Bill Ackman: 1966–2008

[00:00:09] Morning folks, and welcome to today's episode called Bill Ackman 1966-2008. And I'm going to break Ackman's story up into three, maybe even four parts, because like him or loath him, Ackman is a very, very interesting character. And I'll kick off this episode with a quote from Carlike and the legendary Wall Street investor, stroke, corporate raider, stroke, greenmailer. And he's had many tussles with Ackman.

[00:00:38] And this is what he said of Ackman. I would be a very happy man in life if I could be as certain of just one thing, as he is certain about everything. And that really is Ackman in a nutshell, like supremely and annoyingly confident. I was going to say to the point of arrogance, but he is actually arrogant.

[00:01:02] And yes, it's this confidence combined with intelligence, because again, like him or loath him, he is very, very smart. And he also is very persistent. And this has all resulted in the Ackman that we know today, the hedge funder who sticks his nose into everything from college admissions to DEI, to Israel, to Ukraine.

[00:01:28] And he has the answers to all the world's problems, apparently. While also, he's built up a massive, massive fortune and a very successful career. He's worth about $9.6 billion at the time of recording. So in this episode, I'm going to dig into how he started off. So it's a fascinating story. Enjoy.

[00:01:47] Now, Bill Ackman, he was born May 1966 in, I hope I'm pronouncing this right, Chappaqua in New York. And the family lived in this sprawling, stately home because he comes from a very, very wealthy background. His father, Lawrence, or Larry Ackman, was chairman of Ackman Brothers and Singer. This was this very prominent real estate mortgage broker.

[00:02:11] And Larry Ackman, he's credited with financing really the major projects that would have changed New York's skylines. So very, very prominent. Now, Ackman and Singer is still going today, although it's called Ackman and Ziff. And it appears that Bill Ackman, he got his activism gene from his mother, Ronnie, because she was one of the key people who pushed for the electrication of the Metro North Railroad in New York.

[00:02:39] He had one sister who was very good academically. She went on to become a doctor. So it was expected that young Bill would also achieve academically. He was always massively competitive and still is really competitive character. And around the age of nine, he took up tennis. And he was good, but never at the pro standard, but a very, very good tennis player who still plays an awful lot of tennis.

[00:03:02] And what apparently stands out in his tennis game is his persistence. He stays in rallies. He refuses to give away points. He has tolerance for long, grinding matches. And he's remained a very, very big tennis fan. He's often photographed at the major tennis tournaments. You'll see him there. Now, it's fair to say that Ackman has always had a thousand percent belief in himself, in his own abilities, in his own intelligence.

[00:03:30] And that can be seen from this story from 1983. So he's aged 17 and he made a $2,000 bet with his father that he would score a perfect 800 on the verbal section of the SAT. They're the tests used for college admissions in the US. Now, that $2,000, they are his entire savings. And his father, who I did some research on and who appears to be a really decent kind of character, genuinely nice man, he didn't want to take all of Bill's savings.

[00:03:59] So he cancelled the best just before the results arrived. He was right there, because when the results came back, Ackman scored 780 on the verbal, not 800. So still a very good score. But to give you an idea of what Ackman is like, even now, like 40 years later, he still doesn't accept that he might have been wrong on those SATs. And here's a quote from him from an excellent article by William D. Cohn in Vanity Fair in 2013. Ackman says,

[00:04:29] Anyway, he graduated fourth of his class, entered Harvard in 1984 to study social studies. That was an honours programme built around social theory, history, economics. And while in college, he gets a summer job selling advertising for a publication called Let's Go. This was a student-run travel guide run from Harvard, owned by Harvard. And this was before the internet. So this was really the Bible for backpackers back then.

[00:04:57] And Ackman apparently was a ferocious salesman. Here's a quote from one colleague. He described Ackman's selling technique as relentless, bordering on annoying. So Ackman would make dozens and dozens of calls every day to hostels, hotels, restaurants across Europe, pressurising them to take full-page ads, saying that they're going to miss out big time if they don't. And by the end of the summer, he earned $14,000 in commission. A huge sum for a student back at that time.

[00:05:27] Now you would think, as most of us would think, well that $14,000, you know, your parents would be delighted. That goes back into funding your college studies. But not Ackman. Ackman spent nearly the entire $14,000 on a high-end stereo system. And this is back in the 80s. Like what kind of stereo are you getting for $14,000? What Ackman didn't realise at the time was that he was hired by Let's Go as an independent contractor.

