Ed Ludlow

I guess I'm not giving you a very good answer, but I think that there are kind of push and pull in both directions.

So they are confronted by ongoing uncertainty in a geopolitical environment.

But Jed, the eye of the storm has been on software names and the uncertainty that AI injects there.

Are you seeing any sort of ability to buy the dip yet?

I think that this private equity and also strategic investor interest in PayPal is instructive and probably going to happen quite a bit over the next 12 months.

The payment space of which PayPal is a member has been hit really, really hard over the last one year and even further back, if you look.

And so, yeah, I think you'll see strategic investors, private equity backed investors start to sniff around areas like payments, areas like software.

And it wouldn't surprise me one bit if you see a pickup in M&A in those areas as investors seek value and try to kind of pick through the rubble in an area that's been fairly well bombed out in the last six months.

Jed, I appreciate you reacting to that breaking story.

Basically, sentiment out there is quite negative right now.

Tariffs, software, geopolitical risk.

From the market participant side of the table, particularly focused on the tech sector, are things as dire as the news headlines would have us suggest at the moment?

It's such a unique environment because we've seen a handful, most software companies report fairly good

fourth quarter 2025 earnings.

Most of them issue reasonably good guidance for 2026, or at least the first quarter of 2026.

And yet investors don't care about that at all.

Their concerns lie further down the road a couple of years out as these AI tools continue to develop.

The last speaker talked about a doubling of capacity or capability every seven months.

If that continues for the next couple of years on end,

You will certainly see some of the more point solution software companies struggle with AI capability competition.