-on is on the podcast for the first time in a long time he is talking about shift four the ticker there is four i'm going to include a i mean he did his q2 letter has i've had value investor friends pitching shift four to me for years i've looked at shifers of the years his q2 letter has a 25 page just masterpiece of background work valuation all this sort of stuff on shift four i'm going to include a to them in the show notes, but we're going to dive into everything he talks about really interesting, fascinating company, interesting setup. I mean, look, pick your poison. It is a cheap company.

Their share buybacks. There's some questions about management because they've pulled targets. They've done some acquisitions that I think I had one person when I was prepping for this podcast said self-inflicted wound, some of the acquisitions they've done. But they've got a great history of acquisitions. Cheap company allocation, payment sector is destroyed, just all sorts of interesting stuff. So we're going to get there in one second. But first, over from our sponsors and I'll just hop into that read. The sponsor day is Trada. Trada.T-R-A-T-A-A-D-A-com.

If you've been listening to this podcast for a while, you know I love Trada. If you like this podcast, you will love Trada too. Trada is two by-side investors who are hopping on an anonymous call and they just talk about stocks that they own or stocks that they follow, whether they're bulls, bears, whatever,

and they talk about the underlying issues that they're seen in the company. And I think you're going to love it if you like this podcast. If you don't believe me, go to trota.com slash 4-F-O-U-R. And you can see a sample transcript that I use to prep for this podcast of people talking about the real issues that they're looking at when they're thinking about Shep 4.

So if you like this podcast, and I mean that both in the general yet another value podcast way and I mean that in the shift four ways, go check out Trada.com slash 4. That's T-R-A-T-A dot com slash 4 to see it for yourself. All right, hello, and welcome to Yet Another Value Podcast. I'm your host, Andrew Walker. With me today, I'm excited to have on for, I believe it's the third time. It's the first time in a long time. my friend, my fellow New Orleans native, Andrew carry on.

Andrew, how's it going? I'm doing great, Angie. Thanks for having me on. Yeah, the last two were energy pitches. So I'm coming back to firmly establish that I'm not an energy-only analyst. Well, those are a while ago, and this is about as hairy. This now is about as hairy as energy, I guess, in 2018 would have been. But we'll get there one second.

First, disclaimer, remind everyone nothing on this podcast is investing advice. There's a disclaimer in the show. notes. There's a disclaimer at the end of the podcast so you can see those if you're interested. All right. Andrew, the company we're going to talk about today is Shift 4. Tigger there is 4. F O you are. This is a company that I'm going to let you explain, but it's attracted a lot of value investors and your write-up, which your Q2 letter had, I think, the best write-up I've seen on it. Actually, when I put it in chat sheet-T and put some other notes and stuff, it was like, oh, this is so far in a way the best write-up on it. So chat-ch-ch-P-T is a big

fan of your writer. But you had a great write-up again. I'll include a link in the show notes for people to go check that out. But I'm really excited to talk about it today. So I'll just toss it over to you. What is Shift 4? Why are they so interesting? And we can kind of go from there. Yeah. Yeah, thanks for all that, Andrew. And yeah, I mean, like you mentioned, this is definitely probably unlike the two companies we talked about before, this is a company that I think a lot of people will probably be familiar with. But for those for those that aren't, shift 4 is a, vertically integrated payment processor. And specifically, they had a couple of very strong verticals,

one being restaurants where in the U.S., they're the number two restaurant POS behind Toast. And I'm sure we'll get into that because unlike Toast, who has kind of one core product, Schiffor is really kind of a Frankenstein and a lot of different stuff. And I think that's like a theme that will be repeated, really across all of their verticals. And I think it's a reason why there is so much controversy

and two sides to a lot of the debate for shift four. But they're a vertically integrated payment processor. They have a couple of very strong verticals. Restaurants is one. Hotels is another where they have one piece of software or another touching 40% of hotels in the United States. stadiums and event venues is another where they are the payment processor for 75% of professional sporting venues.

And then more recently, they have a vertical in luxury retail, which seems kind of like an odd niche. And we can get into kind of what led them into that category. But unlike a global payments or Pfizer or some of your other like ad in really big payment processors. Shift 4 is a little bit different than that. You know, certainly compared to those at, at 250 billion of payment volume. They're much smaller. And they really have some deep exposure into a couple of very specific verticals. And we can kind of take those one by one or, you know, start however you want. Well, you know, I'd actually like to start here. So again, shift four and we'll

talk valuation. We'll talk all verticals. We can talk anything you want. And again, I'd encourage people to read the letter. You've got this really deep history dating back to when, you know, the founder and CEO was a teenager and starts this business. You've got all their, you know, all their history, all their verticals and everything. But we'll talk to them. I guess I want to start here. You know, payments in general has been a value investors, a lot of value investors have been focused on it for the past year. And it's been a value investor graveyard for a lot of investors for the past year. And it's not just for investors. You know, I was prepping for this. The CFO here was at the Goldman Conference, I guess, a week ago.

And right at the end, he's talking about, hey, our capital allocation, like our shares, we think our share price is a gift. But then he kind of broadens out and he says payments in general has just been crushed, despite, you know, recurring revenue and stickiness and all this sort of stuff. So I just want to start at high level. Payments have been crushed. Shift 4 has been crushed. Is your thesis shift 4 more shift 4 specific?

