FRMO Corp Q3 2026 Earnings Call - Navigating Transition and Strategic Asset Compounding

Thérèse Byars, Corporate Secretary, FRMO Corp: Good afternoon, everyone. This is Thérèse Byars speaking, and I’m the corporate secretary of FRMO Corp. Thank you for joining us today. 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 fund. 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 security 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 Steven Bregman and Peter Doyle, Co-Chief Executive Officers.

We’re also joined by Jay Kesslen, General Counsel, and David Arndt, Chief Financial Officer. They will review key points related to the fiscal 2026 third-quarter earnings. Now I’ll turn the discussion over to Peter Doyle.

Peter Doyle, Co-Chief Executive Officer, FRMO Corp / Horizon Kinetics: Thank you, Thérèse. Good afternoon, everyone. Two weeks ago, I never dreamed that I would be kicking off this call, and it’s obviously with great sadness that that’s the case. I’m going to give a little bit of background and tell you how I was introduced to Murray Stahl. I had the good fortune in my senior year of college of having a professor who was in the same graduate program as Warren Buffett at Columbia, and they learned under Benjamin Graham. Benjamin Graham is considered to be the father of security analysis. He’s a legend in the industry, and virtually anyone that’s in finance has read his books.

Essentially, the professor would say, "Trying to buy a dollar’s worth of value for something less than a dollar." I had read "The Intelligent Investor," which was penned by Benjamin Graham, prior to joining Bankers Trust Company, where Murray was working. I had no real business with Murray when I first started. It just so happened. This is 1985, so 41 years ago. I happened to sit outside of his office. He used to work late, and I was a young person trying to get ahead in the world, and I worked late. Probably within the first week, maybe the second week at most, I wandered into his office just to introduce myself. I very quickly realized that he was the smartest person I was ever speaking to, had ever spoken to. 41 years later, that was still true.

I didn’t realize at the time, although I figured it out fairly soon, that I had bumped into the equivalent of Benjamin Graham. Frankly, I think he rivals Benjamin Graham in professional, and as a person, I think he far exceeded Benjamin Graham. I know a lot of you feel like you know Murray from the calls. I know some of you met him in real life. He was an intellectual giant. He was generous beyond belief. He was empathetic. All of the good things that you think about him, you can multiply it by 1,000, 10,000, and it’s still true. It’s heartbreaking for us, and I can tell you that we’re grieving here at Horizon Kinetics, FRMO, and we’re managing.

That said, Murray Stahl laid the foundations for us as investors, and he laid the foundations for the companies that we’re involved with, and they’re in great shape. Today we’re going to touch on all the things that Murray Stahl would have touched on today. The four works in progress, the cryptocurrency business, the exchange space, Horizon Kinetics itself, and then the various inflation hedges. We’ll touch on them to varying degrees. Feel free if you want to share personal things and if we open it up to questions or you want to speak to us in person. I know you feel like you’ve lost a loved one, and that’s really what happened. Murray Stahl was the colleague, the work spouse, if you will, of both Steven Bregman and myself for 41 years, and it’s not an easy time for us.

With that, I will turn it over to Steven and see if he wants to add anything or to jump in with the presentation.

Steven Bregman, Co-Chief Executive Officer, FRMO Corp / Horizon Kinetics: Sure. Well, I guess what I’ll say is part of the presentation. You might appreciate that it’s only been a couple of days. Well, it’s been more than a week now. I need to stop measuring time in-

Peter Doyle, Co-Chief Executive Officer, FRMO Corp / Horizon Kinetics: Steve, it’s 2 weeks at 4:33 today.

Steven Bregman, Co-Chief Executive Officer, FRMO Corp / Horizon Kinetics: Okay. People would ask us questions, what are we doing and what are we thinking? Depending who the counterparty or client was, are we okay? Is Horizon okay? Employees might ask such things. I tell them, "Look, we’re just in hours now. We can’t even measure in days. We can measure in hours." There have been movies made called "24 Hours" or "48 Hours" or "72 Hours." As you might appreciate, in the first days, among the many things we were doing was preparing for a memorial and making sure certain clients could come if they were flying into town and couldn’t. We couldn’t turn them away and we limit the number of employees and where can we gather afterwards. Then all the steps you have to take to reshuffle or rationalize the different reporting structures and responsibilities. We’ve been through all of this.

