Introduction

Hello, I'm Steve Forbes. It's a pleasure to introduce my guest, Ken Fisher. Ken
is the CEO of Fisher Investments and one of the longest contributing columnists
here at Forbes. Ken is "crazy bullish" about the markets right now. His rosy out
look comes in reaction to all the anxiety, pessimism and disbelief on Wall Stree
t and Main Street. In fact, Ken says the markets love to climb what he calls the
walls of worry.
Ken has a rule for determining which companies will benefit at the end of a bear
market.
He says companies that did well in the first half of the bear market and then go
t killed in the second half will lead the bull market. Based on that, companies
that cater to consumer discretionary spending will do well. Ken also encourages
investors to potentially hold off on changing their asset allocation to more bon
ds before retirement. Since people are living longer than they think, switching
too soon could mean not enough income in those twilight years.
More on that and why Ken's a huge fan of investing in emerging markets in a mome
nt.
Pessimism Of Disbelief
Steve Forbes: Ken, good to have you with us. You've been one of the longest runn
ing columnists in Forbes history. Excellent record. You're going against this gr
ain of pessimism out there. You call it a "pessimism of disbelief." You make the
point that pessimism's already reflected in stock prices, therefore get over it
and make some money.
Ken Fisher: Well, you know, one of the features that's normal, Steve, and thank
you for having me here today, that people forget is that whenever we have a big
bear market and recession, people always think these terrible problems that crea
ted this terrible event are so big and so different and so unique that it'll tak
e us a very long time to get over them.
That's a normal view. So there's this phrase which you hear quite a lot these da
ys called the new normal, originally created by Bill Gross and Pimco, articulati
ng a long below-average future ahead of us. But the notion of the new normal is
the same old normal we've always had, which is this aftermath of pessimism that
comes from a period like this. The fact of the matter is we've got a very nice g
lobal recovery being led by emerging markets countries, which collectively are b
igger than America, pulling the developed world forward. And consistently econom
ic events are coming in better than expected, surprising people, and yet people
just keep batting off. "I don't believe it. Anything good is going to morph into
something bad. Whatever happens is probably going to be bad." And if you just l
ook at Internet postings, wherever you can read postings, they're just snarky, s
kanky, skeptical, dour. I like that.
Forbes: Climbing the walls of worry.
Fisher: The wall of worry, the bull market always loves to climb. If people were
already optimistic, you couldn't get more optimistic in the future.
Bears And Borrowing
Forbes: So let's bat through some of the things that make you think this is worr
y and not reality -- junk bond offerings.
Fisher: You know, this is an interesting feature. Because, fundamentally, when w
e look at a year or 18 months ago, people said, "Low quality borrowers can't bor
row. This is terrible. How can we do well if low quality borrowers can't borrow?
" Now we have junk bond offerings at record rates and people are worried that lo
w quality borrowers are borrowing. You can't be a bear and have it both ways. If
the one's bad, the other's got to be good.
And fundamentally, we're moving to a world of opening all of the windows of fina
ncing again and the junk bond offerings picking up are just one sign of that.
Forbes: That leads to small businesses, which have been, had a very jagged time.
Fisher: Absolutely.
Forbes: Banks have been cutting back. Credit cards been cutting back. Companies
that use cards, small businesses, for working capital. You think that's going to
change. And you have a great comparison to why that's going to change.
Fisher: I do believe that changes. And I'm going to make my comparison in a coup
le of ways. One is my pizza analogy and the other is the yield curve. The fact o
f the matter is, if we look today on a global basis -- and I always like to thin
k globally first, America second, because America is just one piece of the world
and the world is inherently positively correlated. It's not negatively correlat
ed. America is not an island alone. Hasn't been for a long time and never will b
e again. When we look at the world and you kind of think of a global, GDP weight
ed yield curve, or the tradeoff between short-term interest rates and long-term
interest rates, that spread on a global basis is steeper than it's been in a hal
f century. And that spread, the yield curve, fundamentally is a measure of futur
e banking system propensity to lend because the core business of banking is taki
ng in short-term deposits and making long-term loans.
So the steeper that yield curve, the fatter the operating profit margins of futu
re loans become.
And my analogy, as some of your longer-term readers know, in my life I've weighe
d more and I've weighed less. And you've seen my weight, over the years, fluctua
te by 100 pounds a couple of times. And the fact is I've learned to keep my weig
ht down by making a point to not eat things I like. Then I don't over-eat them.
