Patrick O'Shaughnessy

So $7 billion, but a $12 million average deal size is quite something.

There's not a lot of examples of firms that have done that.

So with that in mind, maybe describe what is the perfect canonical short capital deal?

What does the business look like?

What does the multiple look like?

What does the prospect for growth look like?

If you had to atomize it, how would you describe it?

One of the things I'm personally really focused on is thinking about the different kinds of opportunity costs for capital today.

As rates have gone up, as the S&P has a certain sort of expected return, call it 10% over the long term, that really to deploy capital away from risk-free rate or very cheap index funds, you need to demand like a really high rate of return.

And otherwise, it's just not worth it.

You might as well just stash it somewhere liquid and go home.

What have been the rates of return in this style of investing historically, now that you have so many deals done, lots of deals exited, 10 years of experience?

Just level set us a little bit on the return profile of a strategy like this, the return on equity.

One of the things I used to love studying in my quantitative research days was just return on invested capital of public companies.

And the norm would be that ROIC mean reverts.

If it's really high, it gets competed back down.

But there were always some platforms, a lot of them are the biggest companies in the world today, that would have these bizarrely persistent high returns on capital.

And when you investigated them, you found classic business moats.

It seems like the same question applies here.

Like, what is the system moat, as you would describe it?