[00:05:51] So a few months later, the IRS hit him with a tax bill that young Bill couldn't afford because he'd spent it all on that stereo. So he had to get his daddy to help him out. So it's easy to dislike this young Bill. Imagine being able to spend $14,000 on a stereo and then have your daddy bail you out. Even physically, I haven't mentioned what Bill looks like. He's 6'3", he's athletic. He's not Brad Pitt handsome. But he's not unattractive.

[00:06:20] He's very waspy. So, you know, easy to dislike. But again, as I said in my episode about the Winklevoss twins, we're often prejudiced to just dislike this type of rich, athletic, handsome person. But, you know, it's not their fault in many ways. But as we shall see, there's probably other reasons to dislike Bill Ackman. Anyway, back at Harvard in his senior year, his thesis was titled

[00:06:48] Scaling the Ivy Wall, the Politics of Admissions at Harvard and Yale. And Ackman's thesis, as I understand it, it was that the driving force behind Harvard and Yale's admissions policy was institutional self-interest. You know, that its policies were always the result of public or political pressure. And they were implemented more or less as a PR exercise to make the college look good. So it wasn't based on fairness or merit.

[00:07:18] It wasn't based on who actually deserves to get a leg up. Now, what I find very interesting about this is that I'd always assumed that Ackman's recent, very public tirades against the big colleges like Harvard, and for those of you who aren't aware, over the last few years, Ackman has been very public in his criticisms of the admissions policies and other policies of Harvard and other top colleges. So I thought he was just jumping on the bandwagon over the last few years.

[00:07:46] And while I don't agree with what I believe has been his campaign of harassment against the presidents of certain colleges, what we can see from this thesis is that Ackman, in fairness to him, had been raising questions of the admission policies of these colleges almost 40 years ago. Now, you know, you could say it's a bit ironic that in his thesis, Ackman is essentially criticizing Harvard for implementing policies on the back of public or political pressure.

[00:08:14] And then this is exactly what he's been doing over the last few years, using his influence and political ties to try and change the policies of Harvard and other colleges. Anyway, after graduating, Ackman went to work for his father for two years, but he was always interested in investing. He was heavily influenced by Warren Buffett, and this is a quote from him. Read everything Warren Buffett has ever written, and you can stop there. That's all you need to know. But as we shall see, for the first part of his career,

[00:08:43] he didn't really follow Buffett's value investing formula, buying into good companies and holding them long term. Anyway, in the autumn of 1990, because he was interested in business and investment, he enrolled at Harvard Business School and began investing his own savings. He started doing well. He also found another classmate who was interested in investing, a guy called David Berkovitz. Now, this wasn't the son of Sam, the serial killer, different guy. The division of labour between them was pretty clear. Ackman was the front guy.

[00:09:12] He was the guy who found the deals, you know, the best investments. Berkovitz then was the back man, the guy who stress tested, did the maths on them. And in their final year, in 1992, they began cold calling wealthy investors for what would become their company, Gotham Partners. And that was incorporated a few weeks after they graduated. Now, Ackman, you know, he was 26 years old. Berkovitz was a few years older. They had zero experience managing an investment fund.

[00:09:39] And Ackman had to persuade sceptical investors that these two graduates with no track record could outperform the market. And his pitch was described as relentlessly confident. So, no surprise there. He apparently pitched about 100 potential investors and he got six to invest. Ackman and Berkovitz put in 350,000 of their own money, which was all they had. Apparently, Ackman's father put in around a million and they got the rest of the three million

[00:10:08] that they started the fund with from these six investors. And one of their first significant positions was in a company called Alexander's Inc. This was a distressed New York department store chain. It had gone into bankruptcy. And a fun fact, in the 1980s, Donald Trump held 27% of Alexander's. But this was taken from him by his creditors when he got into financial difficulties. That led to the first of his six bankruptcies in early 1990.

[00:10:34] Now, when Ackman invested in Alexander's, the company was worth just $80 million. But because of his background in real estate, he knew that the value of the company's flagship property, which was on Lixson Avenue alone, that that would be worth hundreds of millions. Now, it took a few years before the site was redeveloped. But Gotham got a return on investment of several hundred percent on that deal. As a result, the fund grew the following year. They had about $30 million.

