Keith Smith - Bonhoeffer Capital

· Podcast Episodes
Keith Smith Bonheffer Capital

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German theologian, philosopher, and martyr. You may be wondering why he may have anything to do with investing. My guest Keith Smith has been influenced by Bonhoeffer's thinking. He named his fund after him and incorporated his philosophy.

Independent thinking has been the bedrock of Keith Smith’s investment philosophy. As an engineering major on an Air Force scholarship at Cornell University, Keith was drawn to the finance library one night on a study break. Always interested in finance, he picked up a copy of Graham and Dodd’s Security Analysis, and the investor was unleashed.

Over the next three decades, Keith successfully invested his personal and family capital. He applied risk management tools he learned as an Air Force captain and the analytical tools he learned as a valuation expert to identify market inefficiencies and sector disruptions where patient investments returned market-stomping returns. Keith relishes in questioning the popular perception.

“We're going from a situation where historically business was done by families. You did it with people you trusted around the world. Now this new system, which is the disruptive system of the Anglo-Dutch system, basically put everything on its head. It said that strangers can basically interact with each other, with a given set of rules, feel that they can trust this situation and no one's going to steal their money.”

We spoke about:

  • Dietrich Bonhoffer standing firm against popular opinion
  • Judging the quality of management
  • Compound mispricings
  • Mischaracterized companies
  • Leveraged Buyouts
  • Stock Buybacks
  • How great Financial Twitter is

TRANSCRIPT FOLLOWS BELOW

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Keith Smith (6s):

When I started out, like I, probably most investors do when they start out, they just look at the numbers, they try and find cheap companies and such like that. But as you try to delve and really understand what these businesses are, you really need to look for clues of other qualitative aspects of the business that are really going to drive and motivate people because in the end, all these businesses are people, right? It's all driven by people.

Phil Muscatello (28s):

Hi, and welcome back to Stocks for Beginners. I'm Phil Muscatello. If you board the wrong train, it's no use running along the corridor in the opposite direction. That's a quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German theologian, philosopher, and martyr. You may well be wondering why he may have anything to do with investing. So I'm going to let my guest today explain. Hello, Keith Smith.

Keith Smith (51s):

Hi, how are you doing? It's great to be here.

Phil Muscatello (53s):

So Keith, who was Dietrich Bonhoeffer. And what does he mean to you?

Keith Smith (58s):

Well, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German theologian, as you had mentioned. He also was a key player in the resistance movement against the Nazis as they took over Germany in the late thirties. He ended up dying as a martyr. The key aspect, I think, of his life that resonates with me was his convictions and willing to stand up with them, really being able to sort of draw a line of where he should really make a stand. And a lot of times when it comes to life, that's an important thing to do. We all need to make decisions of okay, our convictions and what we really want to do. Where are we going to draw the line? He drew a line and he stuck with it.

Keith Smith (1m 38s):

He stuck with his convictions. He basically taught a lot of other people. He became a leader in terms of people following him in Germany in terms of what was going on at the time. But then in addition to just being able to follow those principles to the end. You know, he basically, I think got under the skin of the people that didn't like him to the point where he had ended up dying as a result of that because they ended up executing cause they thought he was such a threat. So it really resonates with me just in terms of my faith in the way I think about things. And the same thing. I think when it comes to investing in terms of basically being able to find some principles, be able to stand with them and know where to draw the line because there's a lot of gray areas and basically you need to decide, okay, well, which areas am I willing to stand on?

Keith Smith (2m 23s):

Because everything can become a gray area and some areas are not white, but you really need to find out where to stand. So that's how it's influenced me personally. And I think it's also helped us in terms of the thought of being able to stay focused, but then there's also, you know, looking at things in other ways. I mean, he was a very open-minded theologian in terms of being able to apply Christian principles in a lot of different ways, probably beyond what people were necessarily used to at the time. He visited a lot of the churches in the United States at Harlem, and basically spoke out against a lot of the racial discrimination that was happening at the time. And so he basically applied his faith in ways that were not common amongst people at the time. And I think that's one way that, you know, as analysts, we need to also be able to do, we need to basically be able to apply our analysis in ways that may not be popular at the time or conventional, but makes sense from a principal perspective.