First thing I’ll say about it is that at Horizon, which also ends up perforce impacting FRMO Corp, everyone who raised their hand or to help without even raising their hand is doing it. All of the original partners are gathered together and we’re here. People who’ve worked with Murray Stahl since 1984 or 1985, in one case earlier. We’re rearranging our brain trust in a way. No one of us can be Murray Stahl, and probably not three or four of us can be Murray Stahl. We’re all of a like mind, at least as far as the goals and investment philosophy and business values and approaches. In terms of what I might say to Peter and I both to employees, first of all. Because our employees, by the way, they speak to clients, and clients have the same questions.

If the employees don’t feel comfortable answering the questions to the client, then the clients can’t feel comfortable. One of the first things is that we tell the employees, "Don’t worry, we’re not closing our doors. We’re not firing anybody. We’re not selling ourselves." One of the things we’ve done over time, and as Murray’s the strategic architect of it, is we’ve created both at Horizon Kinetics and at FRMO Corp, just a, people use the term fortress balance sheet. That’s true. An absolutely fortress balance sheet. We’re not in a hurry to do anything. What we’re going to do is do things right, the right way. That was by design. I want to talk a bit more about that actually, so you understand it. If you understand something, it’s not something you have to try to remember because you know it.

It’s not memorized. Balance sheet basis, I’ll talk about why we did what we did because it’s very unusual. We’re solid, and it means we have time to do things as we judge them to be the right way, and put one foot in front of the other and not step without looking or make drastic changes under pressure. The other thing is we’re different in many ways, is that our portfolios, whether it’s the FRMO Corp portfolio, whether it’s the Horizon Kinetics corporate portfolio, or whether it’s our client portfolios, they are in a much better position, same as the balance sheet, and very different qualitatively than they were, let’s say, 10 years ago. Because 10 years ago, we had good years and bad years as investment advisors. Not every security is the best security. We might have some really excellent investment securities.

They weren’t strategic. Years ago, we weren’t in a position, decades ago, to own strategic assets. What does strategic asset mean? Now let me give you one example just to differentiate. A very large position, just in investment portfolios you might be making at Horizon, is Hawaiian Electric. It’s a classic recovering utility. In this case, it didn’t happen to be a failed utility, but sometimes they fail first and come out of bankruptcy, and then they’re recovering utilities and restructured. We’ve invested in utility stocks when they are in this position for decades. In fact, Murray Stahl and I worked independently at Bankers Trust Company creating a utility portfolio as an element of a bond substitute strategy since bonds are wasting assets after inflation.

We’ve been thinking about these things and working with him for a long time. Now, the nice thing about a recovering utility is that you have a very high degree of confidence in what it will be earning, let’s say, 4 years down the road or 5 years down the road, and what the payout ratio will be, and therefore what the dividend will be. It’s extremely unusual, but it’s a regulated utility. It’s actually a very easy calculation, not challenging. You have a certain rate base, the amount that the regulators deem they’re allowed to charge, to earn a return on. Lately, it’s maybe in the 10% or 11% range for a utility company. Therefore, you can multiply the allowed rate of return by the rate base and know what they’ll earn once they recover.

You can readily see that for Hawaiian Electric, you might make 2 or 3 or more times your money over a certain period of time. It’ll be a great investment. But once it’s fairly valued. There’s no more reason to own it. It’s just an electric utility. It’s a fine investment, but it’s not a strategic investment. I think we’re investing because TPL actually is a strategic investment. There’s a reason for it to be able to compound its value for generations as it has been. Right? It’s actually in a sense, more than a sense, it actually has more future value potential perhaps now than it did years ago. 6, 7 years ago, it was primarily in terms of its revenue generation, the oil and gas. Now it’s a portfolio of different sorts of revenue.

In our accounts now, we have strategic holdings. Not just one, but many. It could be Miami International Holdings, could be other securities, whether it’s LandBridge or Permanent Benjamin Trust and private ones and public ones. Peter kind of joked a while, not so long ago. It’s not really a joke. He said our investment portfolios would probably be better off in the next 5 years if we just shut the door on them and walked away and didn’t touch them. They probably would be. We have clients and realities of people who just take money out and do some liquidations, or they just are uncomfortable with TPL having gotten to a certain high level, and they want to cut back that kind of thing. We have the benefit of time and stability and strategic flexibility to look at the balance sheet.

