FRMO - Earnings Call - Q3 2025

Transcript

Thérèse Byars (Corporate Secretary)

Good afternoon, everyone. This is Thérèse Byars speaking, and I'm the Corporate Secretary of FRMO Corp. Thank you for joining us on this call, the statements made on this call apply only as of today. The information on this call should not be construed to be a recommendation to purchase or sell any particular security or investment funds. The opinions referenced on this call are not intended to be a forecast of future events or a guarantee of future results. It should not be assumed that any of the securities transactions referenced today have been or will prove to be profitable, or that future investment decisions will be profitable or will equal or exceed the past performance of the investments. For additional information, you may visit the FRMO Corp. website at frmocorp.com.

Today's discussion will be led by Mr. Murray Stahl, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, and Mr. Steven Bregman, President and Chief Financial Officer. They will review key points related to the 2025 Third Quarter Earnings. There was an error in the press release that the number for presenters on this call was sent out to our public, and I just wanted to ask if you received that number, and would you please mute your line so that we can hear Mr. Stahl and Mr. Bregman clearly. Thank you so much, now I'll turn the discussion over to Mr. Stahl.

Murray Stahl (Chairman and CEO)

Okay thanks, Thérèse. Thanks, everybody, for dialing in and having patience with us. It's a little technical issue, we'll begin with some conceptual things. The balance sheet, the earnings, I think they speak for themselves. The numbers are self-evident, I think the thing to do is to give you an idea of how we look at these numbers. We look at these numbers a little bit differently than you might look at these numbers with the spreadsheets. You'll observe, of course, we release our holdings, and that's of securities, of cryptocurrencies, our big holdings, you know what those are. What we do is we separate out the digital assets, and we're not looking at the balance sheet and the holdings holistically like you might, let me tell you how we look at them.

You'll see on the balance sheet there's roughly $13.7 million of digital assets, it's primarily Bitcoin. Those are coins that we mined over the course of time, you'll see about $1 million of digital mining assets. Those are mining rigs, which we use to mine digital assets. You will notice we own 1,997,007 shares of Winland as of February 28th. We own a little bit more now because we resumed buying it after a hiatus because of our 10b5 program. Those assets, in our humble opinion, can't be viewed as mere holdings. The reason is the purpose of putting cryptocurrency mining into a corporation and viewing it as a business is that the digital assets will increase numerically. That's a separate question from valuation, we will increase numerically, meaning the number of Bitcoin we have will increase as a consequence of the mining.

The other Bitcoin investment trust securities and others that we have, a lot of that is in the funds. There is nothing wrong with having them in the funds, and we hope and certainly expect they will appreciate in value. The only way we are going to have more of those securities is if we buy more. They can grow in price, they can grow in value. They can't organically grow. In the world of mining, your digital assets can organically grow; that is the purpose of what happens in Winland. If you have two agglomerations of digital assets and one agglomeration is just net asset value because it can only grow in price, the other can grow in price, of course, but it can also grow numerically. We believe that should trade at a premium to net asset value.

If it didn't trade to a premium net asset value, there'd be an arbitrage between the two. How much of a premium net asset value one can debate. You can see, because Winland is a publicly traded security, it actually trades at a premium to net asset value. That's one of the reasons that we are undertaking to expand it in the manner in which we're going about that. That's a salient difference, and I think it needs to be reflected upon. Another minor point in this regard is, we are in the process of buying some more Winland in HK Hard Assets I, which we never did before. This will increase our pro-rata ownership of Winland, but now we've gotten to the point where there's a fair amount of cash flow in HK Hard Assets I, and we'd like to make use of that.

Our investment in Winland, in theory, if we keep doing that, will grow a little faster. Now, somebody is ruffling some papers, so if you can kindly mute your phone, it'll help everybody, thank you so much. Anyway, that's the idea, the goal of Winland and the goal of FRMO is to show that a digital mining business is far superior to an ETF. Basically, if you're interested in cryptocurrencies, you can obtain cryptocurrencies two ways, and only two ways. You can buy it, you can make it. Making it, I think this is self-evident, but it's worthwhile pointing out, making it is a lot more difficult than buying it. Nobody is going to go through the effort of buying it, excuse me, of manufacturing or making it if there isn't an advantage to doing so, there is such an advantage.

It's just not well recognized in the world of assets. The simple reason for that is that cryptocurrency is really a brand new asset, and the world is still learning about cryptocurrency. I think in due course, the world's going to view cryptocurrency mining in a very, very different way than it views it right now. Another thing I should point out is, that what we do in Winland in terms of mining is very, very different than what the other publicly traded cryptocurrency mining companies do in their work. To give you an idea, if you were to buy the top-of-the-line Bitcoin mining rig today, just bought it and plugged it in and paid for electric power at the going rate, it'd be very hard to get a payback profit before the halving.