[00:11:02] And here's a quote from the Washington Post about Gotham. This is only a year after they launched. And this is what a top professional investor said of the fund. It is intriguing that they are up and running so well and yet lack much experience. We have never put money with people who have no professional background, but they are really smart guys who've impressed a lot of experienced investors. Now, in 1994, on a side note, on a personal level, Ackman married Karen Herskovitz.

[00:11:29] She was a landscape architect and they were going to have three children together. Now, Ackman and Gotham, they were still small players by this stage. But the deal that really pushed them into the limelight was one that they didn't actually win. So, in 1995, the Japanese owners of Rockefeller Center, a landmark complex in the middle of Manhattan, it filed for bankruptcy and Ackman put together a partnership with a larger financial company called Lucadia National. Now, they didn't win. Goldman Sachs won the deal.

[00:11:59] But that attempt alone, it put his name in front of a much larger audience. He was now playing in bigger leagues. And over the following years, the fund grew to $500 million in assets. But then in 1998, the fund diversified into an entirely different industry, into golf. And I couldn't find information why they went this route. So, they bought a private golf course operator and they began expanding it. They began taking on desks to buy courses across the country.

[00:12:28] And now, Ackman found himself managing this large service business. They had over 25 golf courses and you've got all the operational stuff that comes with it. And this is very different from buying and holding stakes and shares in public companies. Ackman had no experience in this. And by the end of 2001, Gotham had invested somewhere between $100 and $150 million in the golf business. It was losing millions. 9-11 didn't help it at all either.

[00:12:56] And Ackman's proposed solution then to get it out of trouble was to merge the golf operation into this real estate trust that Gotham controlled. And they were going to use that real estate trust's $100 million in cash reserve to absorb the losses. But, of course, the shareholders in that trust, they could see exactly what was being proposed. Like, their cash was going to be used to rescue this golf business that Gotham controlled in a totally separate fund.

[00:13:25] They went to court, the shareholders, and they won. And once investors saw that the fund's biggest asset, the golf, was failing and its rescue plan was blocked, everybody wanted out of the fund. And so, in December 2002, Ackman and Berkowitz announced the liquidation of Gotham Partners. Now, as a side note, Berkowitz, he went on to have a pretty successful career working for other hedge funds, whereas Ackman, as we know, he continued on his own and set up a new firm, which I'll get into.

[00:13:53] But, before we get into that, two important things come out of the Gotham liquidation. First of all, Gotham Partners has shares in a company called Hallwood Realty. And Ackman believes that shares are way undervalued at $60. He believes they're worth about $140. But, he needed to get rid of them because he was liquidating Gotham. And he called Carl Icahn, the legendary Wall Street investor, stroke corporate raider, stroke greenmailer.

[00:14:21] And they hammered out a deal where Icahn agreed to buy the shares for $80. But they also built into the agreement something Icahn called schmuck insurance. I love this. So, this was an agreement that if Icahn sold his shares in Hallwood or Hallwood maybe within three years, they would split any profit above 10%. So, it was called schmuck insurance because if Icahn made a quick profit, this agreement prevented Ackman from looking like a schmuck.

[00:14:49] Now, when Hallwood Realty was merged a year later and Icahn got $137 per share, Ackman expected to be paid around $4.5 million, his share of the profits. But Icahn refused to pay Ackman because he said technically he didn't sell his shares. He got his payment through a merger. Now, Ackman sued him by all accounts. Based on the contract that they'd signed, Ackman had Icahn banged to rights.

[00:15:18] But Icahn thought he could bully Ackman. Icahn had a net worth at this stage around $14 billion. Ackman was worth about $4 million. The case dragged on for seven years until eventually Icahn was forced to pay Ackman what was owed, including interest, a total of $9 million. And after the verdict, Icahn was enraged. Now, he said it wasn't because he lost.

[00:15:43] He said it was because Ackman went to the press and got a nice puff piece written about his victory in the New York Times. And according to Icahn, in doing so, Ackman violated a decades-old code on Wall Street in that you never rub it in the other guy's face. No matter how gratifying the win. You just don't do that. Now, it's hard to know if this is what really pissed off Icahn.