By the way, if you want the origin story of how it is that an investment advisor like Horizon Kinetics can have a $100 million-plus balance sheet or equity market cap, and it actually started with an idea before Horizon originally was even formed, before we even had a name. Murray liked to regale people with a story about how once we determined that leaving Bankers Trust and setting up under the aegis or umbrella of some existing investment advisory firm was just too risky, we thought we actually had to go out and create our own company. Our first strategic planning meeting was at a, this is his Burger King story. He and I sat at the Burger King, down the block or around the corner from our employer, Bankers Trust Company at 1 BT Plaza, across from where the World Trade Center stood.

We mapped out what kind of structure do we want for the future of our business. We understood it was going to be an investment advisory business. We would try to be honest about it, abscond, albeit legally, within proper regulatory and legal framework with clients of the private bank who somehow associated more strongly with us than with the institution. At a certain point, Peter and Murray and I, and everybody would collect a certain thimble full of investment advisory accounts. Then what? What are we actually doing? Strategically, well, we’re going to be in an inherently volatile business, right? We might do well for some period of time, and then the stock market goes down, because it will.

Our revenues will go down because prices of securities go down, and people withdraw money, they need money, or they take an account away. We want to do everything we can, recognizing what we’re doing, to immunize ourselves from that volatility. What can we do to do that? We had a few ideas. They would involve really long-term plans, especially considering that we didn’t even have a business yet, and we didn’t even have the capital between us to raise the money to start a business and put a deposit down on a commercial lease. One thing we decided to do was if and when we got enough revenue that we could pay ourselves some modest salaries, we would take all the excess earnings and keep it on the balance sheet.

Because we wanted to build up a balance sheet eventually that was big enough that the interest and dividends thereupon would be able to pay not all of our expenses, but let’s say at least our rent or some portion of our other operating expenses or salaries. That if there’s a big downturn in the market, we could tighten our belts and not have to close our doors or sell ourselves or fire a bunch of people. Or more, I shouldn’t say more importantly, but way up here on the priority list was the idea that we don’t want to, under pressure, have to sell stocks we want to hold on to or buy stocks we don’t want to buy.

If you’ve ever been in this business as a professional, you can imagine the excruciating pressure that was applied to us on occasion to buy technology stocks during the dot-com bubble because we were underperforming by over two and a half years, felt like three, but just the most enormous amount. It was like Mount Everest of underperformance. We at the bottom. Everyone else at the top. Because we just refused to buy Cisco and all the rest of the crowd. Likewise, during the great financial crisis, when everything was falling, people thought they were looking into the abyss. We had advisors for whom we managed accounts for them, threaten us, say, "I need you to sell this stock and that stock because I don’t want to see my clients look at their month-end statements and see that." I said, "But it’s foolish.

We should actually be buying the security." They say, "You know what? I can just take my accounts out and just sell it myself, and nobody will ever look back." That’s the kind of pressures I’m talking about. We wanted to avoid that. We knew it would come. We didn’t realize, well, how ambitious it was, and it seemed like a pipe dream. Because in order to have some millions of dollars of interest and dividend income, you have to have some tens or scores of millions of dollars of saved up after-tax capital. But Murray was tenacious that way. If the analysis worked out and the analysis was sound, then there’s no reason not to do it, and you just keep at it.

There was a period of time, I don’t know, Peter might remember better than I, but we got salaries at a certain point, maybe it was $60,000, just enough to live on. We kept them flat for years, maybe as a step-up. Until we figured out a more efficient way, it became a point when I’d get a big check at the end of the year. I might never have seen a check that big in my life. I’m like, "Man, maybe it was $100,000," or whatever it was, $200,000, something like that. I’d look at it. It was pleasant, and I would look at it and I would sigh, and I would maybe spend 10 seconds admiring it. I would put it down and I’d write something on two pieces of paper.

