Good afternoon and welcome to the Pabry Wagons ETF shareholder call. Before I begin, Aiden Townsend who's our manager of investor relations has a few disclosures that he needs to share with all of you. Aiden, >> thank you Mish. Good afternoon and welcome to the Parvar Wagons ETF investor call. The ETF is now listed on the New York Stock Exchange and trades under the ticker wagon W AGN. Before we we begin the Q&A, let us start with the usual disclosures. Investing involves risk, including the potential loss of principle. The fund is non-diversified, meaning it may focus its assets in fewer individual holdings than a diversified fund. Therefore, the fund is more exposed to individual stock volatility than a diversified fund. The fund may invest in small and medium capitalization companies which involve additional risks such as limited liquidity and greater volatility than larger capitalization companies. The fund is new with limited operating history and there can be no assurance that the fund will grow to or maintain an economically viable size. Past performance does not guarantee future results. Opinions expressed are subject to change are not intended to be a forecast future events a guarantee of future results nor investment advice. Fund holdings and allocations are subject to change at any time and should not be considered a recommendation to buy or sell any security. Exchange traded funds, ETFs or short are bought and sold through exchange trading at market price and not NAV and are not individual individually redeemed from the fund. Shares may trade at a premium or discount to their NAV in the secondary market. Brokerage commissions will reduce returns. Now, I'd like to hand the call back over to our portfolio manager, Monish Babai. Thank you Aiden and thank you all of you for uh joining us for the call. I always enjoy these sessions and uh we got quite a large number of questions submitted to us in advance which I'll be trying to go through as many as I can. You also have the ability to submit questions in the Q&A window if you want and I'm not sure if I'll be able to get to those but I'll certainly try to get through as many of the questions as I can and uh so again thank you very much for your interest. I'm also going to be kind of prioritizing questions which are about portfolio positions that are newer which we may not have discussed in the past etc versus the let's say the largest position but I'll try to get a good mix of things. So the first question I'm going to go ahead with is the fund appears to have a relatively concentrated set of holdings across sectors like cyclicals commodities shipping and select compounders. How does Monish determine the appropriate balance between deep value cyclical opportunities and long-term compounders within the portfolio? So in general, stocks and businesses don't really fall neatly into different buckets. Just like Warren Buffett has said that value and growth are not mutually exclusive. In fact, all intelligent investing is value investing. And the notion that a cyclical quote unquote cyclical is different from a compounder or a cannibal for example is also very myopic. So I'll just give you an example just to kind of set the stage of kind of how I think about these things. If we think of a company like let's say Saudi Aramco which is in the news these days. Salio Ramco you know one would in a kind of broad brushstroke say it's a commodity cyclical business but that actually is an incorrect way to look at the business it's doesn't do justice to it so Saudi Aramco has been around for many many decades their cost of producing a barrel of oil used to be$1 or $2 a barrel I think currently all in it's under $12 a barrel and they currently produce around uh 12 million barrels a day and they could actually pump that higher if they want and you know huge reserves etc. So if the way I look at a business like Saudi Ramco is a business with an incredibly deep mo it is a business that has generated more cash in its history than any other business on the planet and it's likely to continue generating more cash than almost any business one can think of including the mag 7 and so on. So when you have a lowcost commodity producer like Saudi Aramco which is sitting you know in the bottom quartile more like bottom 10% of the cost curve it's very unlikely it's ever going to hit a situation where it's not making money. I mean if you got a $12 all-in cost to produce oil it's hard to imagine a situation where you're losing money. And so it is a business that I feel has you know variance in cash flows maybe significant variance in cash flows but bought at the right price it can be a tremendous business and bought at the wrong price it can be a terrible investment. So I don't really kind of categorize companies in these kind of nice buckets and then make decisions on how we uh go about allocating and so on. So one of the businesses which I'm going to talk about a little bit later which kind of dovetales into Saudi Aramco is alpha metalical resources and warrior metal. Again people will characterize these as commodities or they characterize them as cyclicals but that's not how I look at them. So if we look at the PLV index which is a premier lowwall metco index the main index by which metal is priced you know the seaborn trade around the world is currently sitting at about $220 per ton and that $220 per ton price is approximately the average