[00:16:07] But according to Ackman's critics, this is the type of behaviour that really annoys them. That he's needlessly competitive. He always has to be right. But more importantly, they say, he wants everybody else to know just how right he is. And this is a quote from William D. Cohn's excellent 2013 Vanity Fair article. And it's from a fellow hedge funder. And this is what he says of Ackman. He is very smart, but he lets you know it.

[00:16:37] And he combines that with this sort of noblesse oblige that lots of people find offensive. Now, to look up noblesse oblige, it's a French phrase meaning nobility obliges. The idea that those with privilege or wealth or high social status, they have a responsibility to act generously or honourably towards those less fortunate. And the hedge fund guy goes on to say,

[00:17:01] On top of that, he is pointlessly, needlessly competitive every time he opens his mouth. Now, I said those two things that come out of the Gotham liquidation. The second thing that came with this is that Ackman had started researching a company called NBIA while Gotham was winding down. Now, NBIA is this huge AAA rated bond insurer.

[00:17:25] So, what they did was, for example, if a city in America wanted to build a school or a bridge or a sewer system, they issued bonds. And very often, NBIA was the one insuring those bonds. They insured about 20% of all US municipal debt. So, hundreds of billions of dollars worth. And the AAA rating that they had was vital. Because NBIA, because of this AAA rating, was considered by Wall Street to be basically zero loss underwriting.

[00:17:54] It was the idea that the debt it insured was so safe, it would never have to pay out. But, Ackman's research on NBIA was pretty explosive. Because he claimed that they were insuring risky subprime mortgages and CDOs, or collateralized debt obligations. And that these were, of course, far more dangerous and risky than the municipal bonds they were supposed to cover. And it's worth just pausing for a second. Because most of us, including me,

[00:18:24] I didn't become aware of subprime mortgages really until about 2007 and 2008. So, in 2002, subprime really wasn't on most people's radar. So, Ackman, in fairness to him, was one of the first to call it out. Now, for clarification, he wasn't calling it out and saying subprime mortgages are everywhere on Wall Street and it's going to bring down the economy. But he did see them in NBIA and he did see the potential harm they could do for that company.

[00:18:53] And for context, it was around this time that the bundling, like 2000, 2001, 2002, that the bundling of subprime mortgages into CDOs and then packaging them in a way that made large parts of that risk appear safe enough to carry top-tier AAA ratings. That's when all this started. So, Ackman did see it in NBIA and called it out. And I won't get into the whole CDO and subprime thing here.

[00:19:21] But if you want to get a really good book that explains this in terms that even I understand, I strongly recommend you read Gillian Tett's book, Fool's Gold. It's a fantastic read. Anyway, Ackman's core argument was that NBIA was both fraudulent and insolvent because it didn't have enough cash in reserve to pay out if even a fraction of those subprime mortgages defaulted. Now, before Ackman published the report,

[00:19:51] NBIA's chairman got in contact with Ackman and Ackman says this is what he was told. You're a young guy early in your career. You should think long and hard before issuing this report. We have high friends in high places. But Ackman didn't back down. And even though Gotham Partners was winding down themselves, he still published a 55-page report titled Is NBIA AAA? And then he took a short position against the company.

[00:20:21] That is ballsy because NBIA's threat, it wasn't an idle one. They publicly accused Ackman of market manipulation and they lobbied the New York Attorney General and the SEC to investigate Ackman. And Elliot Spitzer, he was the super aggressive New York Attorney General. He was known as the Sheriff of Wall Street. He was feared on Wall Street. And being targeted by Spitzer, it would often be the death sentence

[00:20:50] for a financier's reputation. Now, a fun side note, Spitzer eventually became governor of New York and he had to resign after it emerged that he had spent over $80,000 on high-end desk courts. But that was a few years later. Anyway, Spitzer launched an investigation into Ackman. He served him with subpoenas. Ackman was subjected to gruelling depositions, but he stood firm. And he treated the investigation as a platform

[00:21:19] rather than a threat. Like every time Spitzer's office would email him questions, Ackman would provide hundreds of pages of data. He was essentially trying to flip the investigators, trying to convince them that NBIA was the wrongdoer here, not him. And it worked. By late 2003, the investigation fizzled out. Spitzer's office found no evidence of market manipulation, mostly because everything Ackman was saying was technically true.