One was a deposit slip to put it in the bank, and the other was a new check, which I’d write to Horizon to put back into Horizon, whatever the after-tax number was. We gave ourselves a ratio. Out of $100,000, $70,000 of civil fine would go back to Horizon. It was hard, but that’s how we built up the cash and securities at Horizon Kinetics. Then basically, it’s the same thing we did in FRMO Corp. We did that. We got there. Another question our employees had and clients had was, "Well, now that Murray’s gone, what are you going to do for ideas?" I’m not going to bore you with the long details of different ways of generating ideas on your own, if you don’t have strategic engagements, which we did. There are ways to find stocks.

We have a research team, and they’re engaged in doing it too. There’s something different now about us, which is our strategic engagements with some of the exchanges, with companies in the energy field, with these. If you’re on the board of directors or you’re working with these companies, you’re actually in the flow of engagement with other people who know all sorts of things you don’t know. They might appreciate knowing some of the things you do or your perspectives because they’re different than theirs. It can be very collegial and very productive. You’re being presented with all sorts of interesting ideas. Some of them are private, some of them are public. You’re actually in the flow.

We have analysts who are regularly out there in the oil patch visiting not just TPLs out there, visiting other business people and companies that are doing deals and interesting things, and the same with the exchanges. At our investment committee meeting at Horizon, just this Monday, one of our analysts, James Davolos, told us about just two or three coming public businesses or just in public businesses or private that we want to be aware of, that we might be working with people on, because he’s out there interacting with them. One of our other analysts who actually lives in Texas and has been more oriented generally speaking to the exchange groups and is quite familiar with the people at MIAX. I once visited him, went with him, to visit Greg Wojciechowski, the head of the Bermuda Stock Exchange.

We took a trip there because some people from representatives of an Indian securities exchange wanted to talk to MIAX. We introduced them to that idea about some product. When you’re in that, once you’re strategically associated with people like that, and by the way, the story of how we got there is another interesting, but I bored you with all of that. We got there through a process. That is afoot. In fact, we’re now maybe step 8.5 of 10, through having nothing to do with TPL. The fact is that we’re down there in Texas. And there’s someone who specializes in buying a certain kind of land, having nothing to do with mineral rights, nothing to do with oil.

There is a way of secured lending via land for development at a certain level of a certain type, which is a very persistent market advantage that if this works out, when we do our due diligence, we might be able to offer a private fund clients a proper kind of bond substitute investment with, let’s say, a 10% yield. Maybe that’s something FRMO can be involved in. I’m not so sure it’s appropriate. Ideas, we’re not short of. In fact, one of the things we’re short of is some active research processing capacity, and we’re actively discussing investing further in our research staff. I just wanted to give you that to understand that we’re fine. There’s a lot of blocking and tackling and real innovation to do to make sure that we’re on top of things.

I thought it was worth giving you that sense of things so that you needn’t be worried about it. Now, today, for instance, I can confess to you up front, and I’ve learned in my life, particularly more in the last 20 years than the 20 years prior, I’ve learned to not be so embarrassed or ashamed about some of my deficits or failings. We have been as busy. I use this expression offhandedly with one of our, only young to me, not young to people who aren’t as old as I am. She was a couple of generations behind me, and I offhandedly mentioned to her that we’re as busy as one-armed paper hangers. I got the blankest stare, and I realized, okay, I need to use a more contemporary metaphor than analogy. We’ve been quite busy and in good ways, good busy.

For instance, I can tell you that I’m very glad we have, for instance, David Arndt, who’s a properly trained and highly qualified and competent CFO, whereas I was not. My role as CFO, you know how that happened? It happened because when FRMO was created, that was one of my proudest professional achievements. We created a publicly traded company with $450. I can tell you the story another time. We did it because we located, actually, thanks to one of our board members and an extremely able investor. We were introduced to one small public company. I had the idea that since we worried about spin-offs, the Spin-Off Report, actually, spin-offs, we thought, what if we can get some small publicly traded company controlled by someone whom we could induce with the wisdom of the idea of just as a paper transaction, creating subsidiaries, spinning it off.

We had an idea for building a business from that. As a facilitation fee, they could own some of that business. Why not give it a try? Some people would be up for that. Anyway, he introduced us to a fellow named Buster Tanner, who, among other things, was an extremely talented securities attorney. He did it all for us. Anyway, we were capitalized with $10,000, and that was a gift from him. He just decided to put it on the balance sheet. It started quite a long time ago. Anyway, the idea of speaking about the process of investing as opposed to actual investments that come first. Anyway, the way I got to be a CFO was the $10,000, the purpose of that was we didn’t have any expenses. Murray and I never took cash salaries.

