June 26, 2019–The Fed Hints At Rate Cuts And The Markets Rejoice. What’s Next?
Facebook Announces Its Libra Cryptocurrency. But Is Libra Really A Cryptocurrency?
Slack Goes Public Through Direct Listing, Defying Convention. Why Didn’t It Pursue A Traditional IPO?
Activist Skewers HBC As It Seeks A Substantial Increase In The Go-Private Offer. What Is Fair Value?
A Discussion On Quality Investing. Does It Actually Work?
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Welcome investors to the Absolute Return Podcast. Your source for stock market analysis, global macro musings and hedge fund investment strategies. Your hosts Julian Klymochko and Michael Kesslering aim to bring you the knowledge and analysis you need to become a more intelligent and wealthier investor. This episode is brought to you by accelerate financial technologies. Accelerate because performance matters. Find out more at www.Accelerateshares.Com.
Julian Klymochko: Welcome investors to Episode 19 of The Absolute Return Podcast. I am your host Julian Klymochko
Michaek Kesslering: and I am Michael Kesslering.
Julian Klymochko: Today is a lovely Monday June 24th, 2019. Got a lot of important events happening in markets global economy to chat about this week.
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- Number one off the top. The Fed hints that rate cuts and the markets rejoice. What is next?
- We are going to chat about Facebook. Its Libra cryptocurrency that was discussed a lot this week but we are going to chat about is this really a cryptocurrency? We are going to get into some of the details behind the structuring on that stable coin.
- Going to chat about Slack’s going public through a direct listing instead of a typical IPO.
- Also going to chat about the HBC go private which is getting done and the market specifically an activist investor is not too happy with the price offered.
- Lastly, we will talk about a recent blog post just on quality investing and how that works.
Big news on the U.S. economy last week you had the FOMC coming out with their rate decision specifically. Fed Chairman Jay Powell, he indicated his willingness to support the U.S. economy through monetary policy. The Federal Open Market Committee deciding to hold rates steady, not enact an interest rate cut that some market participants were expecting. Consensus was to leave rates steady so was not, necessarily unexpected. Powell did hint at future rate cuts, which is a change. He stated quote, “an ounce of prevention is worth more than a pound of cure.” which I thought was a pretty interesting quote from the Fed chairman there.
Powell emphasized that new information between now and July 31, that is the date of the next meeting of the FOMC the Federal Open Market Committee, this would be crucial to near-term monetary policy specifically this date over the next few weeks will include the outcome of a meeting at the G20 summit in Japan later this month between President Trump and Xi Jinping, the Chinese president. What they are going to do is they are aiming to resolve the trade tensions between the U.S. and China that have spooked businesses and investment across the U.S. and globally. For now, the FOMC decided to keep rates steady but noted quote uncertainties about the outlook. Another interesting piece of language that is new because really this meeting showed how reactive they are to the market and what the market is demanding out of them.
Kind of makes you question their so-called independence. 8 of Fed 17 officials are forecasting lower rates this year. One of the biggest challenges for the Fed in contemplating rate cuts is that U.S. economic data which we have touched on lots of historical podcasts. This data has not deteriorated to the point where officials and other economists fear a sharp slowdown or recession which could easily justify monitoring easing through interest rate cuts specifically.
Typically we do see aggressive rate cutting by the Fed in recession not when GDP is effectively booming. These Trump-Xi talks at the G20 could result in anything from a truce, which obviously would be incredibly positive, all the way to a full blown escalation in this trade war that would offer Mr. Powell a much more straightforward case for easing policy and cutting interest rates.
Some market action – inflation, it has consistently been running below the Fed’s target 2 percent rate, which is indicative and it gives them room to cut rates, because they are trying to stimulate the economy. Such that inflation is within their 2 percent range and it really has not been over the past 10 years. They have really struggled with getting inflation up to their target 2 percent level. The market implied probability of a 25 basis point cut in the Fed’s interest rate in July has jumped. I think it is approaching 100 percent as we speak and they are even pricing in a decent chance of a 50 basis point cut, which would be in my opinion unexpected. What are your thoughts on the FOMC, and what they are doing with interest rates here?
Michael Kesslering: It is funny that you mention the Fed Independence as Trump has been tweeting lately about the possibility of demoting Powell, which it is quite unclear whether he would actually have the authority to do so but nonetheless it is something that is gathering some steam in the media. Basically I think what has been rumoured would be demoting him to a Fed president and then installing a new a new chairperson. You know I really don’t see a lot of validity to this but interesting nonetheless as you know with the Trump administration there will always be random tweets being fired off.
