Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news.
Speaker 2: For years, the Federal reserves policy of lower rates for
Speaker 2: longer helped fuel a bullmarket in stocks, and even now
Speaker 2: after the Fed's rate high campaign to fight inflation, the
Speaker 2: bullmarket keeps on running. It's all raising questions about the
Speaker 2: future of short selling. So here now to share his perspective,
Speaker 2: I'm pleased to say, is legendary short seller Jim Chainos, President,
Speaker 2: managing partner and founder of Chinos and Company. Jim, great
Speaker 2: to see you here in.
Speaker 3: New York with us, Thanks for having me. You look
Speaker 3: at the number.
Speaker 2: Of short buys hedge funds as tracked by HFR, and
Speaker 2: it's fallen dramatically from fifty something to fourteen now fifty
Speaker 2: something in twenty eight and fourteen in about twenty twenty three,
Speaker 2: twenty twenty four. How much does the rate environment overall
Speaker 2: contribute to the shrinking universe of short selling funds?
Speaker 3: Do you think?
Speaker 4: I think the rate environment is probly the first or
Speaker 4: second derivative. I mean, it's really the ongoing persistence of
Speaker 4: the bull market, which has now been fifteen years, and
Speaker 4: we saw something similar Scarlet in the late nineties, or
Speaker 4: the number of short short biased funds by nineteen ninety
Speaker 4: nine and two thousand really had dwindled to a handful
Speaker 4: and people just got exasperated.
Speaker 5: And that was right before.
Speaker 4: There was really ten years from ninety nine to nine
Speaker 4: of just fantastic returns on the short side and two
Speaker 4: bear markets, of course, but I think that really it's
Speaker 4: the length of time beyond just FED policy, although FED
Speaker 4: policy certainly had a lot to do with it in
Speaker 4: the last ten years.
Speaker 3: Now, I introduced Chinos in company.
Speaker 2: It's now a family office and advisory instead of a
Speaker 2: hedgepoint firm. Right you are investing in the market, though,
Speaker 2: I'm curious how you're investing in the market right now.
Speaker 4: Well, and we're advising clients. Look, this is the I
Speaker 4: just advised a client on a putbas its strategy this afternoon,
Speaker 4: and right now, what we're seeing in the universe of
Speaker 4: companies we follow is probably as attractive at time as
Speaker 4: it was in first half of twenty twenty one. And
Speaker 4: I've said publicly that twenty twenty one was the most
Speaker 4: stucket of market I've ever seen in my forty years
Speaker 4: of forty five years of investing, and we're getting back
Speaker 4: to that. Not quite there, but it's close. And you've
Speaker 4: seen it with things like the meme stocks again and
Speaker 4: my god, we're still we're starting to price backs again.
Speaker 4: And noticed that three billion of SPACs price.
Speaker 6: Does that give you ajata? Particularly the run up we
Speaker 6: saw on Gamesop? And yeah, I means facts are somehow
Speaker 6: trying to call their way up.
Speaker 5: People have always said, well, what about the FED?
Speaker 4: Per your first question? And I always said, we'll give
Speaker 4: Wall Street enough time. The FED is not the only
Speaker 4: one with the printing press. Wall Street does a pretty
Speaker 4: good job at issuing pieces of paper when people really
Speaker 4: want them.
Speaker 6: I mean, how do you sort of navigate and you
Speaker 6: talk about advising folks, you're advising people on a public market,
Speaker 6: public equity market at least right now that is a
Speaker 6: high at least on the SMP, on the NASAC. A
Speaker 6: lot of people would look at historical valuations and say,
Speaker 6: we're stretched here.
Speaker 7: What is the advice you give in that situation?
Speaker 4: Well, since really the mid nineties, we ran our business
Speaker 4: where we were long equity markets, we were long indices
Speaker 4: and then short our names. And I still think that
Speaker 4: makes a lot of sense. And where the stock market
Speaker 4: is going, I have no idea. I started my firm
Speaker 4: back in nineteen eighty five, that dial was thirteen hundred,
Speaker 4: So that.
Speaker 5: Should tell you something about timing.