price that that index has been at for the last 7 years. But if you were to look at let's say take out the COVID period when it actually dropped quite a bit because of all the nuances of COVID and if you also take into account that we've had a lot of inflation in the world in the last several years the current PLV 220 price may be close to a floor in terms of the last five or 6 years of where it's traded and also it's difficult to bring on production in any meaningful quantities including transportation and so on below that that price. And in fact, at this price, there are plenty of mines in Central Appalachia, etc. that are shutting down because they are cash flow negative. At this $220 price, if that price were to just stay at that level for the whole year, Warrior would make more than $550 million of cash flow and Alpha would make more than 350 million in cash flow. And alpha has a market cap of you know under 3 billion and warrior has a market cap of under 5 billion and you know those are perfectly fine. So from from my point of view these businesses like alpha warrior that may be with us producing cash especially in the case of alpha for 50 to 100 years and the case of warrior maybe 40 to 60 years and that cash flow may be you know at the low end maybe you know 100 200 million 300 million a year at the high end could be billions per year. You know my answer to that is where do I sign? So I don't really allocate capital based on you know what kind of business it is. I look at kind of the nature of the business and you know the cash in cash out and then take it from there. So hopefully that can help you know folks uh understand a little bit better of how you know the portfolio is structured and so on. Going to the second question, why did you invest in vertical market software companies like constellation, topicus and lumen despite not typically investing in tech and are you worried about AI disruption in this space? So just a little bit of background my degree is in computer engineering. I ran a IT services system integration firm for uh more than a decade and uh worked in tech for you know around 15 years or so. And uh the first 5 years as an investor uh this is even before pubry funds uh almost 100% of my investing was tech investing in the public markets and we did actually very well at at a time the 1995 to 2000 period. So you know I've always had familiarity with technology and software and technology and so on. The reason we haven't done a whole lot in that area is typically we're not able to find these businesses at compelling enough valuations because they're very popular with the crowd and such and so they tend to from my vantage point trade you know maybe above where a cheapkate like me is willing to buy. Now coming to constellation and Mark Leonard and so on. I want to just kind of share that quite unexpectedly. I had some interaction with Constellation the company and with Mark Leonard directly a couple of years ago, two or three years ago and they had reached out and they wanted me to do a podcast which was just internal to constellation was never released outside and Mark Leonard actually came up with the questions and so on and I enjoyed that quite a bit and subsequent to that Mark Leonard invited me to meet him for breakfast in Toronto which I did and I had a wonderful breakfast with him And then after the breakfast, he and I walked to his home and we continued our meeting in his home library. A wonderful, humble gentleman. I really enjoyed meeting Mark. He has some health challenges now and I hope he gets back back on track and is doing very well. So I wish him all the best. Constellation, I have admired Constellation for a long time. I read Mark Leonard's all of his letters even before all this interaction and meeting. So I've I've really admired Constellation. But again like the other software companies that traded at valuations that made it difficult to step in even though I had a lot of respect and I would just like to say that the constellation business model may in detail may not be well understood by many folks. So you know constellation might be buying 100 200 software companies a year. They have a list of people believe somewhere like 50 to 70,000 vertical software businesses that they touch at least twice a year and I have friends who have vertical software companies and uh you know in talking to them they have actually you know they've been on the receiving end of these kind of nudges and so constellation has a significant size team that is basically tasked with both digitally and on the own etc. reaching out to these principles and founders and saying hey you know if you ever decide to do something uh please think of us and that sort of thing. So if you just think about it very simply that if you had 50,000 software companies and if you think that all these founders let's just say were between the age of 40 and 80 for example and let's say they were like you know 2 and a half% in each age like you know 2 and a half% are 40 or 41 or 42 there might be about 2 and a half 3 or 4% who looking to retire every year. And uh so if you're looking at about 50,000 companies, you know, you might have about 2,000 2500 companies of founders that just naturally want to move on there. Also then you add to that people who are looking to sell even before retirement age and wanting to do something else etc. So I think there's like a few thousand companies that