Phil Muscatello (3m 17s):

So apart from inspiring you in terms of how you look at investing, he inspired you enough to even name your fund after him.

Keith Smith (3m 27s):

That's correct. I mean, I think the fund basically sort of, imbibes sort of his, his approach to things. And I think just the ability to, you know, we've talked before in terms about the principle aspect of it, but also on being able to, you know, persevere through times of when your particular opinion isn't going to be popular. Part of his approach too is basically to explain what he was doing and clearly have an explanation of why the hope that was in him was there and actually taking in actions and focusing his life on it. And so I think that's, again, just sort of another inspiration of being able to take a principle and apply it to whatever works that we're doing in life.

Keith Smith (4m 11s):

I mean, just, it's a, you know, it's basically being able to work as though you're working for God, no matter what you're doing. So it's a similar sort of approach they're basically saying, okay, what's the dedication and the focus on that? There's interest, but then there's also sort of, everyone has a God-given sort of potential that's in them and the interests that have been there. And then how do you really sort of invigorate that? He's an important person in history and, you know, one of the things we do with our shareholders is we give them, you know, some books and some background about him. There's some really good literature out there written there there's actually like a graphic novel and a few other things out there to really sort of get across his message. And I think it's a real important one, especially in the days that we are in today, because there is so much gray area and provides sort of a nice example of, okay, here's a contrast that really makes sense from that perspective.

Phil Muscatello (4m 60s):

Okay, so you're explaining the principles that Bonhoeffer espoused, but in terms of investing, what are you telling your shareholders and clients about investing and your particular way of approaching investing?

Keith Smith (5m 13s):

Yeah, the particular way that that we look at is it's primarily a value oriented investment strategy. That's a strategy that a bedrock strategy that we always have. In the initial, sort of focus has been in sort of three areas. Areas that we would call compound mispricings, which are situations where both the company and the underlying security are mispriced and therefore we can get some kind of multiplication effect by really buying both and over time having adjustments in both the security evaluation itself and the underlying security. A simple example of that would be like a long-term option, undervalued security. And clearly what you get there is you get the leverage of the option plus the security rerating.

Keith Smith (5m 55s):

So that's a simple example of that. The other two areas that we focus on have been what we call mischaracterized companies. These are situations where a company doesn't quite fit into a specific industry or really the business model is outside the scope of what analysts look for. An example of that, that we have in the portfolio is a company called Ashtead. So Ashtead is typically when you look at the way the analysts look as is lumped in together with the industrials, but the company is really a rental company and really has some really inter rental and distribution business, which really has some really interesting characteristics that are more akin to those and the growth models that they have are a lot closer to that.

Keith Smith (6m 35s):

And therefore, what happens is since industrial analysts're following it, it gets an industrial analyst multiple. But if you look at companies with very similar models, the model that Ashtead actually had is very similar to Amazon. And the fact that what they do is they establish local areas where they basically become dominant. And then what they'll do is through that distribution channel, they'll provide other products to lease and service. So they started out with just rental equipment, scissor lifts and such, and then right now they have cleaning equipment, other things that they're planting on top. So it's almost like an Amazon model on a local basis. And so that's clearly different than most of your industrial companies, which are mainly manufacturing businesses. So that's an example, sort of a compound mispricing.

Keith Smith (7m 17s):

The other effect we try to look for and take advantage of in the portfolio is where it characterizes a sort of private and leveraged buyouts. So it's situations where companies will take on a good amount of debt, but they have a really steady cashflow. And the trend that that can really take advantage of is as long-term interest rates continue to go down, If you can find a very steady business, for example, if you look at like cable companies, very steady cash flows, they can be levered up by a significant amount. Primarily due to, you know, they're stable cash flows, but you can take advantage of the spreads. It's almost like, you're almost taken out of like a bank you're saying, okay, we can get X amount of investment on the cable business, but you can borrow at this really low rate and therefore getting an arbitrager or another aspect of that type of a situation is buybacks.