Or is it more payments in general specific with shift 4? the way you played. And I realized that's like a little bit of both, but how much is this just payments is crushed and you were a value investor looking versus, hey, Shift 4 in particular is the super unique opportunity. Yeah, it's a great question. I think that for Shift 4 specifically, the whole payments overlay and payments getting absolutely annihilated was just kind of one layer of the cake of this thing going from 120-ish year, you know, literally 18 months ago, to now one third of that price. And so I guess like zooming back because it is, you know, what they say, right? Like nothing influences sentiment quite like price. And of course, vice versa. But it's easy to be

where we are today in 2026 and be like, ah, payments is awful. But it's not that long ago that you, you know, zoom back out and all of these companies were, you know, maybe not darlings is the right word, but certainly fairly priced and had reasonably high expectations. And I think that there's been some very industry-specific situations that have cast a shadow or the whole payment space, you know, the debacle with FISA and, you know, a lot of, a lot of issues with kind of, you know, it's not all public info where they're being sued over, over a lot of issues about transparency reporting and some issues there. And, you know, I think specifically for shift four, and I think it, you know, carry over for the whole payment space for

some reason. I understand it more of a shift more than the others, but, you know, layering the Saspocalypse on top of an already kind of wounded payment space just sent, you know, the whole space down even further. And it's really kind of perplexing because in my view, if you're talking about something that is, you know, certainly there's a lot of software, this whole notion of integrated payments, right, it is all software originated payment volumes for shift forward. That's not true for some of the legacy payment processors. But, in my view, being an integrated payments processor as a call it, like, go-to-market software operating, is one of the most defensible, easily, like, understandable defensible positions

versus, you know, something that might truly be able to be bidecoded. And so, you know, those tensions, I think, have kind of eased off. but as far as my interest, I think it has more to do with the nuts and bolts of the specific verticals that are in. And then that's why I'm sure we'll talk about, just the execution of this team if you really go back and understand the full history of the business with where we're at today. That's perfect. I'd like to go to the team now if that's okay. So, you know, I think for years, I mentioned Jerich Isaacman, who is now, I believe he's the head of NASA is his role. It might not be, exactly what he's called, but head of NASA is what he is.

He leaves the company in 2025 to go be the head of NASA. And his team basically takes over, right? Like his brother's co-founder, I think it is, is now the CEO and chair. Like his team takes over. So it's the same team, but kind of the visionary who, again, started this company when he's 16, grows it to a multibillion dollar company. He is gone. And I just want to ask because this is a company that was Azure Letter Details,

it was built through acquisitions. And they just did their largest acquisition ever, I believe, Global Blue in 2025. And you know, you do worry, hey, when the guy who built this company, when the founder who owned basically half the company, he still owns about a third of the company, I think is 28.6% is the exact metric. When he is gone, but the team is still in place and they're running his playbook, is some of the magic gone. You know, the Bulls without Jordan were still very good.

They might have won in 1994 or 95 if Scotty Pippen hadn't got a migraine, but they were not the Bulls who went 6 and 0 in the finals. and if he's gone to some of the magic gone and do you just kind of start drifting? So how do you feel about the team kind of post-Jarred? Yeah, I mean, that is a very fair question. I think my comfort with some of this comes from like what Jared himself said

when he kind of has signed his farewell at the Investor Day in 2025 when he said, you know, Taylor's going to be coming in as the CEO and I'm, you know, I am stepping off as a CEO, but Taylor knows he's losing a boss and getting a very activist shareholder. And so I have a lot of comfort and from the understanding that, you know, Jared is not not invested here.

It is an extremely large personal holding of his, and he's still, you know, he's adding actively earlier this year when prices got down. But I think stepping back, you know, again, kind of back to what I said, you know, nothing changes the sentiment quite like price. And if you look at that actual execution, you know, that the company has put up since, you know, it's not been nearly enough time. but, you know, since early 2025, there's not been any really obvious stumblings besides what I would say is stuff carried over from when Jared was still there, which was they had

kind of a succession of things. I think if you were to try to like piece back what led us to this, you know, really rough, you know, share price that we're at. I think a lot of it started at the guidance that they gave at the 2025 and yesterday that was. was, you know, a billion of free cash flow exiting 2027. And, you know, again, right before the Global Blue acquisition, I mean, they were trading at, you know, over $100 a share, putting out this really lofty guidance, having to ultimately walk that back, you know, running into broad payments, you know, a really rough payments broad landscape. And then Sasspocalypse, it's kind of just been an endless stream of bad things from a sentiment perspective. But if you look at how the business is

actually performed, I think that it's done quite well. Let's go to the business itself, right? Now, they've got lots of different verticals and lots of different things. I mean, I think a major one is they, if you go to a stadium, like one of ways I see them, I think I was at the Met Stadium the other day and I think all the terminals were shift four, you know, and these guys, par, sometimes those when I see them like, oh, that's a publicly treated company. I always laugh when I seen there. But, you know, one of the things, this is just me personally. And maybe this is because I'm getting all the end of all my mind is just getting out for chat GPT. But when I see a payments company, I always read the 10K and I nod along and I say, okay, I get what they do? And then if you were like,

Andrew, tell me the difference between PAR, Pfizer, uh, GPN and chip four. What do they do? where specifically the payments they were like, I don't know if I could tell you. So kind of what is shift four doing? Maybe I don't want to go into their differentiation versus every single company. But if I was looking at, you know, shift four versus Visa versus Pfizer, like what is the differences and what is shift four specifically doing? Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, I try to draw some of this out in the letter. But I think that for ones that people will be broadly most familiar with and probably like the gold standards, what I would say are definitively like the gold standards. the industry. I mean, one of the easiest points of differentiation to think about what is shift for versus what are some of the other payment processors. One kind of spectrum would be card present versus card not present. And so you have your stripes and your agins of the world who, again, I would say are probably the gold standards of the industry. Perfect. Yeah. Undeniable fabulous businesses. And really,

the genesis of those payment processors are, hey, you know, roll back to how the world really works, you know, still works in a lot of places, but how it definitively worked when, you know, e-commerce became a thing was you had your traditional payment processing that was a bank acquiring process. And, you know, what used to be just accepting a card with a physical terminal now that you have an e-commerce website, there is no physical terminal. So how do we accept cards as a online e-commerce business? That's when you have this creation of the virtual payment gateway. And so you had this situation where, you know, over time, people like Stripe and people

like Adion said, like, why does it make sense that there's a gateway and that there's a payment processor. Like, these should just be the same thing. Like, why do I have to get a gateway and then get a payment processor? Can I just get like one solution? And so to really dramatically vastly oversimplify, you know, stripe and ad in, that's kind of the crux of like, they took what was two separate things that were both pretty outdated in a e-commerce world where, you know, Amazon is eating the world and said,

hey, here's payments in the form of a acquire and gateway in one, and this is your solution. But again, their genesis is card not present. E-commerce, you're putting your card details in. And they are fabulous for that. Shift four, if you look across almost all of the verticals, it is card present. You're eating at a restaurant. You're going to a stadium. You're shopping in an Hermes store.

you're physically, you're physically tapping your car. And there are some important differences there. And then the other vertical I would say is really important is just what is a very overused term, but integrated payments versus non-integrated payments. And so, like, I'm sure you've been to, you know, pick your restaurant where they take your order and then at the end of the day, they get a little handheld and then they key in, you know, what your, what your sales price is and then hand it to you to tap. Well, that physical, you know, dumb payment terminal is not integrated with anything in your system.