would always be interested every year in a transaction and then constellation is extremely anal and picky because they know these vertical markets so well in terms of what they go into and what they pay etc. And I think now with the AI so there's a couple of things with the AI threat. My view is that the AI coming on of AI is a tailwind for the for the incumbents in the vertical market space as opposed to providing tailwinds to Betsy sitting in HR wanting to generate some HR software on her own. And so I think that when you look at that 50 to 70,000 universe, there will be a set of founders who will have concerns about AI and concerns about whether they'll be able to make the transition etc or not. So that the number of companies willing to sell I think would have gone up since the AI threat has come in. And I also believe that because the market that constellation is in and they have like in many cases the only player which is willing to buy these businesses and hold them forever and most other companies don't even want to go that small etc and buying these companies that their multiple that they were paying which might have been four or five times cash flow may go down so the multiple may go down the businesses may stay the same and AI is going to for sure reduce constellation frictional costs of running these businesses. So there is a case to be made. Now I I don't have a crystal ball of exactly how this will play out, but there are possibilities where their costs go down, their revenues don't get much impact, and their acquisition price goes down. And even if all those things don't happen, stock that was sitting at $5,500 that was compounding at 25 20% of the 5500 went into the low 2000s and when I looked at it, it finally came into a price point where person like me got excited. So that is why we are interested in constellation and topicus and all of that. Now I would also point out to you that Warren Buffett made three or 400 at least three or 400 investment decisions while running Burkshire for the last 60 years. It may be more than that but he himself pointed out that 12 decisions had moved the needle. So about a 3 or 4% hit rate in terms of you know multibaggers that really moved the needle for Burkshire. So when I look at my portfolio, you know, and I look at it with, you know, rosecolored glasses, I can't see any of them that are, you know, going to crash and burn. And many of them look like they'll be, you know, solid compounders for a long time. But I also know that that 4% rule is not something I'm going to be immune to or any portfolio manager is going to be immune to. So I think that many of these companies that we may think have incredible futures, the actual futures may come about very different from the way I'm thinking about it including constellation or including warrior and alpha and so on so forth. So you should keep it in mind that none of these are you know absolutely you know for sure or anything like that. So keep that in mind. Going on to the third question. Why did you decide to invest in a fintech and payment processor like Caspie? Considering it is in a highly competitive space prone to techn technological disruption, the CASPY bet kind of different from I would say the Alpha Warrior or even the constellation Marth Leonard complex bets. It is more of a heads I win, tails I don't lose much bet. So Caspie the price got cut down quite a bit because they cut their dividend which surprised a lot of people and the reason they cut the dividend is they made an acquisition in Turkey and they made two acquisitions. They actually bought a fintech company in Turkey and they also bought a bank. So they are getting ready to kind of replicate or try to replicate what they did extremely successfully in Kazakhstan. In Turkey, the Turkish market is about, you know, eight times, seven, eight times the size of the Kazak market. It is a very analog market, whereas Kazakhstan like China is now a very digital market thanks to Caspie. And I think the jockey at Caspie is a total rockstar. When I looked at his the history of what he's done, it blew me away. And so this is a bet that the jockey can roll up his sleeves and do something interesting in Turkey. Now the good news from the way I think about it is that if they fail, I don't think we lose much because they've got a great business and a a very locked position in Kazakhstan. And on the other hand, they have a lot of reasons, a lot of ways that they could disrupt and make inroads in Turkey. So we don't know. So basically this is a kind of heads I win tails I don't lose much. We will see how it goes but we like the jockey, we like the business, uh we like the economics and we like a number of things about it and so we'll see kind of how it plays out. Question four, as the largest shareholder of GMAT growth stock, do you view this as a passive position or do you intend to influence management ideas such as implementing a Costco style membership? Well, like Warren Buffett says that if they need my help, we're both in trouble. I'm the kind of the last person you would expect to be an activist. I'm too lazy for that. And we don't want to go into any businesses with the idea of thinking that we can change those businesses. We want to go into businesses where we can cheer the management on from the sidelines and they don't really ever need us to do anything or we we never get involved. So we definitely have no plans