You put a piece of pizza in front of me, it's safe. You put a whole pizza in fro
nt of me, it's safe. I take the first bite of the pizza and the whole pizza's in
jeopardy. The fact is, once I've taken that first bite of pizza, pizza, watch o
ut. And that's what I think the yield curve pretends, for the future, to the sma
ll business borrower. The small business borrower is going to see the spigot tur
ned on as those banks feel the power of that steep yield curve and the fat gross
operating profit margin they get, which is just as fat as the fat on that pizza
.
Forbes: Very good point. And so, in other words, even though now regulators, exa
miners come in, beat their brains out, "Why are you making a loan? Why aren't yo
u tightening standards?" which makes them go to safe stuff, that temptation is s
o great, once they have the first bite, 1,000 points, boy I can get used to that
pretty quickly.
Fisher: Exactly. And I don't believe that the banking regulator function goes aw
ay. But I believe that you can't stop a ready lender from finding a customer tha
t he believes he can make, or she can make, a good bet on. And small businesses
are the backbone of America.
Forbes: Pizza overcomes Weight Watchers right?
Fisher: There you go. Absolutely.
The Market Already Knows
Forbes: So the yield curve is steep. Now another thing is, in terms of pessimism
, as the taxes are going up, capital gains is going to go up 15, 24, 25%. Person
al dividend taxes, 15% to 43, 44%.
Fisher: It's just terrible.
Forbes: And you would make the point, again, market already knows that.
Fisher: Well, I'd make that point and a couple more. And people just don't want
to believe this. But the history of stock market movements in the short-term aro
und tax increases and decreases you can measure and is completely unpredictable.
That is, when you go in the past, and you see, at times, like, for example, whe
n we've had capital gains rates cut and raised in the past, and you look through
that window, they don't quite always operate the way people think they would op
erate because, first off, America is just part of a bigger global stock market,
so other things can be going on. So if there is a bull market going on anyway, t
hat shift isn't likely big enough to stop it. And the other thing is people know
these tax increases are coming, so a lot of people will actually take action in
advance, which is your discounting point. And then, if you've got selling to do
, people would be doing it now. That would be holding the prices down now. After
you raise the rates, they're probably less prone to sell because, after all, an
increase in capital gains rate is an increase on the tax on selling.
Being Crazy Bullish
Forbes: So you're pretty bullish on the market right now.
Fisher: Oh, I am what most people view as crazy bullish. I have lots of reasons,
so many reasons that in the limited among of time we have to talk today, we cou
ldn't possibly cover them all. I can rattle off a few. But, the fact of the matt
er is, most people think that my optimism is pretty Poly Anna-ish. I think most
people are caught up in this period that I view as the pessimism of disbelief.
I challenge people to find a period in the last 100-plus years where looking at
total returns on a global basis, you had a bear market followed by a positive 12
months where the second 12 months was anything other than up. Sometimes up a li
ttle, sometimes up a lot. But right now we're at the beginning of that second 12
months. And I challenge people -- go back in history and find the bad periods o
f that second 12 months. You're not going to find it.
Forbes: So even in the terrible 1970s, 1975, '76.
Fisher: The second 12 months was very nice.
Forbes: Yes, it was.
Fisher: And the fact of the matter is the reason this works is because, in my vi
ew, the pessimism that's created by the big bear market is so pervasive that you
've got a lot of room for what you could view as psychological rebounding. And I
go back to my point that I mentioned earlier about, and anybody can do this, yo
u go on the Internet and you got to any place where they accept posting commenta
ries from the average person. And if somebody says something optimistic, 15 peop
le jump on them and tell them why they're idiots. If somebody says something neg
ative, they get chimed in by 15 people who agree with them about why that's the
wisdom. My point is this is part of the pessimism of disbelief.
All news is bad or if it's good, it'll morph into something bad. And, as things
improve, all those people get surprised on the upside and we have a good time. I
think it's a heck of bargain.
Forbes: Inflation, government binge spending, again, already reflected in the cu
rrent prices.
Fisher: Well, you know, you and I may have some slightly different views on this
. I'm generally fairly much of a critic on central bankers. Going back to the ol
d Arthur Burns line that when you become head of the Fed, you take William McChe
sney Martin's pill that makes you forget everything you ever knew and it lasts j
ust as long as you're a head of the Fed.