In a way of saying, after the halving, that machine or that device will not be profitable. You have to do some pretty creative things to make the thing work. In other words, it's effort. In due course, Consensus Mining is going to be a publicly traded security, and in due course, hopefully, we'll have more Winland. We'll be able to disclose more of what those companies are doing. For now, just let's leave it at this, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised by what's happening in both those companies. It's an important part of what FRMO is doing in its transition to a cryptocurrency business. Historically, I talked about the various businesses we wanted to get into, and for various and some reasons, which I won't repeat, we ended up excluding a lot of things, and we ended up with cryptocurrency.

Some exciting things are happening there, and it's worthwhile talking about it. Now, let's shift gears and talk a little bit, if we can, about Horizon. Horizon is also kind of a turning point. To give you a story, I think I did this in one or two other presentations. Horizon, I think this is true of just about every value-oriented investment company, investment manager, not just Horizon. The period of time, roughly 2007 to roughly 2024, was a very difficult one for active managers because of the rise of indexation. Now, why should indexes exist before 2007? Why should indexation have been uniquely problematic in that time period? In order to illustrate that, I'm going to read you some numbers. Forgive me for taking a few minutes to read them, but I think it illustrates more than the verbal analysis could illustrate.

Basically, what happened in that time period is the big, large, multinational companies were able to dramatically lower their tax rates in ways that domestic companies, in other words, companies that we would ordinarily buy, just were not able to do. I will read you the name of a company, the tax rate currently, and the tax rate as it was in 2007. I think there are 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 of these. I think these 14 companies represent, in round numbers, about a third of market capitalization of the S&P 500. This will tell you a lot of what you need to know about indexation. Starting with Apple. Apple, of course, the biggest company in the S&P. Current tax rate: 14%; 2007 tax rate: 30.19%. Microsoft, current tax rate: 17.7%; 2007 tax rate: 30.03%. NVIDIA.

This is the only one where the tax rate actually went up, current tax rate: 12.3%; 2007: 9.37%. Amazon, current tax rate: 10.3%; 2007 tax rate: 27.88%. Meta Platforms, I can't go back to 2007 because it was not even a publicly traded company. I found the earliest data I can go back to that was publicly traded, which was 2010. Meta Platforms currently: 12% tax rate 2010; in this case, tax rate: 39.88%. Alphabet, formerly known as Google, current tax rate: 17.6%; 2007 tax rate: 25.91%. Broadcom, another interesting example, current tax rate: 0; 2007 tax rate: 0. Tesla, current tax rate: 15.7%. Tesla, going back as far as I could, 2008, tax rate is irrelevant because it had no profits. Netflix, current tax rate: 12.4%; 2007 tax rate: 39.95%. Eli Lilly, current tax rate: 12.5%; 2007 tax rate: 23.81%. Visa, current tax rate: 17.4%.

2007 tax rate: 39.82%. Mastercard, current tax rate: 14.1%; Mastercard, 2007 tax rate: 35.01%. Coca-Cola, current tax rate: 18.6%; 2007 tax rate: 24.03%. Johnson & Johnson, current tax rate: 11.7%; 2007 tax rate: 20.36%. Had the tax rate remained the same, the earnings would not have grown nearly as much, and, obviously, the companies wouldn't have done as well. Will the tax rate go back to what it was historically? I personally think not, but it's certainly possible. A more relevant question is, can the tax rate continue to decline? It has declined from 2007-2024. I think not, I think not because it would be an absurdity to have the bulk of the S&P paying no taxes, I don't even think it's politically tolerable. There is a huge change happening in the world of investing that favors greatly the stock pickers.

In principle, an index investor was merely investing in a diversified portfolio of companies, but in practice, an index investor was really investing in a, in quotation marks, sort of tax shelter, which can't continue to be a tax shelter at the same rate. It is arguable that taxes might remain as low as they are right now, perhaps even go lower. The reasons for the declining tax rate are not germane to our conversation. I just do not want to belabor it, but if you want to ask in the Q&A, I will go into it in great detail of why it ended up this way. These are right out of the SEC filings, I think it is more important just to enumerate them and talk about the consequences rather than talk about why it happened. It just happened, it just can't continue at the same rate.

Therefore, the non-index investments are likely to do, better than indexation. Just that, because now that advantage being eliminated and the advantage of continuing to lower tax rates and maybe, quite possibly, running in reverse, now the relative advantage moves to the active manager. Two other things I'd like to talk about: indexation that gives an active manager like Horizon a big advantage as opposed to the disadvantage it had for a very long period of time. The next thing I'd like to talk about is the reconceptualization of small-cap investing. To put it in its simplistic terms, its most simplistic terms, if you want to define small capitalization, the best way to do it is the way the Russell indexes do it. The top 1,000 market capitalizations, that's the Russell 1000 index. The next 2,000 market capitalizations in sequence are the Russell 2000.