You know, it's very easy to get something wrong. You know, the data doesn't necessarily flow through to all your accounting back office software. It's not integrated with anything. And so, as opposed to like a FI server or a global payments where they are very free, and you know, non-integrated payments, shift for literally everything that they do is software integrated payments. And so, so if I was thinking about this, if you're at the coffee shop and, you know, you order a large coffee and the guy types it in and, you know, he had your shot of whatever you wanted. And then he just turns the terminal to you and you tap your card. That would

be integrated if I'm kind of thinking about that. That's right. That's right. Can I just ask you one quick question? You mentioned strike as non-card present, right? And The way I know Stripe as a dumb, dumb consumer is, you know, when I go to a food truck or something, and the guy has the little white square that he plugs into the top of his phone and then he swipes. And like, that's hard present. Is that just, so that's just how I know them. And obviously, I know they're bigger. But if somebody was listened to it, they're like, oh, well, that's Stripe, that's card present.

Like, how does that compare to shift for? Yeah, so square. You might be thinking it's square. Oh, that's square. Okay. Yeah. I just ted it off my head. Yep.

That makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But square, yeah, but square is. absolutely heavily card present and also a bit different in that they obviously have a very, very big with cash app, you know, consumer. Yeah, lots of,

and they've got that old title acquisition. Maybe they'll dominate the music business at some point. But I think all of this kind of points to like payments is really complicated. And one of the things that I think is very attractive about shift four is that unlike a global or unlike a FISA, you can take this very, very, you know, challenging, you know, challenging to understand landscape and kind of boil it down to like, I understand why we win in these specific verticals. And if we continue to do well in these specific verticals, this is very, very undervalue. And so I think that's part of attraction here.

The verticals that I probably know and think about them best in our restaurants, in part because of your, you're right up and in part because I've looked at par, before and I've done a little bit on toast. So restaurants and then a little bit stadiums, I would say. So maybe we could just break down, you know, what Schiffor does. And let's do restaurants because that's the broadest and people are most familiar with what the shift four does, why they have a right to win, all that sort of stuff. And I think people can kind of figure out the rest of those verticals from there. For sure. Yeah, restaurants is a really important vertical. If you look at, if you look at the business today as they kind of define the important revenue

metric across all of the business today, call it two and a half billion of gross revenue less network fees, roughly. The restaurant vertical is roughly a billion of that 2.5. But it is a very, very profitable, you know, my numbers are somewhere in the 450 million of EBITDA from the restaurant's vertical. And this really, the restaurant's vertical really is like when they came, public in 2020 in the heart of COVID. It was a 80% plus restaurants by payment volume business.

And going back to how this company was assembled over time, they bought, you know, if you mentioned par, there's a, you know, light speed out there. Obviously, you know, light speed being another public company, you know, spot on, toast, obviously, there's a lot of different restaurant POS systems. And how Schiffor really established itself in the restaurant space is that they acquired, you know, in 2017, three very large, on-prem restaurant POS system. So obviously, when you think about toast, when you think about SkyTib today, it is a, you know, usually working off an Android device that is software from the cloud.

So you're not, you know, you don't have a server in your back office next to where you're making pizza or whatever. It's a cloud-enabled piece of software that runs on an Android device. And same with your handheld and whatever devices that you might use from a player like Spot on Toast, SkyTab, etc. of the sky tab being shiftboard shipboard dine is what's now called and so when there were a handful of groups that just failed to make this jump from being a on-prem POS to jumping to a cloud product and as a result we're really really suffering and not only did they fail to make that jump you know this is right at the same time where square came in and they really you know square was really the first group to make you know software plus

payments, a real business model. And this is before Toast existed. And so these groups, you know, restaurant manager, future POS, and POSA touch, you know, these first three POS systems brought them,

you know, really big chunk of merchants, call it like 80,000 or so restaurant locations. And the whole playbook was basically how do we take these restaurant locations that are running a POS software and attach payments to it. And really, really attractive because when you can attach payments to what was a on-prem POS software where the bulk of your revenue was from that initial sale and your maintenance fee

is pretty low, the revenue uplift you get when you attach payments, I call it like a 50 to 80 bit spread, you know, it's like a, it's like a 10xing of your revenue. And you can, well, not not of your revenue, right? It's a 10xing of your, your kind of profits, right? Because the revenue might be small, but it's super high gross margin. Yeah, both, both in essence, because the revenue is extremely high flow through. Um, what all that to say is that they were acquiring shots on gold. And, and that, that restaurant corpus still exists. And so this became a playbook where, you know, there's three original POS systems and software in restaurants. They bought in 2017. They bought Focus POS in 2023. They bought Revolent in 2024. And then now they're kind of

replicating that playbook internationally. But really the most important thing within restaurants was, and I'm sure we'll dive into more of this, is that in 2021, they really came out with their first in-house POS product. And that's what's now shift forward. dying. And, you know, I think that one of the realizations that I had as I was really, really ramping my work up here is just how quickly that product is getting adopted and how that is being missed by a lot of people. And it's partially because they don't necessarily give their segment by segment breakdowns to you, you know, spoon fed. But if you look at shift force balance sheet.