And when Burns was later asked why he did a lot of the stupid things that he did
as head of the Fed he said it's because he took Martin's pill. The fact is Mr.
Bernanke, for example, is a very intelligent man. He's very educated. This is a
little like somebody that knows everything about boxing. It doesn't mean they'll
be good in the ring. He does know what he has to do to avoid inflation.
Forbes: Is it like the Bourbons as Bismarck said, "They know everything, but lea
rn nothing."
Fisher: Ah. I have been very critical of Mr. Bernanke. And I would have preferre
d that he not be reappointed. But he is in his position and he will remain in hi
s position and he is a very bright man. He knows what he has to do. Will he exec
ute on it? I don't know. I'm somewhat skeptical about that. But I am strongly of
the view that today inflation is always and everywhere global in its nature or
nonexistent. And we will not see inflation in a material pickup unless you also
see that throughout Europe. Unless you also see it at the bulk of the emerging m
arkets countries. And I do not believe we will see that until capacity utilizati
on in both manufacturing and services gets materially higher than it is today. I
n history, when we've had periods where inflation has not been a problem, and yo
u've had a big recession, and you've been operating at low levels to capacity ut
ilization, and there's been a wall of money thrown, you don't get to pick up an
inflation until capacity utilization gets something on the high side of 85%.
Do I think that can happen? Yes. Do I know it'll happen for sure? No. It's possi
ble that the central bank yanked the money back out before we get to that time.
And, if they do, then we wouldn't have that inflation. Am I confident they'll do
that? No, I'm not confident in them at all. But I am pretty confident that we d
on't get that wall of inflation until then and I'm confident that this year's st
ock market is not discounting that far out into the future.
Emerging Markets Leading
Forbes: You mentioned emerging markets several times. You've made the point, the
y are leading the world. We'd like to lead the world. But, for a variety of reas
ons, we're not this time. But you look at the Brazils, Indonesians, put them tog
ether and they're growing at, what, twice the level of the United States?
Fisher: If you take the officially Morgan Stanley world index categorized emergi
ng markets, they collectively make up a little more GDP than America does. They'
re a little bigger, collectively, than America is as a percentage of global GDP.
Forbes: So call them the developing countries union?
Fisher: Yes. And then, of course, there's a whole lot of other countries that yo
u don't really think of as emerging, right? They're what I would think of as the
rest of the less developed countries. But these countries today are at a very i
nteresting juncture. Yes, they are growing at a little more than 2X US rates. Th
ey started growing in this cycle before we did, and they've been pulling us alon
g stronger than we would be otherwise. For the first time ever, and we're not us
ed to this, they actually have internal demand. And one of the features that you
can measure in American history, in European history, if you kind of do what to
day would be thought of as $5,000 per capita inflation adjusted income, as natio
ns rise through that barrier --
Forbes: You make the point it explodes in terms of consumer spending.
Fisher: Consumption goes through the roof and particularly in terms of things th
at you think of as consumer durables. So, in the old days, that used to be, when
I was younger, and a country could achieve that, an explosion in television set
s. Today you can see it in explosions in cell phones. You can see it in broadban
d. You can see it in every form of consumer appliance. And that world is all of
the BRIC nations. We're on the high side of that in South Korea. All of these co
untries are, for the first time, creating the beginnings of middle class emergen
ce, which is a tremendously positive phenomenon.
And if you go back to your David Ricardo or you go back to your Adam Smith, we s
hould want them to do well because we should try to do the best we can do and we
should hope they do well, because then we complement each other. People kind of
forget that. They kind of have a view, Americans particularly have a view that,
if we're not leading, something terrible's happening. What we should be doing i
s as well as we possibly can do. And I'm all for that. And then we should want t
hem to do as well as they can possibly do.
Forbes: So you make the point that companies or industries that you would descri
be as dog meat in this country, like airlines, are boom industries in a country
like Brazil.