It doesn't get any simpler than that. Now, within the 1,000 companies, surely there will be a number of companies that just don't do well. Their returns of capital will decline, It always happens. Some will decline to losses, others will not decline to losses. If they decline enough, their stock prices will follow, and they will be purged, so to speak, because their market capitalizations don't support a position in the Russell 1000 index. What happens to them? They go to the Russell 2000 index. Similarly, there will be a certain number of companies and an indeterminate number of companies that excel in the Russell 2000, and their stock prices will rise commensurately. Those companies will graduate, so to speak, into Russell 1000. The Russell 1000 has a mechanism for purging itself of its worst performance.

The Russell 2000 has a mechanism of purging itself from its best performance. A wonderful-performing stock in the Russell 1000 will just trade at a higher price. If it keeps trading at a higher price, it'll always be in the Russell 1000. The Russell 1000 will not purge itself of its best-performing members like the Russell 2000. Of course, the Russell 2000, like any index, will have companies that have deteriorating returns on capital. Their stock prices will decline, how can they be purged? There's no place to which they can be purged.

Therefore, what happens over time is the Russell 2000 index, the small capitalization index, the index that the active managers draw their expertise from, those that are ones that are least efficient stocks, at least in principle, those indexes will build up over time a large number of companies that just have low returns of capital. As a consequence, that ultimately, if there's enough buildup, that ultimately will affect the returns of the index. If you looked at last decade, the returns of the index, you will see they're not very robust, certainly not very robust in relation to the 1000. Of course, the 1000 has all the tax advantages. Of course, all the companies that I mentioned are in the 1000, it is a problem.

If you're an active manager and you want your portfolio to look something different than the index, there's a structural disadvantage, that's now about to turn into an advantage. There's another problem, which has to do with another competitive asset class, private equity. Private equity, at least insofar as I can determine, there's about $7 trillion of money in private equity. If you follow that asset class, one of the things you'll notice is that in the last several years, the number of exits, which I'll define momentarily, has declined by about 85%. What is an Exit? An Exit is a monetization of a private equity position. Now, an Exit can be a monetization, can be another company just buys the private equity. That happens, what actually more frequently happens, at least historically, is those private companies become public once again, they become monetized.

This has become very problematic in recent years. Why is it problematic? Because if the money gravitates to indexation, as it has gravitated to indexation over many years, bringing a company public, it can't get itself into the index, or it can't be put into the index until it trades for a certain amount of time. That constitutes what is known as seasoning; it has to be seasoned. For example, to qualify for inclusion in the S&P 500, a security not only has to have sufficiently large market capitalization, but it has to trade for a certain period of time without being in the index. That requires a constituency of buyers. What can a constituency of buyers be? It had to be non-index buyers, non-index buyers have been losing capital to the index buyers.

How can a greater and greater number of private equity securities be monetized, so to speak, in the equity capital markets with an investor base that is shrinking due to loss of assets under management to indexation? It's very difficult to do. The same seasoning process applies to the small capitalization securities as well. There is this illiquidity backdrop in private equity that ultimately is going to cause some type of a problem because private equity exists ultimately for one reason, which is to realize profits. That requires a monetization event, the structure of the securities market, unintentionally and inadvertently, no one planned it this way, doesn't allow for that. All those stresses and strains added together are a very favorable investment climate for an active manager like Horizon.

One final point is the amount of competition, because of what happened over the years, has been greatly reduced. Horizon is in, as a business, in the best position it has been in in probably 18 years. Of course, you are aware that Horizon is now a publicly traded security. It is a publicly traded security, and it has much more disclosure than it had in the past, anyone can read the documents and see what that is all about. We are in a really, really interesting time period for the kind of investing that we do. That is the thought primarily I want to leave you with, there is one other minor point that I want to touch on the balance sheet before I will turn it over to my colleague, Steve.

He might have some comments, which is I always or usually ask you to take note of an item on our liability side, which is our short sale position. I would invite you to compare the cost to the market value. What we basically do is we continually short path-dependent ETFs. In an efficient market, path-dependent ETFs should not even exist, but they do. Path-dependent ETFs are basically destined to decline in price, it is a perfect short.

Ultimately, you get margin release, that margin release contributes to our cash. You can see a difference between market and cost, that difference basically ended up on our cash balance. That is how we built up our cash balance over the years, it is really important to keep track of that. It is a business in and of itself, and I think it is a unique business. With that, I'll just ask you, Steve, do you have anything you want to add to what I said?

Steven Bregman (President and CFO)

No, not yet, but I'll listen happily.

Murray Stahl (Chairman and CEO)

Not yet? Okay, okay. Maybe the next thing to do, Thérèse, is if you have some questions for us that people submit by email, we'd be delighted to answer.

Thérèse Byars (Corporate Secretary)

Yes, we have some. The first question says, "why doesn't TPL use its free cash flow to acquire the rest of the checkerboard?"