Julian Klymochko: Certainly, and it appears that Jay Powell, the Fed chairman, is really just trying to save face act somewhat independently and blame it on market conditions. Ultimately, he seems to be doing what Trump is desiring perhaps not as quickly as he’d like and not as easy policy as Trump would prefer. However, he really has done a complete 180 versus his stance last year of steady rate hikes, balance sheet runoff and tightening financial conditions. Now he is pretty much the exact opposite indicating a willingness to cut rates and effectively do what Trump tells them.
Michael Kesslering: Absolutely you really don’t like to see that sort of lack of independence with the Fed as it traditionally is supposed to be an independent entity. The other thing that I found interesting was that there is not a complete consensus within the FOMC. There was one dissenting opinion, so James Bullard the president of the St. Louis Fed. He has been arguing for a 25 basis point cut in this meeting but there always is some level of dissent.
Julian Klymochko: Certainly, something to keep an eye on and just Trumps you’ve got to kind of take what he says with a grain of salt although he obviously has quite a bit of power. I remember when Obama was president and Trump would constantly criticize back then it was either Chairwoman Yellen or perhaps even Ben Bernanke. He would criticize that they are keeping interest rates way too low and had financial conditions that were far too easy. He would constantly criticize Obama and the stock market. I think he tweeted at some point a number of years ago that the stock market was one big fat bubble caused by extremely low interest rates. You kind of got to take what he says with a grain of salt and certainly he wants the market to do well under his terms but under no one else’s.
Some market action after this FOMC decision. Of course, the S&P 500 hit a new all-time high. Some markets really liking what they are hearing from the Fed. Gold hit its highest level since 2013 rose about fourteen hundred dollars per ounce. The 10-year Treasury note slipped at one point sub 2 percent. Interest rates on the longer-term bonds the 10-year bonds heading plunging below 2 percent. That indicates as yields go down, prices go up. Bond prices rallying off that as well. Interesting market action but certainly market participants really liking what the Fed is doing here.
Big news in the crypto space with Facebook announcing its Libra crypto currency. But is this really a crypto currency? We will get into it. What happened was Facebook unveiled its plans for a global digital coin called Libra, which could be used to make instant and low cost money transfers around the world from mobile devices. Effectively they plan on implementing this digital currency through their vast applications. Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp. Libra is called a stable coin. It’s a digital currency backed by a reserve of global fiat currencies. This one structured a bit differently. The typical stable coin would be backed by U.S. dollars solely U.S. dollars and so it would be effectively linked to the U.S. dollar. But Libra will be backed by a number of global currencies I’m assuming. U.S. dollar, yen, euro, Swiss franc. A number of different currencies so it won’t necessarily be 100 percent correlated to anyone asset.
It will be backed by, a diversified portfolio of fiat currencies. It is not just an initiative solely backed by Facebook. There are a number of large corporations backing it.
I believe there might be upwards of 100 but some of the bigger names would be Visa, MasterCard, Lyft, and Spotify. Quote from Facebook David Marcus who is leading this initiative. He stated quote, “The Internet has given everyone access to the world’s information and democratize access to free communications but money has stayed the same.” Basically what Facebook is trying to do here is really innovate in the digital currency and financial transactions space really trying to make financial transactions much easier over the Internet. Libra will be backed by a pool of currencies and assets stored around the world. It will not have a fixed exchange rate against any one traditional currency such as dollars or euros. Though it will not swing as wildly as crypto currencies such as Bitcoin, Ethereum and the Lite which are not backed by any hard assets. Interesting play by Facebook with Libra here, what are your thoughts on this new supposed cryptocurrency?
Michael Kesslering: I guess first would be the partnerships and they currently have an association with 28 companies there. By the time, they launch they want to have 100 as you had mentioned. But what’s interesting and mentioned Visa and Uber but it’s addressing how long they’ve been in discussion with some of these companies as you would have thought that this would be over a very long period of time and I’m sure with some of their partners it has been. I believe they recorded with PayPal only having been in discussions with them for like two weeks before this announcement. It will be interesting once you see some of the due diligence done on this and once it is actually executed how this plays out.
Julian Klymochko: Right. Yeah I read the white paper and it does not really have too much for detail it is still largely an idea I believe they are looking to have it finalized by 2020.