[00:21:47] And the information that Ackman provided to Spitzer's office does lead to Spitzer investigating NBIA. But it takes a few years for that to conclude and we'll get to that. So anyway, by this stage, we're still talking about 2003, 2004. Ackman's reputation on Wall Street was pretty low, to say the least. Gotham had folded. Nobody believed his research into NBIA. He'd just been investigated by Spitzer. And even though he wasn't charged,

[00:22:17] the business press was calling him roadkill on the hedge fund highway. But as we'll see, Ackman, he never lets criticism influence the belief he has in himself. In January 2004, he launched Pershing Square Capital Management. He raised 54 million. 50 million of that came from Neucadia National. They were the same partners who had backed Ackman when he tried to get the rocket for the centre.

[00:22:45] And Ackman himself put in 4 million of his own money, which at that point represented everything he had. The name of the company apparently came from the square near Grand Central Terminal where the office was based. Within months of launching, Ackman reinitiated his short position on NBIA. He just wouldn't let that go because he was so convinced his research was right. And Ackman also now shifted his approach to investing because owning a passive stake

[00:23:14] in an undervalued company and waiting was no longer really enough. He wanted more control. He wanted to be pushing management to make changes based on his analysis or research. And this really became the defining feature of how he invested from that point on and for the next 10 to 12 years. And his first big bet, he built a long position in Wendy's, the fast food chain. Because at that time, Wendy's also owned Tim Hortons,

[00:23:43] the Canadian coffee and breakfast chain. And that was growing much faster and generating better margins than the core burger business. And Ackman's research told him that while Wendy's had a market cap of $5.7 billion, that if you spun off Tim Hortons alone, that would be worth $4 billion. So you were essentially getting the 6,000 plus Wendy's burgers restaurants for very little. The analogy is like you're buying a house and realizing the backyard

[00:24:13] was worth more than the house itself. Now Ackman had been trying to get a meeting with Wendy's management to convince them, you know, that they should use his research and spin off Tim Hortons. But they kept turning him down. So in early 2005, he decided that he'd go with a more public confrontational approach. Then he had a bit of luck in March 2005 because a woman in San Jose reported finding a severed human finger in her bowl of Wendy's chili.

[00:24:41] Now this turned out to be a fraud in the long run and she was actually sent to jail. But the story became not just a national media circus, it became international. I remember reading about this story. It was everywhere. And as a result, Wendy's stock dropped. Ackman seized the opportunity and bought more shares on the cheap and he eventually built up a 9.3% stake in Wendy's. But he only had to pay about 100 million because he used stuff like total return swaps and call options.

[00:25:11] These are financial derivatives that allowed him to control hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Wendy's stock while only putting up a fraction of the collateral. By the summer of 2005, the Wendy's board were just being hammered and they eventually buckled under pressure and they announced the IPO of Tim Hortons as well as a massive billion dollar buyback. And Pershing Square, Ackman's firm, netted a profit of about 280 million. And so this now became Ackman's roadmap,

[00:25:41] his playbook for activist investing. So emboldened, he moved on to McDonald's. He published research that argued that McDonald's should sell its company-owned restaurants and spin off its real estate into this real estate investment trust. McDonald's management, they resisted. Its CEO famously apparently told Ackman to go away and said, we don't need a 39-year-old hedge fund manager telling us how to run our business. Pershing Square built up a 5% stake,

[00:26:10] valued at 2 billion. And even though the board rejected some of his proposals, they did come under pressure from Ackman and they were forced to respond. They announced that they would sell 1,500 company-owned stores to franchisees and they increased their dividend. And Ackman was able to exit this with a profit in the hundreds of millions. And again, this really enhanced his reputation because now he's willing to take on big, big companies like McDonald's and force them to make changes.

[00:26:40] So with these high-profile victories, the fund was growing. By 2007, it had around 3 to 4 billion in assets. And this is when Ackman made one of the biggest bets of his career. He started buying shares in the retailer Target and he opened up a dedicated 2 billion dollar fund just around Target. And the idea was simple. Again, another real estate play for the most part. Ackman believed that if the company separated

[00:27:09] its real estate and sold its credit card business, the stock, in his view, would double. But the board didn't agree. They believed that owning their own stores and their own real estate, that was vital because it gave them operational flexibility. And that's way more valuable than a one-time cash infusion by selling off the real estate. So not only had you resistance on the board, but then Ackman's timing was disastrous because you had the 2008 financial crash

[00:27:38] and Target's shares fell by about 50%.. But crucially, because the 2 billion Pershing Square fund used high leverage call options, it didn't just lose 50% like the stock had dropped. It actually lost 90% of its capsule by January 2009 because in options trading, if the stock doesn't hit a certain price by a certain date, the value goes to zero. So it was a complete bust.