Murray Stahl (Chairman and CEO)

Why doesn't TPL use it? I'm not the person that you should ask. I really think you should ask the TPL management that. I will just tell you as a generalization, if you're interested in buying land, it takes two to make a bargain. It's not like a publicly traded stock where you have cash, you could say, "Why don't I just fill in the shares I don't own?" You have to have a willing seller, since almost everybody owns land at essentially a zero-cost basis, you'll find people, I think, and this is my personal opinion, that might think they do better with holding on to their property. That's just my opinion, I think that question really should be directed to TPL.

Thérèse Byars (Corporate Secretary)

Next, "has the desalination technology in the Permian proven itself?"

Murray Stahl (Chairman and CEO)

That is a scientific question, and I'm pretty excited about it, but I think that is a question that really the technical experts at TPL are better informed to answer than I. Sorry for punting the question back to them, I'm not the spokesperson for TPL, and they are more than able to speak for themselves. To the extent you need an update, I think they are the appropriate party to give one.

Thérèse Byars (Corporate Secretary)

"Why not merge the REN Fund with FRMO to take advantage of the loss carry forwards at the REN Fund? Plus, Horizon Kinetics Holding Corp. would earn a management fee".

Murray Stahl (Chairman and CEO)

Okay, that's a question I can answer. My understanding of the tax law is if we were to try that right now with our current structure, we're going to lose the tax loss carry forwards. There are laws that prevent more than a certain quantity of shares turning over in any discrete time period. You can't simply make a bid for the shares and expect to retain the tax loss carry forward unless you first acquired over time a fairly large position, that's basically what the tax law says.

Thérèse Byars (Corporate Secretary)

The next question, "I am having a hard time squaring the excellent increase in book value with the fact that it appears the company also took a hefty loss in the last quarter, appreciate any clarity you can give."

Murray Stahl (Chairman and CEO)

Sure, we didn't take an operating loss. You'll recall, of course, that our prior quarter-end was November 30, 2024. All you need to do is look at the price of Texas Pacific Land Corporation on November 30th. The next mark-to-market date is February 28, 2025. Compute the difference, and give or take a rounding error, you have what appears to be the loss on the income statement. It's just a mark-to-market. I wish TPL went up in every 90-day time period. Unfortunately, it doesn't do that in every 90-day time period as much as we'd like that to happen. This is one of those 90-day time periods where it declined in price, the financial statements speak for themselves.

Thérèse Byars (Corporate Secretary)

"Anything further that you can share on indirect Bitcoin mining as teased on the Horizon Kinetics Holding Corp. call?"

Murray Stahl (Chairman and CEO)

Okay, first of all, I'll tell you a lot. First of all, I didn't tease it. I just wanted to introduce it. Basically, if the average miner, let's say, why would you mine if you didn't think that Bitcoin was going to rise in price? I won't repeat the arguments for Bitcoin rising in value over time, but I actually endorse many of those arguments. I believe that myself. There are other coins that don't have the same appreciation prospects. One of the reasons they don't have the same appreciation prospects is there are other coins that are mined that have no halving. In the halving process, in about 1,000, and I think it's 1,086 days. Forgive me for being a couple of days off, maybe. In about 1,086 days, Bitcoin is going to go through a halving, what does that mean?

That means the number of coins you get for solving a block is going to be cut in half, that is why they call it the halving. Assuming just for the purposes of this narrow point, Bitcoin traded at the same price, your revenue is going to be cut in half. The expenses, meaning electric power, because that is your primary expense, electric power expenses the day before the halving are going to be the exact same thing as the day after the halving. Your expense is the same, and your revenue declines. Another way of looking at it is if you want to mine the same number of coins, you have to have twice as many devices and use twice as much electric power. In practice, it does not really work exactly that way, the machines eventually become more power efficient.

Nevertheless, it's going to take more effort to mine the same number of coins. Let's say we were talking about wheat, there were a certain acreage of land that produced X bushels of wheat. Every several years, that land became less productive, meaning it could produce less wheat. That was true of all the acres of land everywhere, not just your unique acreage. The price of wheat would go up, that's what happens to Bitcoin. It's engineered to appreciate, as I said earlier, there are coins that have no halving. That doesn't happen, it doesn't get more expensive in principle to mine other coins. It doesn't get more expensive, there's no engineering of appreciation. If there's no engineering of appreciation, why should anyone mine them?

Because they would mine them because your momentary return, cash return of mining, is higher than your momentary return of mining Bitcoin. Said another way, in mining Bitcoin, there is the momentary return, in other words, how much did you spend today to make a Bitcoin versus what that Bitcoin's worth. You have to end what appreciation happens over time, what if there is less appreciation? Your momentary return, return of that moment, should logically be higher. Let's say there are such coins, okay, if there are such coins and your momentary return is higher, and you could take those coins, you could turn them into cash essentially instantaneously. What if your momentary return on coin X were higher than your momentary return on Bitcoin? Why not mine coin X, convert the cash instantaneously, and take that cash and buy the Bitcoin?