Speaker 4: But the fact of the matter is is that with
Speaker 4: the exception of the far right group of companies on
Speaker 4: the bell curve, most companies underperformed the stock market over
Speaker 4: time or failed. It's the nvidios or the teslas or
Speaker 4: whatever on that far right end that go up quite
Speaker 4: a lot that give you your returns. So the strategy
Speaker 4: of being long equity markets broadly and short idiosyncratic names
Speaker 4: I still think makes a lot of sense. And then finally,
Speaker 4: insurance is really cheap right now. I mean, you know,
Speaker 4: people insure their homes, they ensure their cars, they ensure
Speaker 4: their loved ones. It's pretty cheap right now to insure
Speaker 4: a portfolio.
Speaker 8: Is AI in a bubble?
Speaker 5: I have no idea.
Speaker 3: You know, you lived through bubbles.
Speaker 5: I go af through bubbles.
Speaker 4: I'll make one observation as it relates to AI. So
Speaker 4: if you go back and look at the US economy
Speaker 4: in the immediate post Internet age, and I think we
Speaker 4: can all agree the Internet changed our lives in a
Speaker 4: major way. From nineteen ninety eight to seven, the US
Speaker 4: economy grew at three percent real annually. From nineteen eighty
Speaker 4: eight to nineteen ninety seven, the ten years prior to
Speaker 4: really the advent of the Internet to the public, the
Speaker 4: economy grew by three percent annually. The internet had no
Speaker 4: impact on growth. Now it had a lot of impact
Speaker 4: on individual companies. Getting back to my point, right, there
Speaker 4: were big, big winners and big big losers. And I
Speaker 4: suspect if AI is going to be as transformational as
Speaker 4: people think it is, and I have no idea whether
Speaker 4: it will be or not.
Speaker 5: They'll be big winners and they'll be big Okay.
Speaker 7: I just want to follow up on that though, too.
Speaker 6: And this kind of leads back to the question with
Speaker 6: Scarlett's started off with about the connection between macroeconomic conditions
Speaker 6: and our markets today, and there does seem to be
Speaker 6: a disconnect.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I wouldn't disagree with that, and I think there
Speaker 4: is a much more specuative nature of this market.
Speaker 5: And we started to.
Speaker 4: See it in late twenty nineteen when commission rates cut
Speaker 4: to zero and retail began to come back in the
Speaker 4: market in a big way in ways they hadn't been
Speaker 4: in prior to that. They've been investing in ETFs or
Speaker 4: mutual funds or what have you, and we began to
Speaker 4: see pre pandemic speculation and individual names really pick up.
Speaker 4: And then of course post pandemic it took off and
Speaker 4: we're still you can see it in option volumes and
Speaker 4: a lot of other sort of quantitative measures that the
Speaker 4: public is in this stock market in.
Speaker 5: A big way.
Speaker 4: That really then means that you have to change your
Speaker 4: risk parameters, change the size of your short bets if
Speaker 4: you will, and be mindful of the game stops and
Speaker 4: those kinds of things. On the other hand, generally they
Speaker 4: chase momentum and sometimes quite frankly, silly stories, and if
Speaker 4: you want to be investing, you don't want to be
Speaker 4: doing that.
Speaker 8: If you were looking at the AI story, and I
Speaker 8: guess you can't say it's a bubble, but it's spread
Speaker 8: out in lots of different parts. Right, Utilities have been up,
Speaker 8: power has been up, your hardware coming up, You've got
Speaker 8: software like it's like the tentacles are moving out. How
Speaker 8: do you think about something like that, like, how do
Speaker 8: you well, we look for.
Speaker 4: I mean, when we look for companies in our world
Speaker 4: that have gotten the benefit of an AI kiss but
Speaker 4: are actually going to lose because of AI. So we've
Speaker 4: been publicly short the data centers, the legacy data centers,
Speaker 4: because they literally are not designed for AI chips. They
Speaker 4: have to basically be retooled completely, and all of the
Speaker 4: infrastructure and hardware in a data center an old one
Speaker 4: is not compatible with the new chips. So people if
Speaker 4: did the stocks up thinking their AI place, they're actually
Speaker 4: losers from AI. And it gets back to the winners
Speaker 4: and losers.
Speaker 3: Thing we mentioned spack companies a little bit earlier.