One day, the regulators said that you can’t work for free. It’s not recognized. You can claim this debit equity and credit expense, but it’s not a cash expense. We just have to recognize it on the income statement. All we had at first was the cash on the balance sheet, and then we had a revenue stream, and then a second one, and the third one that we had negotiated. The $10,000 was just what we thought the annual auditing expenses would be. We could cover our cost of being a publicly traded company until we had revenues. We needed some internal accounting. Someone showed me what QuickBooks was, and they showed me how to make entries. I had taken a couple of semesters of accounting in college.

It was easy enough at first, but then we got a little more complicated. Then we started having accruals that had to be made, and then reversals. I kept up for a little while. After a while, I really was no longer competent to do that. Now we have David Arndt, who’s actually the real deal. In terms of being willing to be publicly embarrassed, I have not had the time to prep properly for this meeting to answer any kind of detailed balance sheet questions and whatnot, but now we have him. Let’s say the bad news, maybe good news. Anyway, I’d like to make one observation at least that’s sort of like I can talk about the balance sheet and what we’re doing in a meaningful way.

You might recall from, maybe not every time, but it seems to me that most times we had these shareholder meetings, the conference calls, Murray would talk about some items in the balance sheet that he thought were important. One of them was that line item on the liabilities and stockholders’ equity portion of the balance sheet that says, "Securities sold, not yet purchased." Those, as those who follow us might know, are our persistent selling short of so-called path-dependent ETFs, which by their nature, because of a flaw in their structure, will eventually continuously head towards zero as long as there’s volatility in the marketplace and there’s contango in the futures curve, and particularly when there’s leverage. $717,000 doesn’t seem like a lot on our balance sheet.

You’ll see that at May 31st, 2025, it was $1.3 million, and now it’s, as of February, it’s $717,000. It’s not that we reduced it. In fact, we continue to sell short every week. In point of fact, roughly speaking, the cumulative short sale proceeds over time from this program is a little over $9 million. It’s over $9 million, less than $10 million. Those are proceeds. Each time we sell something short, those proceeds end up on the balance sheet. In the short term, we might say, "I can’t use them because maybe the security goes against me for a little while." Eventually, enough years pass, it’s yours. It’s your cash. We just never close the transactions that result in it.

This is not a comprehensive difference, but if you take the difference between the market value and the short sale proceeds over time and the current market value, that’s almost $9 million of profit. On a balance sheet of our size, you might say it’s not much, but it’s like 2.5-odd% of the total market value of a rather substantial balance sheet. It’s not nothing. It’s pretty big, and it didn’t require any capital. It required some collateral, but we’re hugely over-collateralized. In a sense, it’s free money, or it just requires the trading operations to do it, and we’ve got that. Anyway, I’ll stop there. I just wanted to show that I’m a little tiny bit on the ball.

I will shut up now, and maybe David Arndt will do more of that, some highlights of the financials that he decided would be worth just studying and highlighting. David, would you?

David Arndt, Chief Financial Officer, FRMO Corp: Yes. Thank you, Steven, and thank you for the kind words as well. Hello, everyone. My name is David Arndt-

Steven Bregman, Co-Chief Executive Officer, FRMO Corp / Horizon Kinetics: Good morning.

David Arndt, Chief Financial Officer, FRMO Corp: Chief Financial Officer of FRMO. I’ll briefly summarize a few key highlights of the company’s financial results for the quarter, which included net income attributable to FRMO of $83 million, bringing year-to-date net income up to just shy of $57 million. These results were primarily driven by unrealized gains and losses in the following investments. TPL, which is our largest holding, both directly and in our private funds, increased 82% during Q3, and is up 40% year-to-date. Our investment in Horizon Kinetics Holding Corporation, whose share price increased by over 20% during Q3, and MIAX, which although it decreased slightly during the third quarter, still remains a strong driver of year-to-date results, and it has increased by about 80% from the prior year-end. Just as a reminder, MIAX also went public in August 2025 and has obviously been a strong strategic investment for the company.