You will find you can buy more Bitcoin, meaning you can, at the end of one day, add more Bitcoin to your portfolio than you would have if you mined it directly. We call that indirect mining, none of the other publicly traded companies that I've been able to observe do that. We've been doing that in Winland, and we've been doing that in Consensus Mining, gradually adding to indirect mining.

Matter of fact, right now, we're in the process of increasing our indirect mining effort in both Winland and Consensus. In theory, at least historically in practice, we've been able to grow our Bitcoin per share at a higher rate via the indirect mining effort than we actually experienced via the direct mining effort. That's what indirect mining is all about, simplistically put. Sorry, I didn't mean to tease it, I tried to make it as simple to understand as possible.

Thérèse Byars (Corporate Secretary)

"Does the $4.6 million payable to FRMO on Horizon Kinetics Holding Corp. latest 10-K represent the 2024 revenue stream performance fee payment? If so, has it been paid yet?"

Murray Stahl (Chairman and CEO)

Yes, it represents that, has it been paid yet? I believe it has been paid. I have to check on that because I do not look every day, but I think it has been paid. It is going to be paid, if it has not been paid, it is going to be paid.

Thérèse Byars (Corporate Secretary)

Our last question is, "does the company target a specific percentage of assets for the short portfolio and path-dependent ETFs, or are they primarily used to deploy excess cash to cover collateral calls?"

Murray Stahl (Chairman and CEO)

Okay, the answer to that question is neither. We have the balance sheet, we could add a lot to the short position if we wanted to. Why do not we? Two reasons. The first reason is, believe it or not, on certain days when we would very much like to short path-dependent ETFs, we either, A, literally cannot borrow them, literally cannot borrow them, or, B, we can borrow them, but we can only borrow them in a very small quantity. There are days when we get allocated literally 25 shares, that is the first point. Second point, is with path-dependent ETFs, they are so volatile. It turns out that was a blessing in disguise, it is not a good idea to just pick a certain day to add greatly to your position, because you never know what is going to happen in the subsequent days.

If that's the way it is, which is the way it is, and we can't borrow mass amounts of shares, we just content ourselves with borrowing a little bit. Some days we're able to borrow a little bit more. In the fullest of time, we have a pretty big position. What happens is you're a lot better off doing it that way, doing a little bit, because you don't know if you did it on a given day if that day is going to be successful several days later. What you do know is in the fullest of time, it's going to work out. If you do a little bit every day, chances are relative to the cost of that day, in not very many months, no matter what happens in the marketplace, you will have a profit.

It turns out you have a much more exponentially smooth rate of return, much less disruptive if you do a little bit at a time. That is not the way we originally envisaged it, but we were sort of constrained into that posture. It turns out to be a fortuitous happenstance, and we like it that way, and we would not change it. Maybe, Steve, you would like to add a point to this, or maybe not, I do not know.

Steven Bregman (President and CFO)

When you asked me before if I'd like to say something, I was thinking with my FRMO hat, but I really should be thinking with the Horizon hat too since so much of FRMO's value is tied to the results of Horizon. In respect of the conversation you were having about some decades-long reversals happening, that effect, the way corporate profits have been distributed in the stock market and the way weightings amongst different kinds of companies have been distributed. There's a frustration I have as a portfolio manager periodically, which is that I can speak as eloquently as I might, not as eloquently as you, of course, but some people have said I can do it sometimes. I'll explain to a prospective, let's say, institutional investor client. Behind that person comes many, many, many potential sub-advisory accounts, they're very sophisticated.

They're analysts of portfolio managers, and they're portfolio managers themselves, I will talk about our long-term approach. I will talk about how we don't track the market, I will talk about how we're value-conscious and so forth and so on, and the way we go about things. They nod their head, and they seem to agree. Yet, if we lag for a while, we don't know things that are going up. Somehow, they forget what we said, and assets leave us, which is what you were describing. Contrarily, when our securities, our portfolios go up for a while and the market doesn't, or they go up more than the market, and especially if we're up when the market is down, they come back. They come back when I haven't even spoken to them, it's happened lately.

What we have been preparing for and positioning ourselves for for a long time, and we have written about it extensively for years and years, these underlying forces are beginning to manifest themselves. If I were to paint you an anecdotal picture, because I do not know how many of you on the call will actually pay attention to the performance of the various Horizon Kinetics Asset Management strategies or what the asset flows are, or whether you are students of portfolio structure or not. I will just give you some responses I have had in the last few months. In November of last year, I had a client send me just a two-sentence email. She wrote something very close to she is glued to her iPad because the market was going up a lot, as you recall. I think the market was up 26% as of November something, rather.