Keith Smith (8m 2s):

'Cause again, sort of the buybacks are the same sort of thing. If the stock is cheap, as long as the underlying business continues to grow, even at a really low rate, you can create a lot of value from that.

Phil Muscatello (8m 17s):

So Keith you've just brought up a couple of concepts there that a lot of listeners may have never heard about and one is being a leveraged buyout. I'm not going to talk about the options because that's another walk in the woods. But if you could just talk about leveraged buyouts and buybacks. So a leveraged buyout is, well actually I'll hand it over to you, tell us whether the leveraged buyout is, and then if we can also speak about buybacks.

Keith Smith (8m 41s):

Okay, sure. So a leverage buyout as a situation where a company that basically can generate consistent cash flows, and you see this common and sort of subscription type businesses like cable businesses, telecoms, and other huge example of this where you're paying a monthly fee for service, and the customer turnover is relatively low so you have a lot of lock-in for the customers. In other words, the customers, they don't switch that often so you have high customer retention. So you have this huge amount of cashflow that just continues to be generated by the business. And in a leveraged buyout situation, you'll say, okay, the company may be modestly leveraged, it doesn't have a whole lot of debt. And what the leveraged buyout allows you to do is allows you to increase debt to a certain level.

Keith Smith (9m 23s):

Now, the key thing behind this is you don't want the leverage to get too high where the company can fail. So there's sort of a point depending upon the volatility of the business that makes sense for this. And there's guys out there that have done a really good job at this and they basically made their whole business on it. So there's this guy in the cable is named John Malone. He's a master at this. He's basically found the point at which cable businesses can be levered without becoming too levered. I mean, as an example of one of the investments I invested in early on in my career, is I invested in a cable business and had gotten too over-levered and the company went bankrupt. And I lost money in that transaction. I bought some money when it restructured and had an appropriate amount of leverage it did well.

Keith Smith (10m 5s):

But that's an example of sort of the dangers of leveraged buyouts is that it can be a good thing, but you need to be cognizant of where the edge is. In basically taking advantage of basically learning from people that have been in the business like Malone who's basically done this for 30, 40 years. You can get an idea of, okay, this business is his suit, this, this amount of leverage and it makes sense. So that's an example of a leveraged buyout. The other is sort of stock buybacks. Now these are the situations where companies, if they see their stock is undervalued, can buy it back. However, what most companies really should do is they should look at and see what their opportunity set is. If they can invest in their business and continue to make investments and get good returns on those investments, that's what they typically would do first.

Keith Smith (10m 51s):

But some businesses are on more mature markets where what happens is, is they basically, there's no more investments they can invest in to make a decent return. So they decide, okay, there's two things you can do if that happens. You can say, okay, I'm either going to return it as a dividend or I'm going to buy back by stock. Now one is much more tax efficient than the other. If you distributed as a dividend, then what happens is all the shareholders have to pay a tax. They're actually paying two taxes, because once you generated the income, you've paid a tax as a corporation. And then when you distribute to them, they pay a tax. So it's taxed twice. Now, if you do a share buyback, that's only taxed once because in essence, it's taxed when the company makes it, but then they go out into the market and buy the shares.

Keith Smith (11m 32s):

And what that does is if the value of the firm stays the same and there's fewer shares outstanding, the price per share goes up. And that's how the intrinsic value works. It's an efficient way, given the current tax code, to basically return value to shareholders for more company that has excess cash. So I think those are two specific things I think, that we try to look for in the fund in terms of basically being able to identify those situations. But a lot of it goes back to sort of overall capital allocation of the company. And this is just part of the overall strategy, but you want to basically see companies when they do this, an example of a thing that can subtract value from a company.