Speaker 2: I'm wondering if you were trading around the elections at all,
Speaker 2: what my aid Donald Trump victory in November, for instance,
Speaker 2: mean for regulation and would that, as a result, perhaps
Speaker 2: create more opportunities to be short companies because you know,
Speaker 2: with the regulatory heat taken off, companies can do all
Speaker 2: kinds of things and speculative fever goes up.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean it's hard to bet, basically if unless
Speaker 4: you know who's going to win. Yeah, it seems like
Speaker 4: I still think it's gonna be a pretty close election.
Speaker 4: And obviously there's certain areas that each party would would
Speaker 4: emphasize and de emphasize. Again, some areas that were already
Speaker 4: negative on, like solar would probably lose under Donald Trump.
Speaker 4: But but it's hard to know exactly, particularly if the
Speaker 4: polls are right that it's still a pretty tight election.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and of course he's a booster for all kinds
Speaker 2: of companies, including his own spack.
Speaker 3: You've been very.
Speaker 2: Vocal about how irrational retail day traders are, how much
Speaker 2: kind of charismatic influencer like Roaring Kitty aka deep fing
Speaker 2: Value and you know what's his actual name, Keith Gill,
Speaker 2: and an army of day traders keep this GameStop dream alive.
Speaker 2: I mean from where you sit and look at it,
Speaker 2: at some point it comes crashing down, does it not?
Speaker 5: Well, it already has. I mean, so if you look
Speaker 5: at the.
Speaker 3: Meme, there's little blips here and there.
Speaker 4: Yeah, But if you look at the memestock class of
Speaker 4: twenty twenty one, which was GameStop AMC, B, BEF and beyond,
Speaker 4: you know a number of others. I mean, with the
Speaker 4: exception of game Stop, they are all down ninety ninety
Speaker 4: five ninety nine percent. It was a disaster for retail investors,
Speaker 4: quite frankly, and so I think that that it gets
Speaker 4: to my point that you don't want to be chasing
Speaker 4: this stuff if there's no fundamentals behind it, and I
Speaker 4: have no position in game Stop, but people are still
Speaker 4: valuing that company. If we're going to value business at
Speaker 4: three times, it's cash, and even though it's raised all
Speaker 4: this cash, it's got about nine dollars of sharing cash
Speaker 4: right now per share. I think the stock's at twenty
Speaker 4: five or twenty six or twenty seven, And so you
Speaker 4: have to believe the business has something or there's option
Speaker 4: value to the cash, which is what people believe that
Speaker 4: Ryan Colm to be able to do something that's really
Speaker 4: hard to do when you're paying three dollars for a
Speaker 4: dollar of cash. And again, so you're chasing the future,
Speaker 4: you're chasing the story. In bull markets, the future gets
Speaker 4: a premium. In bear markets, reality gets a discount.
Speaker 6: Well, when we talk about that premium, particularly when it
Speaker 6: comes a game Stop in some of those meeting socks,
Speaker 6: let's talk about the other potentially on the other side
Speaker 6: of that trade, which is sort of the short positions.
Speaker 6: We saw that in twenty twenty one, where at the
Speaker 6: short interest went through the room. If we're not seeing
Speaker 6: that necessarily as aggressively this time the opposite. But yeah,
Speaker 6: but part of that reason is because there aren't a
Speaker 6: lot of folks like you doing this anymore.
Speaker 7: A lot of those folks got scared off.
Speaker 6: Obviously we know happened to gay block in and a
Speaker 6: little bit earlier we were just talking about Andrew Left
Speaker 6: who had a short position in Game Stop, but even
Speaker 6: he closed that out.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Well again, when you just look at the numbers, overall,
Speaker 4: short interest is down, as you allude to. But take
Speaker 4: a look at Game Stoff again, just to use this example.
Speaker 4: So a week or so ago, ten days ago, short
Speaker 4: interest was twenty two percent of the outstanding or of
Speaker 4: the float. Today it's eleven percent. A. The short interest
Speaker 4: went down. B. They issued a lot of shares, getting
Speaker 4: back to my point about issuance, so the supply increased
Speaker 4: and not a share.
Speaker 5: So now it's not a short story anymore. The shorts
Speaker 5: aren't trapped.
Speaker 4: In January of twenty twenty one, I think the short
Speaker 4: interest was one hundred and forty percent of out standing.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and now it's eleven. It's a big difference.