She said, "I'm glued to my iPad, I keep thinking, this is totally nuts. What do you say? Are we in the roaring 20s?'" I wrote back to her, I didn't know why she was saying that. I realized to look at her portfolio, it wasn't the market she was looking at, the market was up 26%. Her portfolio was up 100% at that point. While I was speaking to her, it was up another 5% that day. That is what she thought was nuts, rather than address the market, I addressed her portfolio more. What I saw was that the lion's share of the excess returns really came from two positions. One was Texas Pacific Land Corp., the other was some Bitcoin-related trusts that trade on the New York Stock Exchange.

I said, "Now, those are up a lot, and they're large positions. In a sense, it seems like it's happened all at once." In her particular account, we owned each of those positions for about eight years. In a sense, they were manifesting now the result of underlying financial compounding, different types for each of those holdings, the price was suddenly reflecting that. In one sense, it really wasn't so very sudden, right? There was a rational basis for it. That's a problem that active managers face because they're being judged against an artificial benchmark with artificial measuring elements to it. As it happens, it's continuing this year because our accounts, for the most part, are up a fair amount, and the market's down.

All of a sudden, we're getting many more accounts and from people I haven't even spoken to. That's the way it works in this industry, you think you're communicating well, and maybe you are, but it doesn't mean that anybody's really paying attention to that. Very often, they're paying attention to something else. Based on what we're seeing and based upon how we're positioned, I dare say that if I had to make a kind of wager, I would say that at Horizon Kinetics, the asset gathering experience is going to be probably rather rewarding.

It may very well be attached to performance fees as well. Time will tell, it's something to pay attention to, which you're not going to see on the FRMO balance sheet in any direct way if you don't look at the, now you can at the Horizon Kinetics financial statements and the various disclosures. You'll just see it through the revenue share. Anyway, I hope I didn't go on too long, but it's.

Murray Stahl (Chairman and CEO)

No, that's excellent.

Steven Bregman (President and CFO)

It's worth paying attention. If you're a student of FRMO Corp., you can now be a better student of Horizon Kinetics too.

Murray Stahl (Chairman and CEO)

That's excellent, that's excellent. Thanks for saying that, I'll just add one thing to that, which is the numbers I read out about taxes. We like to think of ourselves as a research company. Just looking at financial statements and extracting the tax rates for different years, it's hardly a different exercise. We're talking about the biggest companies in the world. Given that the tax rates did decline a lot, at least in a historical sense, in a not very lengthy period of time, they clearly added to the performance of the shares. You would think, because taxes is such a controversial issue, there would be front-page stories about the tax rates either for it or against it. When I made that table, I decided to look, maybe you can find them, I can't even find a story about it.

Either a story thinking it's a good thing or thinking it's a bad thing. It's one thing to have one opinion or another opinion. There is no opinion on it, because there's no commentary on it. What does that tell me? That tells me that the world has stopped doing research, and the world is going to return to research. That's probably the thought I'd leave you with with FRMO and Horizon. At the end of the day, it comes down to research, this kind of research is not obscure research. This kind of research is trivial research, and the trivial research is not being done. Can you imagine what's happening to the consequential research? There is a lot to be gained by a research-oriented company. I'll just leave you with that thought, any further questions to ask?

Thérèse Byars (Corporate Secretary)

That was our last question. If you have any further closing remarks, this would be the time, otherwise.

Murray Stahl (Chairman and CEO)

Okay, just.

Thérèse Byars (Corporate Secretary)

Wrap it up.

Murray Stahl (Chairman and CEO)

Thank you so much for attending the call, I liked the questions, and I thought they were very perceptive. Of course, it always happens at the end of a call, someone's going to think of something they would have liked to ask, but they did not ask. Just do not hesitate to contact us, and we will get you an answer to whatever your question is. Of course, we will reprise this 90 days from now, approximately 90 days from now. Thank you so much for listening, and we will do this again soon, good afternoon.

Thérèse Byars (Corporate Secretary)

Murray, I'm sorry to interrupt that lovely closing, but apparently, we do have a couple more questions.

Murray Stahl (Chairman and CEO)

Okay! In that case, ignore the closing remarks, let's hear the questions.

Thérèse Byars (Corporate Secretary)

Okay. The first is, "do you have any thoughts on how the tariff wars get resolved? What are the implications for inflation once they are resolved?"

Murray Stahl (Chairman and CEO)

Okay, first, the tariff war. To begin with, you can't separate the tariff war from the tax question. Let's give an example, the most quintessentially American company I can think of is Coca-Cola. It might astonish you to learn that something around 35% of the Coca-Cola which is consumed in the United States of America is manufactured in Mexico. Now, if they were a Mexican company, and it just so happened they produced a drink, and people liked it more than they liked Coca-Cola, I would say more power to them, and I guess Coca-Cola just has to work harder. At least part of our trade deficit with Mexico is not a Mexican company coming up with a drink that is perceived to be superior to the drink of Coca-Cola. It's Coca-Cola distributing its product manufactured in Mexico in the United States.