Keith Smith (12m 13s):

So, okay. They can invest in their business, they can do dividend, they can do a buyback. Now there's a third thing they could do. They could do M&A, they can go out and buy another company. Now, if they're buying it within their business and they understand it and you can get a lot of synergies with that, as the companies get bolder, that could be a good thing. Or you have people that just buy things just to make the company bigger and those destroy a lot of value, there's lots of those acquisitions. So the real question becomes is, okay, it's part of the capital allocation decisions and when you look at companies, one thing you can see of companies that have done well over time is you can sort of judge, okay, how have they really done this over time? How has the management team allocated capital that they've been given?

Keith Smith (12m 54s):

Each company's different. Each company depending upon where they are in their growth trajectory is different. And there's a lot of specifics here where you can really see a differentiation of companies that really do the right thing, capital allocate correctly, versus the ones that don't and the ones that don't you have a tendency to just stay away from.

Phil Muscatello (13m 10s):

And that's a really important way of judging the quality of management, isn't it? Because they've got a deal with capital, they've got to deal with where the money that they're holding can be deployed in the best possible way for stockholders' interests and some do it really well and some do it really poorly.

Keith Smith (13m 29s):

Yeah. And there's a whole 'nother aspect of stewardship, right? I mean, because you've got the situation and again, this sort of goes back to sort of the Dietrich Bonhoeffer approach to things too is, he looked at things basically they didn't belong to him, he was a steward of whatever he did. And that's the kind of management team you want because management is the steward of the shareholders' money that they give to them. And you can clearly see it in a lot of different ways. And so if the management is doing the right things from a capital allocation perspective, you'll see it as you just go through different things. One thing we like to look at a lot is, sort of, the proxy statement. If you look at the proxy statement, one thing that I try to look at, I don't see it much in American companies, I've seen it in some Canadian companies, is take a look at the relative amount that people on the management team are getting paid.

Keith Smith (14m 20s):

Is the CEO paid 10 times bigger than the next guy down? To me that implicitly says, the CEO thinks he's better than everyone else, right? So if you find companies that have different arrangements along those things, they can be very fruitful investments because it's getting into the psychology of the management. 'Cause what you're really trying to do is you're trying to say, okay, what's the culture of this business like? And you can see examples of the culture in, for example, the proxy statements and the other things that the managements have to basically publish to sort of see what's going on. So you're basically putting a puzzle together to say, okay, would these guys be good stewards of my money? Because basically the CEO and the management team has given stewardship over this money, how are they going to spend it?

Keith Smith (15m 4s):

Are they going to spend it in a good way or bad way? Or are they going to spend it on themselves?

Phil Muscatello (15m 9s):

Another guest I had on the podcast, he's an analyst and when he talks to management, he's got a list of questions that he goes through, but he, then he throws in little curly ones that they're not expecting and asks, what kind of car do you drive?

Keith Smith (15m 22s):

Yeah. Well, another thing you could do is you can go see at the headquarters, do they have a specialized spot just for management? Or do they say, okay, management has to park where everyone else does. And it goes even to the board of directors, who are the board of directors and how are they set up? Are they set up as yes-men? Now a guy named Mark Leonard who runs Constellation Software, probably as one of the best examples of ways of who he wants on his board of directors. There's two things he looks for. He looks for, does this person going to put a lot of their own money in this? And do they look at this as sort of a learning experience? So basically, is it going to affect them and what they're really doing? Do they have a really, a passionate interest in what's going on in this?

Keith Smith (16m 2s):

And those are very smart things to look for in directors where you don't want a director who's basically that's, their whole life is just collecting directors fees. You want people that have skin in the game and really have to be part of this. And those are some of the clues of the types of things you look for. I was watching a recent interview with a CEO of one of the companies that we own. And it's a very interesting business and that what he really does, which is unusual, this is sort of a Latin-American cable telco type company. But what he's done is he actually has incentivize all of the people that are of the country levels, basically with stock. And that's a very unusual thing in Latin America. And these people really are motivated.