to ever try to instruct GMAT or their management or leadership or board of what they should be doing. I should also point out that we just had a filing earlier this week where we went over 25% not not the wagons fund but across everything that I manage in GMAT. So we now have more than a quarter of the company which very excited about. I have a lot of respect for the founder and CEO. I think he's a rock star. really really classic servant leader and again GMAT is a bet which is similar to a Caspie type bet in the sense that they have two stores they have a lot of DNA which they share with companies like Walmart and Costco they have excellent leadership and there are possibilities that they can grow and scale that in a incredible manner but it's not for sure I mean you know clearly these are it's an embionic company they only have two stores. So in many ways this is a venture bet or a venture type bet. But like Caspie, our downside is very protected because we bought in at a very modest valuation. They have significant real estate holdings which they are getting ready to monetize. So we think it's a good downside protected bet and so we we like that. Going to the next question. What is your perspective on the merger between Trans Ocean and Wolaris and does the combined entity make it a stronger holding considering current ge geopolitics and future prospects? Yeah, I think the merger or the acquisition of Valeris by Trans Ocean was a stroke of genius by the Trans Ocean management because what they were able to do in one shot is achieve two or three things. One is Valeris was a very underleveraged company and Trans Ocean was a lot more leverage. So when you combine them the leverage goes down quite a bit which is excellent. I'm all for that. And the second is that the combined company has greater footprint and market share and their ability to you know negotiate and you know get these different contracts etc. I think is is better when you have one less competitor and you have a larger footprint and all that and Trans Ocean was the better operator in my opinion. I think they're extremely good at operation. So all those operations coming under Trans Ocean is actually going to make the combined company better. So there's many things to like about the deal and we are um very happy that they were able to or we think they're going to pull it off. The deal hasn't closed yet. How do you justify holding Warrior Met Coal after its significant price runup and how is its intrinsic value calculated given that it resembles a cyclical business with declining revenues and a high PE? Well, I just pointed out that in 2026, if the Australian PLV index stayed exactly where it is right now, which I think is uh you know on an inflation adjusted basis amongst the lowest points postco, they would produce 550 million cash flow on a market cap of under 5 billion. And those in my opinion are maybe close to trough cash flows. It would not surprise me to see Warrior in the next few years have years where their cash flows over a billion a year and both Warrior and Alpha have no grand plans to be you know basically doing acquisitions or uh investing a lot of that in the business etc. I mean Warrior might create one more long wall and invest in that but the plan in the case of Alpha is to return all the cash to shareholders and the same at Warrior. The only thing is Alpha is doing it 100% with buybacks, which we love. And Warrior is doing that only with dividends because they're restricted on buybacks because of their NOLs. But on April 19th of this year, those NOL restrictions go away. So, as of April 20th, 2026, Warrior is going to allow shareholders to own more than 5% of the company. Currently because of those NOLs and protecting those NOLs, no one can own more than 5%. We with all the different entities I I manage, we have you know four odd% of the company. But it would allow investors to come in to have more than 5%. So that might be a positive. Some folks might be interested in that. But the more important thing is that after April 20th, they get more flexibility to do buybacks. But I think that Warrior will be kind of straddling between buybacks and dividends. And I just want to give you a little bit of an insight into how powerful the buyback engines can be for these companies. So Alpha which has had all this you know cyclical ups and downs in the PLB price in the last four years from 22 to 26 they have reduced their diluted fully share fully diluted share count by 32%. None of the mag 7 has reduced their share counts by even double digits. In fact, someone companies like Microsoft have reduced their share count by 2%. And even Apple etc. have not done that much. I mean this is this is 32% is amazing considering the average 220 index price. And currently Alpha has less than 12 million shares outstanding. There are some shareholders like us for example that have no plans to ever sell Alpha. So it may not be possible for them to buy back more than 7 or 8 million shares. Even that might be hard. But let's say they can buy back 8 million shares which would take the share count down to about 4 million from 12 million. And that might happen over the next let's say 7 to 10 years or 7 to 9 years something like that. And at that point when you fast forward about eight or nine years, I'm just giving you a plausible scenario that could happen is Alpha has a stock price of about 180 at that point because