The easiest way to break this apart is you go to, they have a line item that is gross equipment, gross equipment under lease. And the net, the net figure is on the balance sheet, but you can actually get the gross figure just by going into the, you know, the ballot of footnotes. And it's very, you know, it's, it's fairly clean. Like before, before shift four dime POS started in 2021, there was call it like a non- nominal $40 million line item from their original Harbor Touch POS systems. But to kind of walk you through the year to year, 2021, you know, like I mentioned, like

I mentioned, like $70 million, $20203, $180, $2024, $250, $250, $250, $3.40. Now we're at a run rate of $400 mid-2020. and you can walk through, okay, well, I know, roughly speaking, each of these shift four Dyn POS systems cost shift four, 2,000 per unit. I know that roughly each workstation is, pick your number at 300 to 350K, AUB per, you know, per workstation, pick your spread number. I use 80 bibs. And then $29 a month per per per.

workstation and I'll leave it to the listeners to kind of do the math on that. But this progression from, you know, in 2021 at launch of 70 million to now on a run rate of 400 million, you know, of a 4xing over over that pretty short time frame is driving a lot of incremental economics. And I think people aren't really appreciating that like for the first time in a while, shift four has a really powerful, you know, organic homegrown product here. And it's not just about, it's not just about buying old PLS systems and hoping to attach payments anymore. This is a true organic growth story. Let me ask two questions on that. So when you lay this out, it sounds great. But, you know, again, I did podcast on part technology and I looked at them multiple times. And it's

slightly different. I mean, that was much more about, hey, we're going to, you know, it wasn't about the internal growth from the existing customers so much as it was, we're going to win McDonald's and roll, you know, like it, but they want a lot of things. And when I look at Toast, toast has probably been a disappointment in the stock market. I don't follow that as closely, but, you know, I'm just looking at the past year. It's 40 a year ago. It's 15 today. And I don't know where at IPO is, but I'm sure it's way down since IPO. I think it IPOs at about 80 or something in 2021. Oh, no, sorry, that's par of stock shod. I'm like, I should need to be better for it. But anyway, I don't think Toast has done that well either.

But for both of those, like the pitch you're laying out sounds very familiar to me from them. And I guess the two things I'd push it back is, number one, hey, I've heard this pitch before, and it sounds great. And it just hasn't really worked. And that could be, hey, you know, all these guys, again, par's starting at a much higher multiple and they're grown into it. Could be that. Or it could be, hey, we're running to the SaaS Poclips at the back end. But I'll say, like, hey, it does seem there's a lot of competition here.

And like, in your letter, you detail how someone who's running toast, if they switch to shift four, they could save like $40,000 over five years, I think is what the economically lay out. And I say, that's awesome. But at some point, doesn't that invite a competitive response where Toast is protecting their customers and do you run into a growth wall because everybody's price cutting? So I threw a lot out to you, but it just seems like this is a competitive industry and I've heard it before. And it feels like the competition always comes and these stories just haven't worked out.

Yeah, that's fair. I do think that there's a lot of differences between PAR specifically and shift for. And so again, I have not, there's a lot of very smart investors who own PARs. I want to say that I am very open to being corrected and I'm sure I will be. So let me just preface all that I will say with that. But I think one of the issues fundamentally with PAR is that they are trying to go out in these enterprise accounts. And that is great.

But, you know, my PAR also doesn't really monetize through payments. you know, my understanding apart that they do have some sliver of monetization of payments, but it's effectively a gateway. You know, when you sign up a Wendy's or you sign up wherever, you know, part of the issue with having clients like that is that if you do, you know, A, they're just not going to sign into a restaurant POS where they don't have complete flexibility to change their payment processor because because of their scale, they're going to negotiate that payment spread down to such a low rate that they want a gateway that is a Switzerland neutral,

allows them to go to Chase Payment Tech, allows them to go to FISA, allows them to go to Global and just say, give me the lowest rate. And so when you're a PAR and you're trying to get those kinds of customers or when you're a Q who's doing phenomenally well, and I would say that actually PARs main issue is Q, because they're really good. Both going after those enterprise-scale customers, you can't really monetize payments.

So that's issue number one. I would say that par is just not really comparable. Toast is doing phenomenally well. I would say it's expensive for my blood, but I think that it's a phenomenal company. I think they're doing really, really well. You know, they're adding a lot of net merchants every single quarter. And it is a very sticky product. So it's hard to argue with their actual fundamental APIs that they're hitting.

Um, what I would say is that like if I think about shift four dime POS, the real, the real players that I think that are worth worrying about are square for sure. And they would play on, you know, the lower end of the spectrum and then toast. And I would say if you took SkyTab or shift or dime POS square and toast, I would say that all three of those groups are. are winning quite a bit right now. And the question is like, where is that coming from? And I think what people are failing to understand is that like right now, shift four dine POS is call it 50,000 locations. Toast is much bigger at 160,000 locations.

I kind of back into a similar 50,000 U.S. restaurant locations for square. And that, you know, altogether gets you to 260,000, but there's $800,000. thousand U.S. restaurant locations. A ton of those locations are still using an old Oracle RES, you know, 3,700 BOS system. A ton of those groups are still using an old NCR system. A ton of those groups are using a touch bistro or, you know, hunger rush or there's, there is, it is a, you know, part of the reason why their M&A playbook has worked so well in restaurants is because it is a really, really fragmented world out there. I know you're in New Orleans and I'm from New Orleans.

Whenever I think about these things, I think about, you know, when I go into a local or a newer restaurant chain or something or someplace in New York, it's always got, you know, tapped pay done. But when I start going to some of the good New Orleans spots, you know, a lot of times you walk in and your report had the image of the processors with the little, the paper on top to print the receipts out. And, you know, they've got the old ones. and you're like, oh, it has to dial up to get the card

and those are still out there. And like, that's where all the show is going from. Yeah, that and then also like you just think about, again, US specific. And this creates its own challenges and opportunities. But 800,000 restaurant locations, there's 50,000 new openings per year. And so every single year,

you've got a cohort of 50,000 where that's up for graphs. And kind of a problem too, because obviously that 800, you know, There's death of restaurants and that's an issue too. Let me let me ask you just a small one. This is so far afield, but I have to ask so I'm curious. You know, I get furious whenever I go to a restaurant and all the restaurants have the 3.5% charge if you use a credit card, right?

So the chance to pass it on. And that's really stepped up in the past three years, I would say. I'm not going to say that's going to make or break a thesis here. But it does, look, this is a business that gets. it's paid in part on payment volumes. And if everybody's pushing you towards cash, I think wrongly because I think restaurants over underestimate the cost of just the carry

and the security and all that. But if everybody's pushing you to cash and like Visa and MasterCard are always kind of flexing their oligopoly power and taking pricing, is that a risk on the long term? How does that even impact the thesis here? That's a great question. Yeah, I didn't, I had to like cut myself off on the letter.