Keith Smith (16m 42s):

They want to know what's going on. They actually have gotten involved in the capital allocation decisions. Recently they've decided to really accelerate this broadband rollout in Latin America. But what's happened is it's hurt near-term profitability. So the stock price has gone down. And the guy that's running the business used to work for John Malone in one of the Liberty cable companies so he sort of has that model in mind. But he's sort of set up a whole system and a lot of is a system and incentives. And when you talk with really good managers, they really know how to motivate people and organizations, you really see the focus is on incentives because incentives drive behavior. But you gotta be careful because you also want to make sure the incentives don't end up having a negative aspect.

Keith Smith (17m 23s):

And so they have to be well-designed and thought out and you need to be able to change them if things don't work out well. So that's, that's an important aspect. I think that we need to take a look at too. And a lot of that has to do is sort of looking at the proxy statement and other parts of the business, other documents that are associated with the business that are outside of just the general financials of the company. And when I started out, like I'd probably most investors do, when they start out, they just look at the numbers, they try and find cheap companies and such like that. But as you try to delve and really understand what these businesses are, you really need to look for clues of other qualitative aspects of the business that are really going to drive and motivate people because in the end, all these businesses are people, right? It's all driven by people. And basically you need to figure out, okay, psychologically, what's the best way to motivate these people to go towards this goal that basically, you know, you're trying to provide value to the customer in the end and value to your employees.

Phil Muscatello (18m 16s):

Okay, so moving on from German theologians to engineering, you've got a background as an engineer in the US Air Force. So obviously engineers are very interested in managing risk, I mean, you don't want that plane falling out of the sky. How's your risk management being informed with your experience as an engineer in the air force?

Keith Smith (18m 38s):

I think the real aspect from the engineering perspective is just the approach. I mean, engineering, you're taught a lot about margin of safety. The other thing that I did when I was in the air force is I was working on a satellite that was designed to live through a nuclear war. And one of the departments that I worked in was sort of survivability, which in essence, was the ability of basically the system to survive that. So you design a lot of margin in there. So basically what you're trying to do in terms of looking for investments, you're trying to look for investments that have a margin of safety. If things don't turn out the way you expect, you're not going to lose a lot of money. But if things do turn out the way you expect, you can get some really nice upside.

Keith Smith (19m 20s):

And I think expanding out into looking at more growth opportunities and thinking about the scenarios of the upside has really sort of expanded beyond. Because when you look at companies in general, if you look at where the growth and value has happened in businesses, if you look let's say over four or five years, a lot of it can be rerating of multiples. But if you look at 10, 20, 30 years, most of the growth is growth in the underlying value of the businesses. Multiples can rerate, that's a one-time event. But if you look at the businesses that have just gone up and up and up over time, it's because they've been able to find a growth engine that's been able to be around for 20, 30, more and more years. And where the big money can be made is where the market doesn't recognize that.

Keith Smith (20m 3s):

Where you can find a company that's growing, let's say revenue's at 20% a year, bottom line, 20% plus 20 to 30% per year, but you're only seeing high single digits or low double digit multiples. And as long as you can feel comfortable with the growth profile that's going on there, it's a really interesting opportunity because the market, a lot of times, they'll just take a look at, okay, well, it's in a cyclical business and therefore here's sort of the maximum price earnings ratio that anybody should pay for it. Well, that may be true, but there's an implicit assumption there that the business isn't going to grow or there's going to be small amounts of growth. If the business can generate a lot of growth, then that rule of thumb basically doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

Keith Smith (20m 44s):

And that's where I think I'm finding a lot of opportunities now is basically in situations where you've got internal generation of growth that's much higher than let's say what the overall market or other people in the business are. You can find those situations and you need to make sure they're going to be sustainable over long periods of time. I think you can find some really interesting situations. And that's so like for example, one of the companies we found recently has been in sort of the auto dealership space. There's a company called Asbury Automotive that in essence, right now revenue's growing 20% per year. They have a, I think, an attainable way of doing that. Probably the bottom line will grow higher than that.