[00:28:07] And the key point here is that some of the investors in this specific target fund, they were fellow hedge funders, activist investors, friends of Bill Ackman, people like Daniel Loeb, who's the founder of Third Point. He ended up losing about $175 million and Loeb and Ackman fell out over this. So just like with Icahn, Ackman made a very, very powerful enemy in Loeb. And I don't think it was just about the money.

[00:28:38] Ackman's prickly, arrogant, superior attitude, it makes him a lot easier to fall out with. And as a result, there were always a lot of people on Wall Street hiding in the long grass, waiting for an opportunity to take a shot at Ackman, as we shall see in the whole Herbalife story that I'll be doing in the second episode. Now, the loss in Target, it caused Ackman to issue a very rare apology. And this is a quote from him. Bottom line,

[00:29:08] the Target investment has been one of the greatest disappointments of my career to date. That's in a letter he wrote to investors. But, while all of this played out, Ackman still had a short position in MBIA. And he was like a dog with a bone. He just wouldn't let up. And with good reason. Because Spitzer's office, as mentioned, they did start investigating the company. And in 2006, MBIA was forced to pay a $75 million fine

[00:29:37] and restate several years of financial results. And, while this was a huge win for Ackman's credibility, it didn't really have much impact on the company at this stage. The ratings agencies maintained MBIA's AAA ratings. So, as you might understand, most people by this stage would have just given up. But not Ackman. He wrote directly to the board of Moody's, warning them of potential liability if they maintained the AAA ratings.

[00:30:07] Apparently, he cornered the CEO of Price Waterhouse Cooper's, MBIA's auditor at a charity event. He raised the issue with a senior analyst at a funeral. And finally, in the first few months of 2008, as the danger of subprime mortgages started to make headlines, the various rating agencies cut MBIA's AAA ratings. And then, after Lehman's collapse in September of that year, MBIA's stock,

[00:30:37] which had traded at $70 in 2007, fell to $2. And Ackman's short position, which he'd held for six years, it finally came good and generated a profit of $1.1 billion for his investors. And apparently, Ackman himself made hundreds of millions personally from this. So, Pershing Square's main fund, note, not the target fund, which was separate, the main fund finished 2008

[00:31:06] with a massive standout annual return. And despite the target setback, Ackman, he is now, he's basking in the praise he's getting for his tenacity and his foresight in relation to MBIA. And here's a piece from Jonah Seara in the New York Times and this is what he said. I don't think I've ever seen a fund manager grab a company by the tail and simply not let go the way Mr. Ackman has done with MBIA. The other participants

[00:31:36] in the marketplace, the analysts and rating agencies and institution investors, they should be thanking him. He may be aggressive, he may be over the top, he may not be able to speak in short sentences, I love that, but he's doing the hard work and thinking the hard thoughts that they refused to do for far too long. So this brings us nicely to the end of the episode, it's 2008, I'm leaving the story, I'll be doing a second part, maybe in six months or maybe a year's time. So I'm not going

[00:32:05] to do a deep dive in terms of what I think of Ackman quite yet, I'll leave that till the final episode. But I think what is clear about Ackman from his youth and right up until 2008 is that he has enormous amounts of self-belief or to quote one of his hedge fund colleagues from William D. Cohn's excellent Vanity Fair article, there is a saying in this business, often wrong, never in doubt, Ackman personifies it. I love that line. And again, look,

[00:32:35] love him or loathe him, Bill Ackman makes for a great business story. Anyway, that brings us to listeners' emails and this one comes from Jay, who I suspect might be a Manchester United fan because he'd love me to do an episode on Jim Ratcliffe. He's the controversial owner of Ineos, the huge plastics company. He himself is worth about $30 billion. He has control over Manchester United as well as investments in loads of other sports teams. He's a fascinating figure and I will cover him, Jay. So thanks so much for the suggestion

[00:33:05] and for listening. And remember, if you have any comments, any corrections or any story you'd like me to cover, email me at info at gbspod.com. All the best, folks.