it cannot buy back shares. It become a dividend payer. Those dividends could be in about seven or eight years be over $250 a share. A $250 dividend at a 4 million share count is a billion dollar cash flow in a year. they can easily have more than a billion dollars cash flow in a year especially after 2029 when Indian steel demand skyrockets and supply demand between metal goes a little bit haywire from where it is today. So again there are no guarantees but you know we like riskreward there. What did you observe in RAS management that shaped your view on business quality leading to a lula pulooa effect? We have been shareholders uh you know before the ETF and the mutual fund we've been shareholders in some of the other funds I manage in RESA for almost 7 years. I've been you know visiting the business and the various location meeting with management and their team and so on for the last 7 years. The company does not have an IR department doesn't even have an investor deck. It's very difficult to really understand much about the business other than looking at the track record and then you know in us having some interactions with management and what I was able to glean from those interactions is there are two or three very unusual traits in the management of RESA that make it very unusual. First is they are exceptional capital allocators. They have a internal threshold of not wanting to make investments where the return is not at least 25 to 35% annually in dollars or euros. Once in a while they'll do something which might be a little bit less than that but they're almost sheepish when they kind of you know say that to me like they were somewhat disappointed when they do that. So they have a high hurdle rate in terms of what they are looking for before they make capital allocation decisions. And what that leads to is basically what I would call anomaly based capital allocation. They do unusual things to get there which is great. The second trait which is a trait I think that they share with David Soal and Greg Ael you know Warren Buffett mentioned that you know what David soal would get done by 10:00 a.m. in the morning he couldn't do all day. The productivity level is very high. And now he says what Greg Ael what Greg Ael gets done in a day Warren cannot do in a week. And Warren himself is highly highly productive guy. So for him to make a statement like that is quite a statement. And so we are in great hands at Burkshire Hathaway with Greg Ael. But what I noticed about the REASS CEO and founder is that he's like the Energizer Bunny and I don't think he himself understands how high efficiency he is in going about his business. For example, Raceas now has approximately 12 million square ft. And in the last next 3 years, that footprint is going to go to 23 million ft². It's one of the fastest, biggest buildouts they've ever done in the history of the business. And I know that he'll get it done because he's just so good at it. He's just so efficient at it. So the energy levels and their efficiency is really an unusual trait. And then the third trait which is a trait of being creative and Borne has used this uh word creative to describe Ajit Jane and he said that one of the qualities Ajit brings to Burkshire besides being you know tremendous underwriter is creativity and it's the creativity that Ajit has brought to a you know state industry like insurance which has allowed to scale at the level it has for Burkshire Hathway where premiums are you know 140 billion or something. So the RAS management is very willing and they have in the past been willing to go into businesses where they have no competence. But what they've always done is they've made bets in areas which they don't have expertise in as extremely small bets and they kind of use that small bet to learn the market. So for example, when they were going to put solar panels on their rooftops and they didn't know head or tail about solar or any of that, they did a test run with one warehouse and then they started to understand that the economics were fantastic and the real roll out to more than 50 megawatts that they now produce from their footprint and now you know while they're building the warehouse even when it's completed the solar is already there and all of that whereas most of their competitors have yet to put a solar panel on. Similarly, they started a new subsidiary in Germany last year in a joint venture with a company where they're building apartments. After World War II, when there were no young male Germans left because of the decimation from the war, Germany brought in large number of Turks to help rebuild uh the economy. And so the links between Turkey and Germany are very tight. In fact, there's probably a flight every hour or half an hour from Istanbul or Ankara to one or more German cities. So, it's a natural for Turkish companies to look at Germany. They made a small bet. It's about a 3.5 million euro bet they made. They they think they'll make a profit about of about€5 million in couple of years or less, which fits their hurdles. But they said that they are uh and they're going to not sell those apartments. they're going to convert them to rentals and use it to kind of get use that tow hole to grow. But that's an example of how they're going into a new business, going in small, paying close attention. And that's how they've grown into businesses like having the biggest truck fleet or the biggest