Fisher: If you think of some of the areas, I mean, if you go back to the 19th ce
ntury, in the 19th century, simply the production of electricity was a growth fi
eld. Today, the production of electricity in America is what you refer to as dog
meat. It's terrible, it's regulated, going to get a low return on capital, not
attractive. You go to these markets, electricity, just simply electric power gen
eration, is a growth business. Airlines. I mean, the US airline industry is a cu
mulative money loser from the beginning of time. And if there's one sure way to
lose money it's try to create a new airline in America. But if you go to South A
merica, you go to China, you go to India, the airlines are actually growth busin
esses. Different world.
Live Longer Than You Think
Forbes: You also have a go against the conventional wisdom a little bit in terms
of when people think of saving for retirement. One, you make the point that you
should have goals so you know what you're supposed to do. But you also make the
point that, thanks to longevity, when we think of an age where you should be ha
ving bonds, certainly for a woman, age 60, that's another 30 years.
Fisher: Well, you know, I've had this view for a long time. But my asset allocat
ion advice is, first, think of your time horizon. Think what you're trying to ac
complish.
And, for most people, the most common thing I hear people say is, "The purpose o
f my money is to take care of me and my spouse the rest of our lives. And then m
aybe we want to leave some money to our offspring." Those are real, normal kind
of goals. Then you ask, "Well, how long did your parents and grandparents live?"
And then you say, "Do you have any unusual health circumstances?" And what peop
le typically find, if they think it through, is they are going to live much long
er than they think they will. And if you actually go to an insurance company and
use insurance company tables versus, let's say, the IRS tables, the insurance c
ompany tables actually show longer expected life than the IRS expects for I thin
k obvious reasons. But my guess is the insurance underestimates how long people
will live because just in our lifetime, life expectancies have increased because
of improved medicine and wealth.
And, as wealth improves in the future, wealth and longevity go together, and hea
lthcare has improved and will continue to improve as science and technology deve
lop new things. So I think people have three, four, five-year longer time horizo
ns than they think they have. And they better plan for those starting today. Lon
ger time horizons mean more allocation toward what you otherwise might think of
as riskier assets. If you went back 50 years ago, the average guy got to be 65 a
nd expected to live for another five years. I mean, the reason pensions used to
work is people worked until they were 65, they got the pension for five years an
d then they dropped dead. That's not the world we live in today.
Multinational Reflections
Forbes: So, first, looking at emerging markets. How should an investor go into i
t? Multinational companies or mutual funds or what? ETFs? Exchanged traded funds
.
Fisher: Well, there's some things we can say and some things I don't think we ca
n say, Steve. Things we can say is that multinationals do not reflect their reve
nue sources, they reflect their country of origin. So, for example, if you take
a US multinational and, let's say, a Japanese multinational, the Japanese multin
ational is going to act like a Japanese stock, the US multinational is going to
act like a US stock, and the European multinational is going to act like the Eur
opean stock. Let's say --
Forbes: So even though most of the American-based companies' earnings are outsid
e of the country they'll still reflect --
Fisher: They'll still reflect American culture, American law. They probably have
their financing mostly coming from American sources. They tend to act. If you a
ctually just look at US versus foreign multinationals they tend to act much more
like their country of origins than they do their sources of revenue. Therefore,
you have to go to stocks in the countries themselves. Secondarily, do you do th
at through mutual funds or ETFs or owning the underlying securities? To me, this
is more a statement about who you are than the things. So if you think you know
something, there's a lot of reason to go to the underlying securities.
If you think you know nothing you might just want to do the ETFs because you can
do them passively. There's nothing wrong with that. Just an acceptance of who y
ou are. "I don't know anything extra in particular. I'm not a stock picker. I ca
n just own the ETFs, own the categories, put them away, come back and worry abou
t it 10 years from now." With mutual funds you have to say, "How good am I a pic
ker of people?" Because that's what mutual funds are all about.
Forbes: Now, here in the US, part of your money should go into US equities, prob
ably.
Fisher: Sure. Absolutely.
Recovery Leaders
Forbes: And you make the point about bear markets. The sectors, companies that d
o well in the first half of a bear market, get smashed in the second half of the
bear market, lead a recovery.
Fisher: You know, this is a point that we've made, I think, my firm is the only
one that seems to have ever written about this, but it's something that is just
consistent in history. People often get it wrong. You said it perfectly. But peo
ple often get it wrong, Steve.