Speaker 7: Okay, so maybe that's not a target.
Speaker 6: Is there sort of a market or more important, appetite
Speaker 6: for that sort of short seller's playbook a playbook that
Speaker 6: you made famous and it just doesn't seem like there
Speaker 6: are sort of new channels is coming around the corner
Speaker 6: in this space anymore.
Speaker 7: How do you feel about that?
Speaker 5: I don't know, you know, af for forty five years.
Speaker 5: I don't wish that on anyone.
Speaker 8: Maybe people want to aspire to that, right, Like, are
Speaker 8: there players in the market.
Speaker 4: There's some really good there's some really good people on
Speaker 4: the short side out there that are doing great work.
Speaker 4: And the folks at Hindenburg I'm a big fan of
Speaker 4: and others, and you know, we never did the short
Speaker 4: activist model, but the work they're doing is is I think,
Speaker 4: you know, the fundamental work, which is what I look
Speaker 4: at when I look at people's work, is really first rate.
Speaker 4: And so it's out there. And I've called this the
Speaker 4: golden age of frauds. So there's just so many companies,
Speaker 4: so many companies now that are playing games that are
Speaker 4: that are trying and take advantage of investors.
Speaker 5: So we need short sellers.
Speaker 4: More than ever.
Speaker 2: We need short sellers more than ever. But the government's
Speaker 2: cracking down on all of them. Right This ongoing investigation
Speaker 2: into activist truth sellers has resulted in its first charge.
Speaker 2: I believe ants and funds and ants and advisors. We're
Speaker 2: accused of hiding payments to bearish researchers. This disclosure issue
Speaker 2: really disclosure is but it's something right.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I think.
Speaker 4: That that was the issue and we were never involved
Speaker 4: with that and we were never that was never part
Speaker 4: of our business model. But I think that the issue
Speaker 4: that the government was worried about in the SEC and
Speaker 4: possibly justice was disclosure. Were there people funding these things
Speaker 4: that was not disclosed that should have been I could
Speaker 4: argue that legally, but I think that was really what
Speaker 4: the issue is was where the third party is involved
Speaker 4: in funding this that should have been disclosed or not.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: It goes back to that idea that there's a lot
Speaker 2: of ways to make money. Short Selling is complicated, it's expensive,
Speaker 2: and it's certainly in a risky way because your downside
Speaker 2: is unlimited.
Speaker 3: You shut down your hedge funds last year.
Speaker 2: Yet, given where we are in this market cycle, you say,
Speaker 2: in the golden age of fraud, this might be a
Speaker 2: good time for short strategies in terms of performance. Do
Speaker 2: you see it getting a little bit easier to raise
Speaker 2: capital from institutional investors.
Speaker 4: It's harder, Yeah, and that's part of why the opportunity
Speaker 4: set is there, nobody wants to do it, and so
Speaker 4: I think that that's what's so interesting. And of course
Speaker 4: you have the growth in the platform companies, the so
Speaker 4: called pod shops, so a lot of short selling is
Speaker 4: done through those vehicles in terms of dollar value. They've
Speaker 4: certainly supplanted the long short world in a major way,
Speaker 4: but with tighter risk models, so we see more volatility
Speaker 4: and sometimes because those platform companies keep short positions small
Speaker 4: and if they move against you a certain.
Speaker 5: Amount, you're out. But bybab the way that works on
Speaker 5: the alongside too.
Speaker 6: But do you think though that long short strategy might
Speaker 6: actually have some value at some point in time? Absolutely,
Speaker 6: because I mean we talk about this idea. I mean,
Speaker 6: you can't have a market that's all long. I mean,
Speaker 6: that doesn't work forever.
Speaker 4: Does it.
Speaker 5: I don't think so.
Speaker 4: Okay, I said, we have forty years of forty years
Speaker 4: of almost that of numbers that kind of proved that wrong.
Speaker 7: Yeah, pretty much, straight up market.
Speaker 4: So I think that that again, as long as you're
Speaker 4: doing your work and don't focus on the short term
Speaker 4: and understand that a dollar is not worth three dollars
Speaker 4: and you shouldn't pay three dollars for it and if
Speaker 4: you can sell it for four dollars, it's maybe not
Speaker 4: a bad trade. I think they'll always be real.