freight train network or the largest oaklift rental business, tobacco distribution, you name it. What is your investment thesis for Taba given that its revenue is entirely in Turkish LRA which seemingly seemingly contradicts the principle of investing in hard currency generators? Well, we in Turkey we would like to invest in hard currency generators and one of our investments is like that which is Tav airports but we have other bets in Turkey which are not like that. So for example a lot of the RSA leases are in LRA. uh now they are indexed to inflation etc but they they're indexed to the official rate of inflation which is below sometimes significantly below the real inflation rate. We're not married to the idea that all bets in Turkey have to be you know hard currency generators etc. Tabida is the master franchisee for Burger King and Popeye's. They have their own brands etc. And so it's a business that is going to be affected by inflation but also it has the ability to pass on pass on those prices because of the brand value etc. I was attracted to Tabga Gita because of the extremely unusual DNA of the company. So the founders of Tab Gida are third or fourth generation civil engineers. So pretty much every person at least every male in the family for like at least the last four generations has been a civil engineer and they have on the civil engineering side which is not related to what Tavita is doing they have been the company responsible for some of the largest civil engineering projects in the country some of the most prominent ones I mean these guys are the best civil engineers that Turkey has produced so it's really exceptional and one of I think it was you maybe a few decades ago where one of these kids who had gone to the US to become a civil engineer, you know, ate at a Burger King and decided that this was going to resonate extremely well with Turks. And he told his family that he wanted to bring Burger King to Turkey. And of course, that was like blasphemy to all these civil engineers, etc. But he was adamant and they said, "Okay, it's a side project, whatever." You know, let him do his thing and, you know, he'll get it out of his system and so on. They brought Burger King into the country. They blew out McDonald's in a major way. And the Burger King part of the business dwarfed the civil engineering side of it. So eventually they the family has moved most of the horsepower over to fast food but they bring a very engineering mindset to fast food. I have actually never seen any fast food team anywhere in the world which is as good as them. These guys are better than any franchises I've ever interacted with. They backward integrated very heavily. they are very very detail oriented on you know all the finer points and they're looking at all the nuances very carefully. So that's the reason why you know they made mince meat of McDonald's but not only that but they also used to be one of the largest burgering franchises in China until recently. So they were even able to kind of project it into a different geography and they had a lot of learning from fintech etc coming from China which they've actually incorporated in Turkey in terms of you know selfch checkout and ordering and all of that and they've innovated the Burger Kings in Turkey have done things which the parent has looked at you know bringing into other location. They've also created their own brands and they're scaling those brands and they're franchising those brands. I'm very impressed with the DNA of the company and this is again a bet which is kind of a little bit similar to the Caspie bet in the sense that it's a jockey bet. I think the jockeys are tremendous and I think the jockeys are very hungry and so with TapGa our take is that we think they'll do things and we think they'll do things which are not even on the radar today. So that's why we like the business. But again, we'll kind of see how it goes. Going on to the next question. What prompted a sale of Oxy Shares, Auto Parts, and the Capital Light Homebuilders. So one of the things to understand about not only Wagons Fund but just how I invest is that when I look at the Wagons Fund portfolio, I order it from businesses that I have the highest conviction, strongest conviction in and going down to the businesses that I have the lowest conviction in. And so as we go down the list when there are anything new that shows up on the radar that looks interesting like constellation or the Mark Leonard you know complex and so on we will compare those because it's all about opportunity costs we will compare those mainly to the lowest conviction ideas and so all of these bets like Oxy and the auto dealers and the home generator uh home builders they are very good businesses but they were at the bottom bottom end of conviction and my conviction level on constellation for example would be higher than any of those. I prefer that business you know any day is a pretty easy choice to make from where I look at it today. And so we will always make that swap. On the one hand obviously we want to be buy and hold but we're not going to be buy and hold in a dogmatic fashion where we just don't ignore just ignore opportunity cost etc. So the lowest conviction ideas in the portfolio are always kind of subject to change and so one can kind of expect that probably won't change. What is the reasoning behind converting the mutual fund into an ETF and was this transition