That's something that international trade theory doesn't tell you about. In international trade theory, they speak in the abstract. Again, we're back to research versus philosophical abstractions. In international trade theory, there is Nation A, and there's Nation B. Nation A might produce wheat, and Nation A has a real advantage in producing wheat rather than Nation B. Nation B might be very good at producing textiles. International trade theory says, "Nation A should focus on wheat because that's what they do well, and let free trade happen, and the wheat's going to go and be produced and sold into Nation B.

Nation B is very good at producing textiles, and that'll be sold to Nation A, and all is right with the world". No international trade theorist with whom I am conversant has ever undertaken to study the question of a company domiciled in a certain market producing its product outside of that country and bringing it into that country. Why is that a problem? If we were a Mexican company, and I would say more power to them, why is it a problem if Coca-Cola does it? The reason is because of transfer pricing, the profit is realized in Mexico and not realized in the United States. In other words, if you can produce a bottle of Coca-Cola in Mexico, the issue is not what the cost is in producing in Mexico.

It's actually more expensive to make a bottle of Coca-Cola in Mexico than it is to make it in the United States because the Mexican electricity prices are higher. You don't make Coca-Cola with people, you make it with machinery, it is more expensive to make it in Mexico. You have to ship it a longer distance, it is liquid, it is heavy, it costs money to ship it. Why would you make it in Mexico? Because you have a tax advantage. I'm making up numbers just for luster purposes because it's easy to do it this way, these aren't the actual numbers. Let's say it costs $1 to make a bottle of Coca-Cola in Mexico, Coca-Cola Mexico sells that bottle of Coca-Cola to Coca-Cola United States at $2, and it retails for $2 in the United States. Coca-Cola United States didn't make any money.

Coca-Cola, the entire corporation, Coca-Cola consolidated, made a dollar. That dollar is taxed in Mexico, it's not taxed in the United States. The World Trade Organization has strict rules about giving your domestic companies a tax advantage, that would be forbidden. There is no rule about giving a foreign company a tax advantage relative to their own market, that is what's going on. You could apply the same thing to Apple or any other company, that is the problem that has to be resolved. If it kept going the way it's going, the United States will get—you can see from the numbers that I read to you—ultimately, if it was allowed to continue the way it's continuing, what would end up happening is the United States would be denuded of tax revenue from corporations. How could that be allowed to continue?

The proposed remedy, whether it works or not, we'll have to see. There are a lot of potential remedies to this problem. One remedy, which you don't have available, is you can't assign a bigger tax rate, because everyone accepts transfer pricing. You can't raise the corporate tax, if there's no profits book-wise in the United States of America. You could raise, of course, the corporate tax, but you're not going to get any more money. If you put a tariff on it, and you say basically the tariff is designed to negate the tax advantage and overwhelm the tax advantage of making it a foreign nation to force the nation to bring them back to the United States. If Coca-Cola brought those bottling plants back to the United States, it will create a small number of jobs.

It's not going to make a meaningful fiscal difference in the employment in the United States of America, but it will bring in corporate tax revenue. That's the point. If it doesn't, it'll bring in tariff revenue. That's the logic, it's not designed to be inflationary, it's designed to be a tax equilibrium strategy. Whether it works or not is an entirely different debate, but that's what it's all about. Okay, what else?

Thérèse Byars (Corporate Secretary)

Okay, "at what point does Horizon become capacity constrained?"

Murray Stahl (Chairman and CEO)

Okay, I'm going to take the liberty of interpreting that as a number of assets under management. The truthful answer, is I don't have a hard and fast number. The reason I don't have a hard and fast number, is it would have to be by strategy. I can't say we can manage this much money because look how many different strategies we have. First of all, we have a small-cap strategy, we have a large-cap strategy. Obviously, there's a finite amount of capacity we have in small capitalization, but it has nothing to do with what we can do in cryptocurrency. We have some private equity investments that we have other plans for, and that has nothing to do with the other strategies, I don't know. In round numbers, we're currently managing $11 billion, I can just say this.

Our goal is not to bring in billions of dollars of new assets, we'd like to bring in some. As we say internally, we want to make money, not raise money. A lot of the assets under management that we have right now, we didn't get $11 billion to manage, and now it's $11 billion. We got a considerably smaller sum of long-term investors, and it appreciated greatly over the years. That's why we come to run $11 billion. We'd like to continue to do the same, we're not going to make a heroic effort to bring in a billion dollars a month, I don't think such a thing is going to happen. If it were to happen, we'd have to do something about it and stop it, at the moment, there's nothing to do.