Michael Kesslering: Yes. The lack of detail is a little bit disconcerting, but the other aspect I wanted to point out was that really this type of service offering already does exist in China with WeChat. It is really just a kind of goal to emulate the WeChat service offering from Chinese company Tencent which is a great service offering in the sense from the company’s standpoint as it’s completely immersed in the lives of Chinese people for payments for it’s a double sided market place similar to like an eBay functions. Many different ways in their lives. The other interesting aspect is how Bitcoin has reacted to the market action Bitcoin with this announcement is you’ve seen it up over eleven thousand dollars for a bit today and yet I think it’s got came down a bit down below 11,000 dollars but it has seen a little bit of a resurgence with some of this positive press.
Julian Klymochko: Certainly a big rally in bitcoin. I believe it bottomed in the 36 hundred dollar range not too long ago and now it is nearly or, perhaps tripled off the lows. Sentiment certainly turning around in cryptocurrency space. As for Libra, I want to tell it how it is. My opinion is this is not a real cryptocurrency even though they branded it as such. The reason in my opinion it is not a real cryptocurrency is that it uses what is called a permission block chain. This means that it is not a decentralized digital asset. Libra block chain will, be controlled by a number of large corporations at least at the start. To be a true cryptocurrency, you need to have a decentralized block chain that is not controlled by anyone that is immutable i.e. transactions cannot be reversed and the block chain cannot be manipulated or changed over time. Currently Libra is not going to have that, it’s going to have this private permission block chain and only large corporations that put up I believe 10 million dollars are allowed to be involved in verifying this Libra block chain. In my opinion Libra not necessarily a cryptocurrency. In addition this Libra it is a stable coin, but shockingly it does not pay any interest on reserves. The way Libra works is, it takes money from investors. Fiat currency consider it U.S. dollars and may go ahead and invest that in treasuries. Well right now, short-term Treasury bonds are yielding above 2 percent. Around two point, oh three percent range and the Libra organization gets to keep all of this.
They flow none of this investment income through interest on these securities back to investors. If you compare this to similar structures and I believe this looks exactly like a money market ETF, basically an exchange traded fund holding sovereign debt holding T bonds. Typically these Treasury bill ETF s have a MER, management expense ratio of about zero point one five to zero point two percent or 15 to 20 basis points. If you apply that same analogy to Libra the stable coin. Where they are in fact not paying out any interest and keeping it all for themselves you can consider that the equivalent of an MER or management expense ratio. Equivalent to the interest payments that they receive on the reserve, which could be as high as two point three percent. In my opinion Libra is basically a money market ETF with fees that are 10 to 15 x higher than their closest comparable which is pretty shocking given what Facebook says they’re trying to accomplish. If we really do a deep down analysis of this, it is just an absolute profit machine for the backers. I think investors here they are just being ripped off pretty badly by not getting access to any of the interest provided by the reserves and the Libra organization, which includes Facebook, they are keeping it all. In my opinion, this is just an extremely high cost money market fund and investors getting ripped off, and it’s not a true cryptocurrency because it’s a permission block chain and it’s not fully decentralized.
Michael Kesslering: With Facebook, the year that Facebook has had this year one would have thought that they would maybe try to move back a little bit to a little less regulated areas. This is just a full dive into the most regulated area of businesses in Commerce Financial Services.
Julian Klymochko: Certainly, they attracted criticism from bankers, politicians, throughout the world. You are hearing it in the U.S. you are hearing it in Europe. Certainly, a number of high-ranking officials taking a close look at Libra. The other thing I would caution people looking to get involved in Libra and perhaps hold some is that Facebook has always really played fast and loose with privacy rules and financial transactions are perhaps some of the most important for individual’s privacy. That is something to take into consideration, is how they are going to protect your privacy. Are they going to take what you are doing with their money and sell it to advertisers? Remember this, is a company that allowed Russia to infiltrate their social networks and heavily influence the U.S. government elections. Something to keep in mind as potential privacy issues with Libra stablecoins. I caution investors and participants in this project to really take that into account on how you deal with it going forward.
We had a Silicon Valley tech unicorn making its public market debut last week with Slack going public through what’s known as a direct listing not a traditional IPO or initial public offering. What Slack did is they went public via a direct listing, which entails them just listing their stock on a public exchange without the concurrent equity raise, which you would find within initial public offerings. They did not do an underwritten equity financing. They just straight up listed their shares on the market and let it trade.