plan for a long time? Well, I think in hindsight we might have been better off just starting with an ETF. I think ETFs have lower frictional costs. We've reduced our annual fees. They also allow us to have investors from many other countries in the world where the mutual fund is very limited. So on many fronts it's a no-brainer so far which is it's been just about little over a month with having the ETF and I think it's great. I actually prefer it a lot more to having the mutual fund. I think it's a win-win for everyone. So it's it's wonderful. What is the specific performance goal for the ETF and do you expect it to outperform the S&P over the very long horizon example 18 years? Well, I think if we didn't think we could, you know, do better than the S&P long term, there'd be no point in doing this. So, I think the ETF is very well positioned to have a very good run against the S&P for quite a while. I think S&P as we sit today, it's very heavily concentrated with the MAG 7 and some other tech names and under represented in some of the other businesses. And I think the S&P will have some difficulties in the next 10, 15 years because the runups went so much and the valuations are so high etc. So we'll see. But yeah, we definitely expect to beat the S&P over the long term. But that's just an expectation. There are no guarantees. How do you reconcile the philosophy of buying great businesses with the wide mode with holding commodity and cyclical businesses that may have lower expected return on capital? Well, I think I address most of this, you know, in the sense that things don't fall into these night nice buckets of, you know, great businesses with wide modes and commodity businesses. You know, Saudi Aramco being one case and I think Warrior being another case where warrior is sitting in the bottom portile of the cost curve and alpha is pretty close to that as well. And so when they sit at that point in the cost curve, it's very hard for them to lose money and and such. Do you consider any current holdings to fit the spawner business model and is the presence of an unstoppable founder legitimate substitute for a traditional mode? Well, sometimes it may make sense to bet on the jockey. I mean that's what you know venture capitalists do and venture capitalist really I mean the best venture capitalists don't even care what the idea is. They look at the team rather than the idea. And clearly we made a few jockey bets. I mean if you look at our portfolio some are pure jockey bets like you know Caspie is a jockey bet GMAT is a jockey bet and a few others we've talked about the spawner business model I think Rayas is a spawner business model taba could be a spawner business model could be a spawner they're trying to do something right now in in Turkey so we've got a few possible spawners in there going to the next question the portfolio includes several companies in markets such as Turkey and other emerging regions. What characteristics of macro conditions make these markets particularly attractive today from a value investing perspective? When I used to meet Charlie and Charlie's talked about this and Warren has also talked about this publicly several times that the opportunities they saw in the 60s and then in the mid70s and even late 70s, early 80s do not exist today. And you know, Charlie would say, you know, it's like shooting fish in a barrel after the waters run out. And in fact, he they both even said that if they were starting out today, they didn't think they could replicate what they were able to do. I mean, so they came up in an era when the competition for ideas was very limited. And you know, stocks, you know, the the DAO from 1965 to 1982 was flat. So it was a tremendous market to invest in especially after the 7374 crash and and such. So I found that when I went to Turkey which I just gone to just you know kick the tires not really make any investments I felt like I was back in the 60s and I think one of the things that happens which has been still the case with Turkey is that a lot of investors in my opinion do not calibrate properly. They put too much emphasis on the macro and too little emphasis on the micro. And in most businesses, the micro will trump the macro. So if you have a Sam Walton, it doesn't matter what the macro is doing. I mean Sam Balton built Walmart through the stagflation of the 70s and you know Microsoft was formed in a time and Apple was found in a time when the US economy wasn't doing that well etc. And so most of the time I think the micro conditions within a business are much stronger indicators of where things might go versus you know big macro things. And you know we saw just crazy things in Turkey like you know buying RAS where market cap is you know on the day I visited them you know $15 million liquidation value you know 600 to $800 million you know that sort of thing is 2 3% 4% of liquidation value in a not levered business and I didn't know at the time that you know we were getting into bed with incredible leadership and capital allocators with energy and creativity and so on. So I think that micro trumps the macro. I think that in Turkey we found businesses like Tab airports which actually are not even that connected to the Turkish economy. They have so many airports outside Turkey and also within Turkey all their you know their costs are denominated in I mean their revenues are heavily denominated in euros and they're you know 