Keith Smith (21m 25s):

But again, the company is selling like in a high single digit multiple. Now clearly if they get anywhere close to that kind of growth, the company is going to go up tremendously. But I think the other side of the story on that one is okay, it's in the auto dealership business, people think the auto dealership business it's somewhat capped. You've got online competitors that are basically, you know, competing against them that may reduce the amount of potential upside they've got. But what we found in a situation like Asbury is they've actually been able to incorporate online into their business models so they can take advantage of that growth too. So there's details of these types of things that you can find out in the market, which makes for some very interesting situations.

Phil Muscatello (22m 9s):

You refer to a high single digit multiple and PE in that answer. Can you just explain what's going on there a little bit, because this is really a traditional way of valuing companies, the PE ratio, which is also known as that valuation multiple. Just talk to us a little bit about that and just explain for beginners what's going on there.

Keith Smith (22m 28s):

Sure, so a traditional way to sort of value a business is just take a look at the price divided by the earnings. What really drives the value of a business is the growth that's associated with the business. And Benjamin Graham, who's like one of the early founders of security analysis, he's done a lot of the early studies and wrote a lot about valuation of companies early on, has come up with a relatively straightforward formula that he's used by taking a look at long periods of data of, okay, what's a reasonable price to pay for a business? His formula is eight and a half plus two G where G is the growth rate.

Keith Smith (23m 8s):

So the sustainable cashflow growth rate over the next seven years. So from that formula alone, you can sort of figure out the math. Okay, a zero growth company should probably sell for eight and a half times. A negative growth company should sell below that. So if you see a business out there that's selling for a five PE, what the market is really saying is they expect negative growth. Now, if they expect negative growth, it's not cheap. Now where you can get a cheap situation is where let's say you get a company, we talked about the one that's like Asbury 20% growth. Okay, let's be conservative, let's say 15% growth over the next seven years or 15 times two is 30. The normal multiple should be 38.5, call it like 39 or 40.

Keith Smith (23m 51s):

Okay. If it's selling at a high single digit multiple, that's a huge difference. And those are the kinds of things that we try and take a look at it. And just a real simple way for people to really sort of quantify, okay, there's a PE ratio out there, but it really needs to be tied to the growth of the underlying business and the cashflows going forward. And that's, that's the simplest way I found and Graham's done a great job of basically taking very complex formulas and making them simple.

Phil Muscatello (24m 16s):

So when you are looking for opportunities for investment, you're not constrained by geographical boundaries. You're not just looking at the US stock market are you?

Keith Smith (24m 26s):

No, no. I mean, we look around the world and one of our constraints is we say, okay, if you look at the history of markets, the first stock market, per se, where you had shareholders who were strangers that didn't know each other, and they agreed to pool their capital and put it into investment was the Dutch East India Company. So it started out in the Netherlands. So the Dutch East India company and there's a number of companies that were developed after that. After that, what happened was over time is that the Dutch became very, very wealthy as a result of that. And then as history sort of played out, the English eventually made the Dutch king their king. And so all of that finance knowledge went to the United Kingdom.

Keith Smith (25m 9s):

And so the United Kingdom started using that same idea of starting companies, people developing companies. What happened early on though, was there was a huge speculative bubble. And what happened as a result of that was they basically said you can't start new companies. So they would for almost a hundred, 120, 30 years in the UK, you couldn't start new companies. However, there was a bunch of immigrants from the UK who was in the United States, who basically said, okay, well, we're not going to have that restriction. So they start a company. And it's that evolution of, okay, we're going from a situation where historically business was done by families. You did it with people you trusted around the world. Now this new system, which is the disruptive system of the Anglo-Dutch system, basically put everything on its head.