But this is actually, I think a material positive for ship for. Interesting. And one of the reasons I would say that is because this, what you're calling credit card surcharging, it is a very, very common. It's becoming much, much more common when you're Chateau Cafe here in New Orleans. Oh my gosh, you just said my mom's your restaurant.

And Andrew, can I tell you a secret? I hate Chateau Cafe. The Petit Cafe is two blocks down the, down the, and it is so much better. I hate Chateau Cafe. Well, you know what? They use a shift four dime DOS. I go there. And when you go to Shottoff Cafe and they are using credit cards, they're saying,

why are we paying this 3% credit card fee? Let's just pass it on. And that's that trend that you're talking about is really, really ramping up. And what people like Shift 4 have done to take advantage of this is they are now through their distribution channel and internal sales reps, basically, positioning or advertising shift for dine as a 0% payment processing fee solution. Where they say you can pay 0% payment processing because with our solution, we will set up your credit card surcharging so that it just gets automatically passed on. Oh, and by the way, for our hardware, we don't charge for it either. You just get it. And so do you want to pay $5,000 for toast and not have credit card surging or do you want us to set this up for you?

And with toasts, you can obviously do the credit card pass through as well. But there are many different bottoms out there that still do not have that set up as a base feature yet. And so for the reason I say that I think it's a material positive is because now you kind of have like the friendly middleman dynamic, right, where if your Chateau Cafe and a year ago, you instituted this credit card surcharging process, and Andrew Walker's mom is still coming every day for her coffee. And you can see in your numbers that you have not lost customers, what incentive do you have to push back on shift four about your payment processing spread? You basically have no incentive.

And what incentive do you have if square comes to you and says, I can save you 10 basis points on payment processing? Well, what's the point? I'm already passing the whole thing through. And so I actually think that this credit card surcharging pass through is very material positive. Something that's maybe worth pointing out, though, is that this is not legal in every country. And so shift four dine is now in the process of, you know, they just launched in Spain and Australia. They've been in the UK and Germany now for a little bit. This was part of the other reason when you mentioned it's a very competitive field.

all these systems that we all know of. Part of the thing that gives me comfort here, too, is that the numbers that I laid out for the gross deployed assets for Shift 4-9 POS, those are all largely U.S. deployments, and they're, you know, pick your numbers for what you want to assume for international, but they're just getting going there. And so I do think that the credit card surcharging is a positive. Let me quickly ask you on international.

I don't want to dive too much into international. It's been 40 minutes. I've got so much I so want to ask you, but just international, you know, whenever you've got a business and I've pushed back on so many businesses where if you're a financial, like part of the thing is the local regulatory burden, right? It is pretty extreme. And when I think about shift for like, hey, all these restaurants you're selling to, it requires a local sales force and there's local specializations, as you point out, like, can you press credit card through or not taxes, all this sort of stuff. And there's already people in foreign markets who have it. So you're going to go, you have to hire Salesforce and you kind of have to engage in that. turf war to take accounts. And I understand everyone wants to grow and there is some, there is some leveraging of tech spending all that sort of stuff. But I guess just my question on international because I don't think you're saying like, hey, if international doesn't work, this thesis is up in shambles.

But I hear people talking about international like a free call option. Obviously, they just did the global blue acquisition. They're spending time on this. And I kind of look at international. I don't know why we have a right to win here. It seems, it seems like more, I don't want to say, empire building, but I'd rather they just focus in the core market. So I'd just love to ask you those questions on international. Yeah, it's very fair. And this will get into like the different

flavors of shift force M&A as well, because part of what they said is like, okay, well, there are plenty of businesses who have tried to do the international thing and it has not worked out. And if you look at how we're doing international, it is quite a bit different. And so shift war's history, if you go up until, you know, being founded in 1999, all the way to when they IPOed in 2020, when they IPOed in 2020, the business was almost 100% external Salesforce. You know, they worked through 7,000 different external channel partners, all of these very small ISO vars that serve, you know, exactly the Chateau Cafe types, where you where they have a local, you know, that local portfolio of 40 different customers that they help with IT.

And that's how Harvard Touch and that's how, you know, all these other products for Shiff 4 originally came to market. And I'm sure we'll talk about when they insource some of that later on. But all that to say is that when they've gone to the UK, when they've gone to Germany, when they've gone to some of these other countries, they have intentionally gone with that same exact approach, a variable OPEX sales force using a local distribution partner, a local ISO, a local bar, because until you get the density, it does not make sense to stand up your own internal sales force in a specific country until you really have, you know, the volumes picked up.

contrast that with like Australia where what they did instead in Australia is they bought smart pay and smart pay like one of the things that they said they definitely didn't want to do either basically when you when you get down to it what they said is what hasn't worked for people trying to branch internationally and failing is building your own sales team from the ground up and thinking that that's kind of like work in any kind of reasonable the timeframe. So what we'll do is we'll work through VARs where our OPX is variable, or we're going to buy a sales team that already works and basically just plug in our own products. And so when they bought Vectron and when they bought SmartPay, those acquisitions,

yes, they came with their own EBITDA revenue, but principally, you know, they were to buy a local sales team who already knew how to sale in Australia, already were productive, already were proven, and then just giving them a better product and saying, go sell. Let me hard shift. So again, I've looked at this company in the past several times. I know a lot of friends who are along this. I know a lot of friends who've passed on this. So I kind of ping some friends coming in on, hey, when we were talking about shift four,

like, why did you pass and stuff? And here are, and there were some great trotter calls. should mention that also had really interesting discussions. They're sponsoring this episode, so I'll be a show note there too just to get a sponsor plug. But let me inch you with the three most interesting kind of other people pushbacks I got because I think these are really interesting. I think there'll be the most frequent pushback I got from people is, hey, you know, you and I've talked, we haven't really hit valuation discussion, but this is trading quite cheaply. You know, you can tell me if you feel like I'm saying anything here, but maybe six to seven times