Speaker 6: I was having a conversation with a long short manager
Speaker 6: and she kind of pointed out this idea of, at
Speaker 6: least in her mind, that price transparency or price discovery
Speaker 6: was not as easy as it used to be, so
Speaker 6: that made the.
Speaker 7: Strategy a little bit harder.
Speaker 6: And she pens some of that on the distortions coming
Speaker 6: out of the private markets, the idea that private markets
Speaker 6: have stolen a lot of thunder from public markets. You
Speaker 6: don't necessarily have the same balance or equilibrium in private
Speaker 6: markets in public markets that you had in the past.
Speaker 5: That's an interesting theory.
Speaker 4: I have not considered that private markets would impact the
Speaker 4: short side that way. I mean, I think the private markets,
Speaker 4: the growth in private markets has had a lot more
Speaker 4: to do with capital raising, particularly in the public market arena,
Speaker 4: including long short. You know, I sit on a couple
Speaker 4: of investment committees and we've been doing nothing but redeeming
Speaker 4: hedge funds and giving it to private private equity, private credit,
Speaker 4: And in my own view, I think that's not the
Speaker 4: right thing to be doing right now. I think that
Speaker 4: wherever you see a flood of money. For years and
Speaker 4: years and years, it's been pretty much you're not going
Speaker 4: to get the outsized returns that you had ten or
Speaker 4: twenty years ago.
Speaker 8: And let's circle back to individual stocks.
Speaker 3: Why don't you like solar stocks?
Speaker 5: I don't like solar stocks.
Speaker 4: I don't like the residential solar stocks because the business
Speaker 4: model doesn't work no matter what rates do. The concept
Speaker 4: of putting up panels on someone's roof and then leasing
Speaker 4: it from that company. If you just look at the
Speaker 4: numbers of the companies that are in that business, like
Speaker 4: sun Roun or Sonova or whatever, they're just they bleed
Speaker 4: cash and they use accounting constructs to tell you why
Speaker 4: it's really and meanwhile they're just burning hundreds of millions
Speaker 4: of dollars per quarter and have.
Speaker 5: Been for years and years and years.
Speaker 4: And I think that that that is uh is just
Speaker 4: simply an accounting story.
Speaker 8: What else don't you like? I mean like it's it's
Speaker 8: interesting to get your take because all our thoughts have
Speaker 8: been on a.
Speaker 5: Tear the last last couple of weeks.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, they were actually beating new loads just last month,
Speaker 4: and so they bounced because of the view on rates.
Speaker 5: Well, we're not going to talk about the Tesla shareholders.
Speaker 7: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 8: You're taken away my father.
Speaker 3: I asked you that behind that.
Speaker 4: We don't like the data centers, and haven't We've been
Speaker 4: public on that for for a long long time. I'm
Speaker 4: puzzled by the number of restaurants that are trading at
Speaker 4: absolutely insane valuations in industry that you know ultimately is
Speaker 4: uh is not a secular growth business. You can find
Speaker 4: stocks of fifty times cash flow and one hundred times earnings,
Speaker 4: and there's lots of companies that are kind of mundane
Speaker 4: that have been bought by growth managers, where the returns
Speaker 4: on capital low, that are treading at fifty sixty, seventy
Speaker 4: eighty times earnings, and you can find them. There are
Speaker 4: a lot of them, and so it's a it's a
Speaker 4: pretty target rich environment right now if you're doing fundamental work.
Speaker 7: And I'm sorry, did he answer the question on that flow?
Speaker 4: No?
Speaker 2: Yeah, Well, Tesla is holding into annual general meeting tomorrow,
Speaker 2: and you were famously short Tesla at a time when
Speaker 2: it basically defied gravity.
Speaker 3: We know that shareholders are going to be.
Speaker 2: Voting on Elon Musk's fifty six billion dollar pay package,
Speaker 2: not from this year, not from last year, but from
Speaker 2: a couple of years ago.
Speaker 3: What is that emblematic of? What does that tell you?