We do raise some money, but we do not raise sums that require any impediments to opening new accounts. We will let you know, you can see why we did not formalize it. Incidentally, the formalization—and I went through this before, so I will not dwell on it—you see what numerical formalization did in the world of small capitalization equity, it creates all sorts of dysfunctional things. We did not numerically formalize it, we just know we should not raise tremendous quantities of money. We are going to leave it at that, I hope that is an adequate answer.

Thérèse Byars (Corporate Secretary)

Okay, "dividends and interest income line looks high relative to $43.8 million cash balance. Where does this all come from?"

Murray Stahl (Chairman and CEO)

Dividends income, do not forget the securities. The income is obviously interest income, you know what the rate is. We are going to get the same rate everyone gets more or less, give or take a few basis points on our short-term investments. You see what the cash balance is, you can compute that sum. Do not forget we have securities, like TPL, there are some other things like Mesabi Trust. For example, in November, our Mesabi Trust position collected an extraordinary dividend. I do not remember the exact amount, but it was something like—it was not exactly $6 a share. I do not remember the number, but it was not far from $6 a share. That is an extraordinary dividend, things like that happen periodically. Most of our income comes from dividends, not from interest income.

Thérèse Byars (Corporate Secretary)

Related to that question, is the fee and other income line all from HKHC Horizon Kinetics Holding Corp.? Latest quarter is disproportionate compared to nine months. Can you explain?"

Murray Stahl (Chairman and CEO)

Yes, it's disproportionate because of the performance fee. Some years, we get a performance fee. This year, we got the biggest performance fee in the history of Horizon, which, as an aside, turned out to be problematic for Horizon because the performance fee has to be estimated on December 15th, even though we don't know what the performance fee is going to be until December 31st. It has to be estimated because we have to pay estimated taxes on the 15th, as a publicly traded corporation. We had never contemplated getting a performance fee that big, and we almost didn't have enough cash to pay the taxes. Happily, we did have enough cash, but we didn't provide for it. We didn't think it could ever happen because it simply had never happened before.

Now, we had plenty of liquidity, we had plenty of securities. We could have sold securities and raised any amount of money required. Any securities we would have raised, we would have sold at a gain, and that would have increased our tax liability. We certainly didn't want to do that, I guess there's a downside to getting big performance fees. That's why the management income is so large, essentially.

Thérèse Byars (Corporate Secretary)

Okay, these little cluster of questions that are all kind of related. "Can you elaborate on the source of the fee and other income line on the income statement, all from HKHC 4.42% participation? Second, can you elaborate on the source of the dividends and interest income line in addition to the interest on the $44 million of cash balance? Where else does this come from?"

Murray Stahl (Chairman and CEO)

Okay, I think I pretty much answered it.

Thérèse Byars (Corporate Secretary)

That's fine.

Murray Stahl (Chairman and CEO)

Yeah, I'll just recapitulate then. In the management fee category, the primary factor was the performance fees. It was bigger than any time in Horizon's history, we only get that at the end of the year. That's the way the funds work, it does not matter how much appreciation we have. We can't get that in the next quarter. We could be up 100%, because it crystallizes at the end of the year. It is just so we know, do not try to forecast next quarter based on our performance. All we can do is accrue, but we cannot crystallize. We are not going to get it no matter what our performance is. In terms of the dividends, and the interest income or that kind of income, as I said previously, it is primarily dividends in securities.

One thing I'll say that I didn't say before, that's the great thing about keeping securities for a very long period of time because companies raise their dividends over time. Your cash flow increases, because you didn't do anything. It's just that the company pays you more money. It's a really very pleasant experience when that happens. Sometimes, like happened to us in the most recent quarter, in the case of, or the prior quarter, in the case of Mesabi Trust, we actually got an extraordinary dividend.

Of course, we're not getting extraordinary dividend every quarter, but we got a dividend. That dividend is much higher than the quarter one year ago. We have a fairly sizable position in the Mesabi Trust. Horizon itself owns, as you can see by filings, a very large position. Mesabi Trust, I think, we're the largest holder of Mesabi. I think that answers that, or it should answer that.

Thérèse Byars (Corporate Secretary)

I believe it does, those were the last questions.

Murray Stahl (Chairman and CEO)

Okay, okay. I'm going to assume that those were indeed the last questions. I'm going to speak very slowly, because I want to answer every question. I'm giving you an opportunity to email yet another question. I'd be delighted to answer, in the event such a question doesn't occur to you, and it just happens to occur to you once you hang up this phone, please don't hesitate to contact us, and we will get you an answer.

Apart from that, in about 90 days, we're going to reprise this call, and we're going to answer all your questions. I thought this was a good meeting, and I really enjoyed the questions, I like the give and take. As you can see, we don't have a lot of secrets in FRMO and Horizon. Please do not hesitate to contact us if you want to know things, we look forward to the next set of questions, thanks so much.