EBDA for a company that says their organic growth is about 11% right now, right? And I think they think they can sustain that. And tell me if you feel wrong. The most frequent pushback I got from Bears is, hey, the easy market share gains that they're going to get, the ones that you've talked about, you know, the picking off the middle-sized restaurant groups that are on just like super legacy on-premises, those are gone. So they're saying, hey, the organic growth rates are going to come down really quickly. And once you do that, you get into that churn battle you're talking about. So all of a sudden, you're getting into this 2 to 3% organic growth. And I think a lot of the people who are avoiding this are saying, I just don't want to be there when the organic

growth rate really starts to decline because they think there's a wall on their organic growth rate. So I'd love to get it. And you mentioned like, hey, the big three square toast and these guys have, I think it was 250,000 of the 800,000 restaurants. That's a long run way to grow. But once you start doing the turn math, you are starting to talk about slowing down pretty quickly there. Yeah, those are all fair questions. So what I would say is specifically, I think you framed it correctly, like six and a half times EBAA, company says 11%, let's say 10 to 11% organic growth. I think part of the reason why some people feel pretty wrong here is that I think that they claimed higher maybe in the past. And so we can,

can get into that later. But what I would say is that I think that there is some misunderstanding here about how these old POS deals work. Because one of the things I think is surprising to people is that you can ask the company, but you can get at it your own ways to is that the vast majority, call it 80% plus of shift four dine POS installs are 100% net new merchants to shift forward. They are not transitions from old POS systems. And I think people don't quite understand that. Part of the reason for that is that you go talk to, again, a Chateau Cafe or that would be a good example, but you go talk to some of these old merchants that are on a POS that are on a future POS. And you go behind the counter and you see this like effectively

just, you know, 20 year old piece of software and you're like, what are you doing with this? but you see a shift 4 logo for the payments processing. For almost all of these, the goal has been take a software-only customer and attach payments. Don't move them on to shift-4-dine POS. If they want to upgrade, that's fine. But your goal is not to transition them

because then you have a whole piece of hardware spend that you didn't have to have. Really what you want is attaching payments. And if you talk to a lot of these groups that are still, you know, to be clear, 60,000 restaurant locations still using all the legacy systems that shift four owns. And they would say, you know, I'm summarizing between a lot of different calls. Why on earth would I move to toast? Why on earth would I move to shift four dime POS?

I pay $0 per month for my software. I bought this license in, you know, whatever. 1999. We're still part in. And I have the computer literally right here and it works. And occasionally it breaks and my ISO guy comes, you know, turns a button on and it works again. And so why on earth what I sign up to pay whatever it is per month when my system works completely fine? And what Shift 4 has done is basically takes takes those groups and say, that's totally fine, but attach our payments to it because you're using FISAver.

using FISA, but they're charging you 70 bits, we'll charge you 50 bets. And they can do that because they have these 7,000 ISO relationships where they just incentivize them to attach payments to all these shots on goal. And so anyways, long-in-way of saying is that when people say like, oh, there's this narrative that, A, they need to retop up the funnel of these POSs because without these transitions from old POS to SkyTab, the growth. rates, lows or whatnot, the vast majority of people coming into SkyTab slash Shift 4-D-N-P-O-S are 100% new to Shift 4. They are not coming from an old POS acquisition.

So that's that's the most critical point. And then, you know, probably not an answer if people want to hear, but like being at $42 a share solves a lot of issues. And when you're at $90 a share or $100 a share and you really need to figure out, You know, like the most common thing that I hear is, well, what's organic growth? And yeah, and it's like, I don't know if organic growth is 5% or 10% could be 12. And I can get into, you know, vertical by vertical, why I think it's actually double digits. You're paying for zero or less in my view right now.

Like, and so it's not that. I can tell you that for sure. Let me jump off that because I think that actually really brings me. nicely to my next question. This is actually probably the question I got most. I mean, organic growth just jumps in my head, but you said, I don't know if organic growth is five or 10. It could be 12, right? The company lays out 11% organic growth in Q2. Now, that doesn't mean it's LTM or Ford, but that's what they're out. I just, when I talk to people and I have it, and I think people hear you have it too. I heard a lot of people who are just distrustful of management here.

You know, I heard a lot of people who said global blue was a self-inflicted mistake. The company, as you said, they laid out kind of medium term cash flow guidance, and then they took those out. And I just hear basically a lot of distrust of management and a lot of, you know, in Q2, right? They're buying back shares. And then in Q2, they way take down the share buyback. And then as I said earlier, the CFO, a week ago says, our stock price is attractive, like this is a gift. We're going to buy back shares. We couldn't buy in Q2 because we had all these temporary cash flow headwinds and we want to stay within our leverage targets. But I just, I get a general distrust of management. And it is a little bit scary when you've got a company who, hey, the organic growth is kind of in the eyes of the beholder

and I don't quite trust management. And there's all these integrations going on at once. Like, that is a little bit of a scary place. So again, I threw a lot out of you and it's hard to say, do you trust management? But I feel like that's the most frequent bear case people are coming to. No, that's fair. I guess maybe to address one point head on, I do think, that there's it's undeniable that I think will global blue map out to the same kind of economics that they've had in other past acquisitions it seems almost impossible right they've had some as you detailed they've had some acquisitions that they bought for like less than one times post synergy ebidavit so if that's the bar it's like yeah you can't always do that right and they

they you know they paid a pretty optically expensive multiple for global blue they paid like 13 12 13 times depending on how you want to look at it um But my view is that they've, you know, what they've laid out is very much like in play. There's nothing that's been disproven about the 80 million of synergies that they're expecting to get next year on top of the global blue numbers. Those are all predicated on a similar kind of like shift war playbook of cross-selling payments, right? Global Blue for people who aren't familiar, it's a tax-free shopping. the largest provider of tax-free shopping. So when you go to Paris, buy a handbag,

there's a VAT tax, a 20% VAT tax. If you're coming from the U.S. or a country outside of Paris, you can reclaim that VAT tax when you leave the country. Global Blue is a 70% market share in tax-free shopping, and it is a very, very, very sticky product because you're integrating with customs authorities, tax authorities, and you have these customers like Hermes and Gucci who are very, very sensitive about how their end clients are treated.