It's not who got killed in the bear market. It's who did well in the first half
of the bear market compared to the market. It's not your falling, but they didn'
t fall as much, and then got killed in the back half. And that's not only true r
elative to industry sectors, but it's true regardless of the category. So it's t
rue for regions of the world. It's true for things like big cap versus small cap
and growth stocks versus value stocks. So, for example, if you look at this las
t cycle, small stocks did better than the market in the first half of the bear m
arket and got killed in the back half. And, from the bottom, smaller stocks have
led. But it's that pattern. You see it over and over again in category after ca
tegory. And, in terms of sectors this time, that's led to materials, industrials
, consumer discretionary, not consumer staples, technology and, to a lesser exte
nt, energy. Not healthcare, not consumer staples, not utilities, not Telecom. An
d, oh, by the way, not finance.
People get this wrong. And I want to be real clear about this because I don't kn
ow why, people do not see this. But a simple fact is finance did well compared t
o the market, but only in the first two months off the bottom. From March of '09
to May of '09. From May of '09 to present, financials have actually lagged the
market. If you didn't get that two month pop there isn't a there or there. Finan
cials are the category that led all the way down. They were bad in the first hal
f and in the back half. They're like what technology stocks were from 2000 to 20
03. Got a pop off the bottom and then lagged for three years. Or energy stocks f
rom '80 to '82. It got a pop off the bottom in '82 and then lagged in '83, '84,
'85, '86. The big category that lags all the way down typically gets a pop and t
hen lags. And, in my mind, I think we're going to keep beating up on bank stocks
for a long time because we've turned them into the Wicked Witch of the East.
Forbes: So what categories, looking ahead, do you sometimes make the point consu
mers are spending, but people say, "Well, yes, they'll just buy the essentials a
nd not go for the big stuff." You say, "Well, that's true today. But, six, nine
months down the road, that may not be true."
Fisher: First I make the point that consumer discretionary stocks have been doin
g well. And they're doing well because, again, stocks are typically looking out
a year, they're not thinking about today. And, secondarily, the pessimism about
they're not going to buy the big ticket items was already in them. So you go thr
ough the categories, I don't much care exactly the sub details. Things like crui
se lines. Who needs to take a cruise? That was already placed into the stocks. C
ruise line stocks have done great and continue to do well.
One of the views that I have that I've expressed in my column is this is a great
time to do things like Weight Watchers on the one hand as a stock because peopl
e will pay up to diet. Then, after they've paid up to diet, feeling better about
themselves they'll go to Las Vegas and splurge, so you can invest in resort sto
cks. In my mind, those go hand in hand. You know, the traditional notion of you
go to the fat farm and then after the people go to the fat farm then they go to
someplace and have a nice dinner. They actually go together. One of the points t
hat I'm kind of big on right now that I just think is simple and fundamental is
that H&R Block is clearly the market share leader in doing personal tax services
. And going back to the point that you referenced a few minutes ago, tax laws ki
nd of get more complicated, it's not going to get less complicated. You and I wo
uld like to see it get less complicated, but we're also not going to hold our br
eaths about that, right? That that's going to happen --
Forbes: Not yet. Not yet.
Fisher: That's not happening again in the next 12 months. But, today, we're want
ing to be thinking about what would be happening a year from now at tax season.
And a year from now, at tax season, there will be more people using H&R Block.
Forbes: You've come up with ways of looking at stocks of, well, went way beyond
the P/E. Gives you also optimism now. Quickly describe the price-to-sales ratio,
earnings yields, and the like.
Fisher: Well, price-sales was just simply a concept that I started working on in
the 1970s. And, you know, if you go back to my writings my writings are the fir
st writings that stand on price-sales ratios. And Forbes was very early to pick
up on that, which is kind of how I got connected to Forbes in the first place on
ce upon a time a long time ago via Jim Michaels.
But the price-sales ratio works just like price-earnings ratio, except it uses t
he company's revenue, where the P/E uses earnings. And the thing that I found im
mediately attractive about it is that you could use it to get a rough calibratio
n of a company that might be either, a) profitless at a point in time, in a way
I'll describe in a moment or b) to think of a company that might have overly fat
profit margins and see that that's unsustainable.