Some price action here, the shares soared at the market open to thirty-eight dollars and fifty cents. Now this is versus the so-called reference price of twenty-six dollars per share that the bankers somehow came up with or made up if you will. Rallying nearly 50 percent above this 26 dollar per share reference price. This public market value indicated Slack was worth 20 billion nearly triple its last private funding round valuation of seven point one billion in 2018. So quite a rally in the valuation for a private market investors over the past year.
Wanted to chat about why go the direct listing route. I believe Slack is the second technology company to go public via this route the first being Spotify, not too long ago. By going this route, Slack will avoid paying multi-million dollar underwriting fees to Wall Street banks while existing shareholders including employees and venture capital firms. They will be able to sell shares immediately versus a traditional IPO where they have something called a lockup where investors are not able to sell their shares for a number of time. Typically, about six months post the going public transaction, but in this direct listing, VC and private market backers of Slack can sell their shares immediately. The other reason in to go the route of direct listing aside from saving on the fees and the liquidity for investors is they just don’t need the cash to do an equity offering that goes with the traditional IPO. Slack had roughly eight hundred forty one million dollars in cash and cash equivalents in its most recent fiscal year. Financial performance that had negative cash flow of less than 100 million so over eight years of cash burn on the balance sheet which is certainly more than sufficient to execute their near and medium term business plans compared to the top 10 software IPO is over the past twelve months. They are trading at I believe on average nearly double their IPO prices on average and Slack about 50 percent compared to its reference price. This performance not quite as aggressive as other tech IPOs, but who is going to complain? With a 50 percent increase in the share price on day one.
Wanted to talk about some shareholders then VC firm Accel owns twenty three point eight percent of Slack. Firm Andreessen Horowitz owns thirteen point two percent slack co-founder and CEO Stewart Butterfield controls eight point four percent so those are some of the major shareholders. Interesting story on how Accel got their massive stake, they actually back the company. They put one point five million dollars into it in the seed round which was the first round of funding back when Slack was in fact a gaming company called Tiny Speck. The way Slack evolved over time is that actually started as this online gaming company, which was a failure. They realized that this messaging platform that they built into the game could be a commercial success. They spun out Slack, shut down the game and there you go. Now Slack’s 20 billion and Accel investment their one point five million dollar investment is worth multiple billions and absolutely, huge return for them.
Blog post from one of the backers of Accel or one of the backers from Accel of Slack. He wrote in a blog post quote, “slack is a great reminder that the most interesting companies are often the ones whose courses aren’t easily charted. The commonalities between those companies start and end with that drive, creativity and resilience of their founders and early team members.” there you have it. Quite the return for Accel and a really interesting public offering or public listing for Slack. What are your thoughts on this direct listing?
Michael Kesslering: Yeah I guess just to go back to your comments about their pivot from the video game company to the basically the chat app. Is it provides a great example of rationale for a founding team to pivot and really just provide solid rationale for that. There are times when companies should pivot into a more profitable area and other times where they should just shut it down and start it up back from scratch. The interesting things that you had been reading. I think around the time of the Spotify direct listing as well you kind of saw the same articles that are arguing that really the direct listings will hurt and potentially even just kill investment banking. My thoughts on that would be that this is unlikely to be that widespread, I think it works really well for companies such as Spotify and Slack that are very well known within the investment community and also don’t need cash. Those types of high growth companies, unicorn companies are kind of few and far between. If you are looking to raise cash, an IPO is a great way to do so and the only unfortunate part is that it is quite expensive but capital does have a cost. I do think the investment banks will be all right, they won’t be going anywhere. I thought those articles were quite interesting.
The other aspect is the difference between the IPO price and Reference price. The example is not a perfect apples to apples comparison. As mentioned Slack had a reference price of twenty-six dollars a share, but no shares actually traded hands at that point, whereas in an IPO. They do raise that initial amount of money at that share price and the share price will typically trade above that ideally in a properly priced IPO but really just a comparison between the two where no shares actually do trade hands at that Reference price but may be used to value employee options or things of that nature.
Julian Klymochko: Yeah, it is interesting the notion of Reference price, which is pretty much just made up by investment bankers a little bit off the market here with a 26-dollar Reference price. The stock soaring to 38-15 nearly 50 percent above that and trading one hundred and thirty seven million shares on its first day of listing which is 71 percent of the company. Many new shareholders getting involved in probably quite a few older shareholders utilizing this direct listing to exit successful investment in Slack.