Speaker 4: Well, first of all, it might shock some of your viewers,
Speaker 4: but I tweeted out a week ago, I actually think
Speaker 4: that people should vote for the package. Really yeah, I think,
Speaker 4: even though I'm a bear on Tesla, I think a
Speaker 4: deal is a deal, even if it's a bad deal
Speaker 4: and they agreed to it. Now the judge has made
Speaker 4: even if they voted in again, that doesn't mean it
Speaker 4: may happen.
Speaker 5: It may not obviate the ruling.
Speaker 4: But I do think a deal is a deal and
Speaker 4: that if you voted for it, that he should get it.
Speaker 5: Having said that, you know, the value of the package.
Speaker 4: Is in excess of all the retained earnings of the
Speaker 4: company's ever made, even post package. And the one thing
Speaker 4: I mentioned I pointed out today, the one thing I've
Speaker 4: been scratching my head on and going back and looking
Speaker 4: at this package from twenty eighteen.
Speaker 5: Was that the.
Speaker 4: Deal was continued on hitting certain numbers and the stock
Speaker 4: price hitting certain values.
Speaker 5: But what they didn't.
Speaker 4: Do was make each trunch the equity the new Equity
Speaker 4: Award that he got for doing that right price of
Speaker 4: that option at the stock price at that moment. All
Speaker 4: of the equity for all of the tronchas was set
Speaker 4: at the original price, which was twenty three dollars adjusted.
Speaker 5: For the split.
Speaker 4: So that is means there's really no clawback provision. And
Speaker 4: basically it means if the stock goes up a lot
Speaker 4: and then goes down a lot, he still wins. The
Speaker 4: shareholders don't necessarily win. In fact, I think the stock
Speaker 4: price is below where he earned the last trancho already.
Speaker 4: So it's a little bit like a hedge fund manager saying, Okay, well,
Speaker 4: I was up forty percent at midyear and then gave
Speaker 4: it all back in the second half of the year,
Speaker 4: but you should compensate me on the fact that, you know,
Speaker 4: I was up a lot at one point, and so
Speaker 4: that's the one aspect of the package I think shareholders
Speaker 4: should really, you know, be kind of kicking themselves on.
Speaker 4: I think that the tranchas should have been set at
Speaker 4: each point at which the stock price had to go to.
Speaker 4: But having said that, I mean, I think he should
Speaker 4: get it. I'm not a big fan of Eline. There's
Speaker 4: no surprise of that, but a deal is a deal.
Speaker 4: It is, however, a very expensive deal for the shareholders.
Speaker 4: And what does it mean about going forward? What's going
Speaker 4: to be the next demand?
Speaker 6: Do you think it would be better though if they structure.
Speaker 6: I mean, I know they can't really restructure. They can,
Speaker 6: but if they try to restructure it would it be
Speaker 6: better to sort of make some of those metrics tied
Speaker 6: to the performance of the company itself, not necessarily a stock,
Speaker 6: but I'm talking about.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it was both, So the award was tied to both,
Speaker 4: and it was various formulas. Look, anytime you tie it
Speaker 4: highly to stock, it's problematic because you run the risk
Speaker 4: of someone being overly promotional to get paid and then
Speaker 4: worrying about it later. And I've often said that lavish
Speaker 4: stock option programs are undervalued in the marketplace in terms
Speaker 4: of their expense, because if you don't, if you have
Speaker 4: a board that's very acquiescent and that's Tesla, and you
Speaker 4: don't get fired for aggressive risky behavior. If you engage
Speaker 4: in risky behavior to get lots of stock option payouts
Speaker 4: and it doesn't work, it actually becomes in your self
Speaker 4: interest to have the stock price go down so you
Speaker 4: can reload at lower prices. So in effect, when you've
Speaker 4: issued call options to an executive in that case, you've
Speaker 4: also issued them put options. And a lot of people
Speaker 4: don't realize that, and so I think that it makes
Speaker 4: share based compensation problematic for that reason and also for
Speaker 4: the reason that everybody simply adds it back for adjusted earnings,
Speaker 4: which is another accounting game being played.
Speaker 7: Yeah, rumber gap, those are the good old days, Jim,
Speaker 7: You're going to have to leave it.
Speaker 5: There.
Speaker 6: A great conversation here with Jim Chanos, the President, managing
Speaker 6: partner and founder of the Family Office and Advisory Channels
Speaker 6: and company