And so what Chifor, the basic thought behind buying that was buy Global Blue and you have this kind of killer application that has a lot of market share, how can we go to all those merchants and effectively attach payments onto that killer piece of software. And that playbook, I think, you know, I think we'll have a better way to assess that in 12 to 18 months than we do now. But it's very much in play. Back to your point about do I trust management. Yes is the answer to that. And I think, you know, again, there's no, I'm going to repeat this again, but like there's nothing that, you know, informs sentiment quite like price of the stock is what I'm saying.

You know, it's easy to have a really bad narrative when the stock price is going down and vice versa. And, you know, I think that the, I think that the reality is here is that some of this was maybe the current management's fault. Some of it, I think you could probably pin on Jared or just a result of over optimism. But I really do think a lot of it came from this billion dollar free cash flow. exit guidance, having to walk that back. You know, if you go prior to that, they really had never missed guidance ever.

And that was kind of a blunder. And then now you have a situation where everybody who was once skeptical of global blue, you now have the Iran war causing some headwind and saying, see, told you so, like, that was a mistake of an acquisition. And so my view at a very, very high level is, you would be absolutely crazy, and again, I guess maybe this is a bit strong to say, but you would be absolutely crazy to go through their track record since inception and say, hey, these guys have increased EBITDA 5x since they IPOed in 2020.

On a per share basis, it's 12x. They've increased EBITDA per share of 12x over a seven-year time frame or a six-year timeframe. Are they owed the benefit of doubt? my answer to that would unequivocally be absolutely. And by the way, like buying back stock, you know, they bought back 10% of the shares in the last three quarters. I like that. I think that's a great idea.

And, you know, you had this more recent situation where people are wondering why they didn't disclose what the exact acquisition is that they bought or that they signed up for in Q2 and wondering if they're hiding the ball, et cetera. people come up with all kinds of crazy stuff. But, you know, I hear you, but that is always a scary place to be. You know, whenever you're starting to question, you're just like, oh, let me go to, so we've said SaaSpocalypse a few times, right? And the SaaSpocalypse, I think it probably peaks in March. And the IGV is down like 50%. And it's bounced quite a bit since then.

And payments is getting hit like crazy over the same timeframe. The only difference between the SaaSpocalypse and payments, you know, they're thrown together, software has bounced back a ton and payments hasn't really. And now this is payments broadly in general, but that's a little surprising to me. You know, I was doing a lot of work on software at the time and you said nothing drives narrative like price. And I think the price was getting in a lot of people's heads with, hey, all these software companies are terminal about terminal zeros.

But, you know, payments, as you mentioned, it's harder for me to see like AI displacing payments just because it's a lot of local restaurants. Are you telling me the local restaurant guy who, as you said, is still running a computer on 1999? All of a sudden he's going to have AI run all his payments. Like it seems pretty crazy. There's a lot of legal tax liability, all that sort of stuff. What is the AI bear case for payments or just what is the payments doomed case that is creating so much bearishness among all of these? It's a very good question.

You're right that they certainly have not bounced back as much. My, like, I think it's very overly simplistic view that this is. that there are some like a FISA that have, you know, idiosyncratic issues that maybe are keeping them from, you know, going through this whole investor day, laying out all the points and having the CEO literally leave the business like mid-flight the next month. I mean, I did a FISER podcast and I remember one, a few people were like, is the CEO a psychopath? Like, I think that was related to, we're not going to do acquisitions and then an acquisition, but people were wondering if it was a psychopath and that's always a fun place to be in.

So I think there are within payments some idiosyncratic reasons why things have not, you know, bounced with software. But I think at a high level, too, it's just for payments in general tend to be a little bit more like business cycle sensitive. And people looking at rates going up now and, you know, oil at $106 and saying, oh my gosh, like all of, you know, all of these payments are levered consumption plays. levered consumer spending, why would I own that? And I think that that's maybe the simple take. In my view would be, you own it because even though, you know,

restaurants same store sales might be plus or minus two, whatever it might be, when you do 50,000 new installs, that dwarfs anything about what the same store sales of those restaurants are. It's like an irrelevant factor. And so, yeah, that matters if your global payments or your FISA and you're living and dying on like, is it going to be 2% growth or is it going to be negative because of spending. But when you're toast or when you're shift four and you have that many new installs, it's kind of irrelevant.

And then, you know, Adion has bounced a decent bit. But like, again, it's hard to square that too because that's such a phenomenal business. and it's hard to square what's going on there too. But yeah, that would have been my view is I think it's more just people looking at payments broadly and saying payments, levered consumer spending, rates going up, bad, don't own. Let me shift again. I think it's more on the management side, but I'll do this and then we can kind of wrap this up because you've been generous with your time.

It's been almost a full hour at this point. But the M&A history here. So in late 2024 or late 2023, they say they're running a process. There's lots of reporting that a lot of different strategic parties are looking. I think in early 2024, Bloomberg reports that Jared, who's still CEO at the time, says, hey, we just don't think any of the bids fairly value us, and we're going to turn them all down and go stand alone. Q1, 2024, they go on a call and they say, look, we've got a high view of the business.

You can look at analyst targets. We agree with the higher end of the analyst targets. It's, you know, I think that would have applied 120, $140 sell price. Nobody hit it, so we're staying standalone. And then in 2025, they go the other way. And they actually buy Global Blue for a pretty hefty multiple pre-cinergies, right? I guess, you know, with that history and then, oh, the one other thing I'll lay in, we talked with the share buybacks, you know, Jared has bought some stock.

He bought about $16 million worth of stock when the stocks in the 80s, and he buys another $20 million or so when the stock's in the 40s earlier this year. How do you think the company is kind of thinking about their fundamental value, their strategic value, their go forward path when I just lay all of that out for you? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, maybe like a little bit different of a, of like a founder, owner in Jared. And that I think he has explicitly said, you know, when I think about like the future of my kids, I don't think about them running Shafour. I don't think that's going to be. Well, he's not running Chafour anymore.