Continuing with our series on HBC, Hudson’s Bay and its go private offer from insiders. Last week a well-known activist investor Land & Buildings that skewered HBC and it is seeking a substantial increase in their go private offer. What activist investor Land & Buildings investment management did, they blasted HBC’s special committee. Noting that the go private offer quote “materially undervalues the exceptional assets the company owns” by exceptional assets. As we discussed before HBC owns a number of extremely high quality real estate properties and in fact, the vast majority of the value behind HBC is in their prime real estate assets. That is really the crown jewel that the insiders are seeking to capitalize on, to crystallize that value for themselves and be able to pay public shareholders a mere pittance of that private market value that they ascribe to those real estate assets.
Land & Buildings the activist investor indicated that the special committee could boost its nine forty five offer or this investor group could boost their nine forty five offer to eighteen dollars per share just by using proceeds from recent asset sales. That is pretty much money they already have in the bank or will have shortly. They also ask the special committee of independent directors tasked with evaluating the latest offer to hire a truly independent investment bank to evaluate the value of Hudson Bay’s real estate and retail banners. Land & Buildings believes it is highly unlikely that a majority of shareholders outside the buyout group will approve the transaction. And the reason why is because the company said HBC said that the real estate was worth as much as six point four billion or over thirty five dollars per share. Just a couple of years ago more recently its CEO just last year said the real estate was worth 28 bucks per share and now they come back to shareholders and tried to take them out for nine forty five per share. So many shareholders really not liking that dynamic. They want all of that real estate value. They really want management to crystallize that value for them and they want to capitalize and realize that discounted value. Now what I believe and it is somewhat there could be a somewhat nefarious plan by management here is to show poor performance get the stock price down. Take it out for pennies on the dollar and crystallize all that unrealized real estate value for themselves. You got to worry that’s a potential possibility here and hopefully the special committee of independent directors at HBC are looking into that possibility.
30 minutes after Jonathan Litt who is the leader and founder of this activist investor Land & Building. After his letter was published, Richard Baker and the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan board they previously had an agreement where Baker would buy teachers stake at 9.45 per share. They actually cancelled that agreement and teachers went and sold their stake into the market at nine forty five per share. Multiple parties stepped up to buy the nearly 18 million shares that teachers owned.
Some background teachers the pension plan first invested in HBC in 2013 when it helped finance the acquisition of Saks Fifth Avenue. Ontario Teachers nursing some losses there but perhaps just cutting a loser loose and moving on taking their proceeds at 9.45 per share. They won’t see any additional upside of this potential transaction but clearly they’re just kind of fed up washing their hands of the situation, and with that it’ll be interesting to see what happens with this vote that is to be held. What are your thoughts on this potential transaction here?
Michael Kesslering: One, of the things that they were asking the special committee to do is really just engage, as you had mentioned. Engage an investment bank and really just to run a proper bidding process to get the highest value for the shareholders, which is a very reasonable ask and something by any of these statements it doesn’t appear that this has been an auction off entity. The other argument is that, with this bid is really just being financed through the planned sale of the European assets, which would be for. I believe that stake is worth about one point five billion dollars and so current shareholders would not realize any of the value of that sale and then would still be giving up the entirety of the rest of the real estate portfolio. Really, their comments are just that current shareholders should participate in some of the value from selling off this entity, which is pretty valid.
Julian Klymochko: Certainly it seems like management is perhaps pickpocketing the shareholders here. There is going to be all this cash from these asset sales and they are effectively using it to take out minority shareholders at pennies on the dollar. I mean nine forty and 45 cents versus the value they pegged for the real estate assets at twenty five to thirty five dollars per share, that is a substantial discount that is supposed net asset value that they have communicated to the market and you have seen independent valuations. In my opinion, the company should be shopped. They should try to find other buyers for it. If this truly is bonafide insider bid then they should let other parties take a look at it to try to find greater value for the independent shareholders here. That is really The Board of directors job is to help realize the highest price for the shares.
Michael Kesslering: The investor discontent is valid in the sense that the management team is not injecting any of their own capital into the business. Just using the sale proceeds, and so it’s not even comparable to a turnaround situation where the management team would come in and inject capital into the business and turn it around similar to what was happening at Sears. Although that was quite a quite a debacle and not quite as simple as that. It was a turnaround strategy where this just seems to be an outright sale.