46% or something owned by the French government. great governance. So, you know, something like TAB airports gets penalized for being headquartered in Istanbul and you get mispricing and so we are happy to take that mispricing and uh you know play with it. So, you know, Charlie one of the most important mental models he has is take a simple idea and take it seriously. That's kind of like a bedrock mental model. And when I saw what was happening in Turkey, I realized that I really need to pay attention because this is like being back in the 1960s in the US, being back in the mid70s in the US when we were looking at these businesses and valuations that just were, you know, I think the mispricing was just too extreme to ignore and such. There's a question while it has been 3 years since you started buying metco companies the global demand for metal has not picked up to a meaningful degree anywhere in the world. In what circumstances or time frame would you consider your metal thesis to be invalidated? Well, the way I look at it is that so if you look at something like Alpha Metallological Resources, my measurement of that business long-term is the number of shares they're retiring over time. So while we've had nothing happen to the price in actually the last 7 years, in the last four years since Alpha started at buyback, they can they bought back a third of the stock and that is a tremendous track record. So from my point of view, what I'm laser focused on is what is the shares outstanding in 2035 and what is the likely average cash flows from let's say 2035 to 2045 and that's when the game gets interesting and just in terms of supply and demand I think it's really around 28 2028 2029 when the Indian demand is coming in in a big way which is increas increasing steel demand while the supply of uh met coal is going down and it's difficult to bring supply up at current prices. So our thesis I think everything that I've seen so far has not been invalidated. The companies are doing well. They don't have any financial stress or anything and we want to let it play out. In light of the recent developments with the war in Iran, do you expect thermal coal to make a comeback? If yes, is core natural resources back on your radar? Well, I would just say that it is likely that thermal coal has a very bright future. I think the power needs we have the US and Europe and other countries driven by AI etc. is just staggering and there's really no other way to have 24/7 power delivered. Natural gas is difficult to get into a lot of places because of pipeline issues and all of that. And coal is relatively easy to transport and you know nuclear is like a four full four letter word. So I think that I wouldn't have an interest in thermal coal because of the Iran situation. I think that's you know I don't know what the you know end outcome of that is but I I wouldn't want to make be making bets on you know some sustained war or something but we've haven't been tempted enough yet to do something in that place in that space. One thing to keep in mind is that if things go crazy then met coal starts getting used as thermal coal and we saw that happen after the invasion of Ukraine. So currently the two markets are separate but sometimes they can you know kind of get joined at the hip. The question you briefly held software companies early on in the funds history. Now that these software companies have become a lot cheaper do you consider repurchasing them? Well that's why we went into the Leonard complex. I liked Mark Leonard's DNA. I think that's very unusual DNA. I don't know any other companies that have that kind of DNA. So, we overdosed on it and we like that. And we are looking at others as there's quite a bit of dumb behavior in my my my opinion in the whole software space. There's a question can a person living in the UAE invest in the PAG PBR wagons ETF from here. I'm not very clear on you know there are many countries from where people can invest. I think the Dubai and UAE may be one of them. What I would suggest is just uh send an email to aiden townsen that's atwagonsetf.com. Just send him an email with this question and he'll be able to better respond. I I don't remember. I mean I know that you know people can invest from India, they can invest from Canada. I know Europe has some restrictions but I don't have the full list of the countries. Uh Dubai should be possible but just ask Aiden. What do you think? And I think maybe this might be the last question. We got a minute left. What do you think about the geopolitical risk implications on CASPY and what the conviction levels on CASPY? Well, CASPY and Kazakhstan actually has been a great boon to the country. It's helped the country kind of grow and prosper in in a wonderful way and I think that they can also be wonderful for Turkey. So again, I think that there the bet is on the execution and such and I think the risks are there, but I I think there might be overblown if you kind of overdose on those and go for that. You know the question, what do you think about topics.com? Well, I think topics.com is very similar to constellation. I think got Mark Leonard's DNA operating in Europe. I think that's less competitive environment, good team and everything. So there's nothing I don't like about Topicus. And I think we've hit our time limit. Thank you so much for your interest and we look forward to connecting with you in about 3 months. Bye.