So, just intuitively, you think of a company selling at one times revenue where
its market capitalization equals its annual revenue. That's the equivalent to a
company that's selling at 10 times earnings, making 10% net after tax margins. T
en percent net after tax margins are really hard to maintain. You got to have wh
at Warren Buffet would call a wide moat around you to be able to maintain a 10%
profit margin because everybody in the world wants to get into that business. An
d 10 times earnings isn't a high valuation. So now you say three times revenue i
s 30 times earnings for something making 10% net after. That's rich. The likelih
ood is your profit margins are going to fall. If your profit margins fall then y
ou're at more than 30 times earnings. On the other hand, something could be sell
ing at 30% of revenue, and not be making any money and if they can get 3% net af
ter tax margins in the future, which isn't such a big push, now you'd be selling
at 10 times that.
And if you can look at the profitless company in a tough time like we've been in
, that's making no money, and see your way to 3% profit margins in a year, you'r
e talking about buying it today when people are scared to death and think of it
as something with no floor under it at all where you're looking at next year 10
times earnings. So in my columns, I'll frequently say things like, "This company
, which currently sells at 30 times trailing earnings, but I think we're looking
at 10 times 2011 earnings," the market's going to move to those earnings long b
efore we ever get to 2011. The market's going to price that into the stock long
before we ever get there and the price-sales ratio is just a way to spot those k
inds of opportunities. The earnings yield concept is just to take the P/E and fl
ip it into an E/P and think of it as a percent.
So a P/E of 10 is really 10 divided by one, 10 dollars to price, one dollar of e
arnings. That, as an earnings yield, is one divided by 10. The only commercial p
itch that I'm going to make here today is that if you cannot divide one by 10 an
d come up with 10%, then you really do need professional help with your money ma
nagement. But that having been said, that yield is the equivalent if earnings we
re to maintain themselves at the exact same level as what you would get from own
ing the business, compared to what you would get from owning a safer bond. So wh
en I think of businesses, or the market as a whole, I say, "When I buy it, what
do I get back in earnings yield compared to what I'd get for a safer bond. And I
ought to see my way to a markedly higher earnings yield than the bond, or I sho
uld prefer the safer bond."
Now if I get growth of earnings, today's earnings yield becomes higher in the fu
ture. But if I am just buying, let's say, for example, a company at five times e
arnings and the earnings are going to remain stable, that's a 20% earnings yield
, and I just take the company private and collect that and bank it forever and I
could borrow money at junk bond rates and finance that, which is basically the
core business of being in private equity. And this is a way to think through and
rationalize how much value do you get out of owning this stock. The earnings yi
eld lets you think of it like you were buying the whole business as a percent co
mpared to safer bonds.
Timing Gold
Forbes: One final thing. Gold. You make the comparison to the mistress of French
King Henry II. Your attitude on gold.
Fisher: I am not trying to suggest that there's something about gold that relate
s to mistresses. That's beyond my realm of competence. She, of course, drank gol
d to try to achieve youth and poisoned herself and died from that. I'm not quite
sure the medical terms involved. But the fact of the matter is gold is a funny
thing. And you and I have somewhat different views on this subject. But the hist
ory of gold is that most of its history, it's been declining in price, followed
by short periods with very rapid spikes in price.
And, in history, if you take out 15% of the months that exist, that have come, I
think, in six or seven spurts depending on which country you're in, what curren
cy you're in effectively, the cumulative rest of history, gold has been a net mo
ney loser. Whenever you have something that gets 100% of its return from 15% of
the months, you'd better be really good at timing. And my point about gold is I'
m neither pro nor con gold. When I'm asked what do I think about gold say, "Well
, what do you think about your ability to time?" Because if you're a really good
timer, you can time gold.
Forbes: When to buy stocks. Or commodities.
Fisher: Yeah, well, let me say that another way. If you can time gold, then you
can time lots of other things. And the question that I say to people is, so, for
example, "Did you time the stock market right? Did you get into oil in 2005 and
get out in the middle of 2008? How good have you been at timing currencies? If
you can time all of these things, great, you don't need any advice from me. If y
ou can't time all of those things, you're probably not going to time gold well.
Gold has these long periods where it declines and then these spurts that last fo
r a year or two, where it goes through the roof. And then these long periods whe
re it declines, and then these spurts where it goes through the roof. And my que
stion becomes not pro or con gold, but how good of a timer are you? If you're a
good timer, great. If you're not a good timer, if you've done a bad job at timin
g the last five things you've tried, I wouldn't try gold.
Forbes: Ken, thank you very much.
Fisher: Thank you for having me.