Julian Klymochko: Certainly, shareholders frustrated. The IPO, I believe in 2012 its seventeen dollars per share and now they are trying to take it out for nearly half the price. Shareholders are very unimpressed with the price, and it is being taken out by a group. At a very low valuation and the group. The share price was that low because of this group due to their poor operating performance. They really did shareholders wrong. They did not operate the business well, because the share price to suffer and they are really trying to my opinion, perhaps rip off shareholders and, you know, effectively take shareholder cash, pay them a bit of it at a nine forty five bid and then retain all the upside for themselves, which is unfortunate. It is good to see an activist get involved, rattle the cages and try to get more value for minority shareholders.
Put out a blog post last week titled Does investing in high quality stocks work well? It in fact does. It certainly does work and there is many ways to, quantitatively view quality of a stock. We have tested, back tested, and simulated, both from a quantitative and qualitative viewpoint, the vast majority of quality metrics and we settled pretty much on our two favourite ones, which is return on capital. Being operating income over capital invested in the business and the second being gross profit over assets. Both of these metrics just really measure the efficiency in which the company can generate profits on the invested capital or the assets of the business.
What we did is we ran a 20-year simulations on U.S. and Canadian stocks monthly rebalanced of top and bottom, decile quality portfolios. The top decile quality portfolio, it selects the top 10 percent of the highest quality stocks within either Canada or the U.S. rebalanced on a monthly basis, and over 20 years, the results are actually pretty astounding. On this return on capital quality metric in Canada, the top 10 percent highest quality stocks compounded at over 15 percent annualized in Canada and in the U.S. north of twelve point three percent annualized. That again is return on capital. The Canadian portfolio, if you invested one hundred thousand dollars in the top 10 percent quality stocks deemed quality on return on capital; you would have one point six million dollars, and in the U.S. on that, twelve point three percent annualized portfolio, you would have nearly one million dollars of that hundred thousand dollar investments. So substantial gains, substantial market beating returns. By looking at the highest quality stocks, you will see the same thing on the gross profit over asset metric. In Canada, those compounded or return to fourteen point three percent annually over 20 years and in the U.S. nearly 13 percent annualized. Conversely, if we look at the bottom decile, bottom 10 percent at the lowest quality stocks in Canada, they lost over 9 percent. That is negative nine point three percent per year over a 20 year starting your hundred thousand dollar investment into only fifteen thousand dollars an eighty five thousand dollar loss over two decades, which would really hurt. And that’s what investing in the lowest quality return on capital stocks will get you. In the US not as bad, but they did turn around negative six point four percent annually over 20 years, so substantial losses. They are looking at gross profits over assets in Canada and the U.S. return negative one point eight percent and negative 3 percent annually respectively. For those two metrics in Canada and the U.S., bottom line certainly take quality investing into account when investing in stocks.
Take a look at return on capital and gross profit over assets. How efficiently a company can turn their assets and capital into operating profits. Make sure to look at equities of companies generating the highest return on capital and perhaps sell or even short sell those generating the lowest or negative returns on capital. Negative gross profits and really no bottom line is you want to invest in the highly profitable companies and sell, not hold or even sell short those generating losses or the lowest return on capital effectively companies not earning their cost of capital. I encourage you to read the blog post on quality investing.
And that wraps it up for episode 19 of The Absolute Return podcast. If you like it you can check out more on absolutereturnpodcast.com or any of your favourite podcast players. Be sure to leave us a review on Apple iTunes if you enjoyed it, and we will chat with you next week. Cheers.
Thanks for tuning in to the Absolute Return Podcast. This episode was brought to you by accelerate financial technologies. Accelerate, because performance matters. Find out more at www.AccelerateShares.com. The views expressed in this podcast to the personal views of the participants and do not reflect the views of Accelerate. No aspect of this podcast constitutes investment legal or tax advice. Opinions expressed in this podcast should not be viewed as a recommendation or solicitation of an offer to buy or sell any securities or investment strategies. The information and opinions in this podcast are based on current market conditions and may fluctuate and change in the future. No representation or warranty expressed or implied is made on behalf of Accelerate as to the accuracy or completeness of the information contained in this podcast. Accelerate does not accept any liability for any direct indirect or consequential loss or damage suffered by any person as a result relying on all or any part of this podcast and any liability is expressly disclaimed.