Keith Smith (25m 56s):

It said that strangers can basically interact with each other, with a given set of rules, feel that they can trust this situation and no one's going to steal their money. And so what you've got now is that system basically being adopted around the world. So it started out with the English colonies and then now it's being spread out to other places, but it's displacing a more older system, which is basically relationship-based system. And so where we look to invest are in countries that have that type of a system. So we understand that system. Example a country that's different that doesn't have that system would be right now, a country let's say like China, where a lot of it is based on state with relationships.

Keith Smith (26m 37s):

You know, the people, you know, and as an outsider, you're already a huge disadvantage of that. And it's not just places like China that have autocracies, it's even places like India, where in essence it's, you know, again, it's sort of relationship-based. So in essence, our scope of where we look at where we're going to invest are places like that. So those would be places like, you know, primarily that's all the English colonies, that would be like the US, UK, Australia, South Africa, and then other places that are adopting those types of principles, South Korea being one, the Philippines is another one that was a US possession. So they, they have this ways of thinking about doing things. I mean, Korea is a very interesting situation because I think they're in a dynamic where they've got a choice.

Keith Smith (27m 22s):

They've traditionally been dominated by China and Japan. And now after World War Two, since we were there for a long time, they've got a choice of going to a third person in the United States. And so I think they've adopted a lot of the United States' approach to things. And you just look at the way that they've done stuff in terms of they've transitioned from these family owned companies, now a lot of them are publicly traded. The incentives they've set up for basically the companies to do the right thing.

Phil Muscatello (27m 46s):

So tell us a bit more about the Bonhoeffer Fund and how people can find you and the work that you're trying to achieve.

Keith Smith (27m 56s):

Sure. So we have a website, Bonhoeffercapital.com that if you go there, you can find information about the fund. I mean, we're a hedge funds, there's the SEC regulations and such like that. You have to be an accredited investor to invest, but if you send us an email, we can get you on the mailing list for reports and such like that. And I also am active on Twitter under Bohnhoeffer_KDS. I found Twitter to be an awesome form to get to know other investors. It's really a great forum. It really adds, I think a lot of value of being able to find and source people. And I found people, even though I've heard in some parts of Twitter it can be pretty nasty, for the most part the people that I've met on what they call FinTwit, which is primarily the financial part of Twitter, have been very, very, very nice and very gracious and willing to share.

Keith Smith (28m 43s):

And I think what you would want a community to be like is sort of what's happened there, which I think is really enjoyable. So I mean, I think those are the main things. And if you want to, again, just feel free to send me an email. If you have any questions, Ksmith@bohnhoeffercapital.com or visit our site, or, you know, if you want, you can, I'm @Bonhoeffer_KDS from Twitter. I think those are probably the best places to get a hold of me and/or just inquiries about the fund.

Phil Muscatello (29m 10s):

And I'll second that about FinTwit and Twitter, it's a great place. And it's also highly amusing some of the accounts to follow as well. Do you know Dr. Parikh Patel? Ever follow him.

Keith Smith (29m 25s):

Yeah. Yeah. He's pretty funny, interesting fun parodies.

Phil Muscatello (29m 27s):

Some of these parody FinTwit accounts are fantastic. So yes, I'll second that for, like you say, the graciousness and the sense of humor, it's not as toxic as many other places on Twitter can be. But Keith, thank you very much for joining me today. It's been a pleasure and we're going to have another conversation soon some time the whole history of capitalism because, that's another area that I wanted to cover and I know you're very interested in that as well.

Keith Smith (29m 52s):

Oh yeah, no, I think it's a very important, very important story to be told and for people to sort of understand what the origins of where they are today is. I mean, I know in the United States, people take for granted a lot of stuff that happens and if you really understand the history behind it, I think it gives you a little bit more of appreciation of why things are the way they are. Just gives you more understanding of what's happening. So yeah, no, I really appreciate it Phil, it's been real fun talking with you.

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