So unless he's going to run that. activist campaign and then reinstall himself out of that. Right. And so this is not like, will be forever in my family legacy, like founder, business type of thing. I think that he is very commercial about how he thinks about the business. And to some extent, that gives me some optimism because at $40, you know, $42 a share here right now with Jared owning 28%, them buying back a bunch of stock, him, you know, I think he bought 36 million earlier this year. in the 40s. You know, I think that,

I think that, you know, his point about being an activist shareholder is absolutely, you know, in play. If we're sitting here at 42 in a year's time or in 18 months, I think that you could absolutely have him come to the board and say, listen, guys, time to make something happen here. Time to like fix this price.

And, you know, go back through the history of when he, you know, every quarterly transfer call that he's been on since, you know, since they came public. And like, he is not one to shy away from giving his opinion on if the company is barely priced or not. And he's also a pretty aggressive guy. So I think that that's kind of more of a back pocket call option. But I think that getting a, you know, getting acquired or forcing a process here again, if things don't fix themselves is absolutely possible. It's funny because I don't quite know how the head of NASA works, but I would guess in 2008, if there is a change of, well, there will be a change of administration because unless

we get a third term president, there's no third term. I would guess he's out as head of NASA. And I was kind of wondering, hey, is there a 20209 catalyst where he's out of head of NASA, maybe he owns 35% of the company through buybacks and stuff. And, you know, two months after he's out, you get a 13 DA that says, hey, I've partnered with pick private equity firm and we want to take this company private. I have been kind of thinking about that in the back of my mind. That's right. I mean, you know, Starlink, they do the, this would be an easy Starlink acquisition. Starlink, SpaceX, with that valuation, could acquire just about anything, right? Look, this has been great, Andrew. I mean, again, I can't tell you, I learned so much from the write-up,

just in terms of we're not going to get to ISOs, but, you know, there's the conflict of interest where they roll out a superior product that's cheaper and the eyes are like, well, we'll get paid less on this. There's so much interesting detail, including concern. But anything you think we should have hit that we didn't quite get to? Yeah, maybe just like as a very broad point on the organic growth point, because I think it is important to people, is that one of the things that I would say for people that are wanting to go down that rabbit hole is that, you know, today more than ever probably in the history of the business, you have as much transparency as you've ever had on wanting to build. your own organic growth number, right? And so take the like 1.1 billion of Iva da

and of the business, well, Global Blue before they acquired it was a completely standalone business. You can, it was a public standalone business. So you can go look through as much data as you want on Global Blue and come to your own assumptions about what you think a fair or not fair organic growth rate is for that piece of the business. The management team would tell you and the history of global blue would tell you, like somewhere in the neighborhood of high single digits to low double digits, EBITs, EBITs per growth per year. Fenerro was a very big acquisition that they acquired, which it basically gave them the European rails to run their payments business internationally. What a lot of people don't know is that

Fonaro still publishes their own standalone financials. And so that accounts for about 30 billion of the $250 billion in payment volume. And you can see for that specific segment, the exact growth. And so I'm happy to point people in the direction there, but you can see, and it's growing very quickly. And so you can get the organic growth rate in Panaro. You know, go by vertical.

And usually there is a way to get to the organic growth. Using the kind of like, oh, they do M&A, and that must be feeling the organic. growth is kind of a lazy way to kind of cast off what I think is truly a very, very high quality business here. That's great. Let's see. Okay, I think we hit everything. You know, I will just ask one more question as long as I've got you. Might as well, right? There's a pretty high short interest here. I don't want to say it's crazy. And they do have the converts, which I haven't looked at them. I think they're way out of the money. So I doubt anybody's like really hedging this with converts.

but it's like 25% of the float is short. Yeah. Look, I think I've gone through all the things, you know, the distrust of management, the questions are going to occur, the AI fears. Is there anything you've, I mean, again, you've got, I'm going to include a link a showdown. You've got this great public credit there. Is there anything that shorts have pressed at you on that like kind of explains why the

short interest is so high? So I do think that, so when they, when they bought Global Blue, Google was a $2.6 billion acquisition, they have a $1 billion convert that converts. to between 9.8 million and 12.2 million shares in in 2028. So you can actually see that step up in 2025 when they issued that convert. And pick your number, but my number is like it's probably $6 million, six to seven million of the shares. Because there is a capped range between 80 and 106.

And as you go down, you know, as you fall below the $80 threshold, it means you're issuing $12.2 million shares. And as you go up past $100, then it gets to the $9.8. And so as you actually fall down, you have to actually hedge more on that convert. And so it's not perfectly knowable what that number is, but I think that in reality, you know, whether it's $8 million of shares actually short or $7 million, it's hard to know. It's not $25. 5%, that's for sure. Okay. But I've not heard a really great short, you know, thesis or pushback.

I certainly haven't had anybody come up. I think it's a lot of the questions that you ask of, you know, I don't know, what the actual organic growth rate or people, you know, worrying about Boba Blue not being the same type of acquisition as historical. But I think a lot of those are really solved. the valuation at this point. No, that makes total sense. Again, I was just looking at the 2007 convert, which I believe is quite out of the money.

You know, it's a 122 and I was like, oh, the stocks at 40. You see it's high short interest with a convert. Sometimes it's the convert, but I'm like, ain't nobody converging out of 122 but I didn't know that about the global blue piece. Yeah, there's a billion dollar mandatory convertible 2028 for global loo. And that explains some of the questions that might. my chat cheap E-PT was having when I was prepping for this podcast where I was like, convert, convert, convert, convert.

I was like, or preferred, preferred, preferred, preferred. I was like, oh, okay, whatever. Cool. Well, Andrew Caring, again, link to the right up in the show notes has been great. I mean, you're just such great deep dive work on all these names. I really appreciate coming on. Please don't go to Chateau Cafe anymore. La Petit Cafe is where it's at.

But looking forward to having you back on again. Talk to you soon, buddy. Thank you so much. A quick disclaimer. Nothing on this podcast should be considered an investment advice. guests or the hosts may have positions in any of the stocks mentioned during this podcast. Please do your own work and consult a financial advisor. Maynick!

Part of the Beast is the must-see adventure of the year. It's just you and me, boy. One of the most extraordinary on-screen bond you'll ever see. I'll get you home. Brad Pitt, Part of the Beast. September 25th. Get tickets now. Thanks.