These unrealized gains were offset by losses in cryptocurrencies, where the company also has exposure, both in direct and indirect ownership. This was led by Bitcoin, which decreased 26% during the third quarter and is down 36% year to date. Net income was also reduced by a significant income tax expense, primarily related to those increases in deferred taxes from the unrealized gains on the various investments. Consulting and advisory fees decreased in the third quarter versus the prior year. Those fees are related to our revenue participation agreement with Horizon Kinetics, who did not benefit from significant incentive fees in our third quarter compared to their earnings in our third quarter of the prior year. Regarding the balance sheet, the company’s balance sheet is obviously a source of key strength, with over $45 million of cash and a well-positioned portfolio of investments.

As of February, we are debt-free due to the sale of our land and building to Synteq Digital, which had a small mortgage associated with that property. That property was previously leased to a third party, to a related party, that was involved in that transaction as well. Investments in equity securities-

Steven Bregman, Co-Chief Executive Officer, FRMO Corp / Horizon Kinetics: I’ll just make a note, David.

David Arndt, Chief Financial Officer, FRMO Corp: Oh, yeah. Go ahead.

Steven Bregman, Co-Chief Executive Officer, FRMO Corp / Horizon Kinetics: Yeah, David, just one note. It’s a small thing, but we used to have to say that we couldn’t technically say that FRMO was debt-free. Accurately, we had no net debt because we had this modest mortgage on this hosting facility in North Carolina versus all this cash we have. Now we actually have no debt. We actually are debt-free without any qualifications. It was minor for us, but it puts us in an even smaller universe of companies.

David Arndt, Chief Financial Officer, FRMO Corp: Correct. Yes.

Steven Bregman, Co-Chief Executive Officer, FRMO Corp / Horizon Kinetics: Understood.

David Arndt, Chief Financial Officer, FRMO Corp: Investments in equity securities, limited partnerships, and our other equity investments all experienced significant increases during the third quarter due to those unrealized gains that we’ve discussed. Those also resulted in an increase to our deferred tax liability, which can fluctuate based on those investment balances. Just as a reminder, our financial statements consolidate the results of Horizon Kinetics Hard Assets, where FRMO owns just shy of 22%. Those standalone results of Hard Assets can also be seen in a relatively new footnote 12 in the financial statements as well. That concludes the key highlights that I had for this quarter. I will turn it back over to Thérèse, Steven, or Peter to continue.

Peter Doyle, Co-Chief Executive Officer, FRMO Corp / Horizon Kinetics: Peter, would you like to make any comments? Sure. A couple of quick comments. I just want to share further what Murray has kind of instilled in us and has this coded into the DNA of the investors here at Horizon Kinetics/FRMO. One of the great things and one of the advantages, and Steven touched on this, is time horizon. When you lengthen your time horizon, you give yourself a tremendous advantage. You’re not operating in this dysfunctional world where they construct it, where the world ends on 12/31 of any given year. Since that does not coincide with reality, you get very dysfunctional behavior. We do the opposite of that. We try to take advantage of that dysfunction.

He also gave us the ability to scout out scarce resources and to find companies that have those resources, but they’re frequently packaged in the right securities. Royalties, as an example, really have no operational risk, and they have a lot of optionality. The last one I was going to touch on is optionality. Many of the securities that we have have the ability to grow revenues or reduce costs through no effort of their own. In the case of TPL, when we first bought that, fracking was not a thing. Fracking was developed by the oil and gas industry, but TPL benefited greatly from that. You can see from the growth of the water business of TPL, the potential for data centers going on that land, this tremendous optionality built into a lot of the things that we do.

What Murray’s aim was for FRMO, and I’m going to touch on the first question, he understood that in order to drive real value and to get a higher multiple for this, other than trading at its cash value and its marketable securities, you needed an operating business, and that was the only way to achieve that. We were slowly and continued to, and there’s no reason for Steven and I to stop, continue to increase our stake in Winland. I think we’re close to now 47%, and I know Murray’s intention was definitely to be at least 50%, over 50% by December of this year, and that’s still our intention. Our goal is to have an operating business, grow the earnings, grow the revenues through an operating business.

Steven and I, earlier today, sat down with the crypto mining team, if you will, and they presented us with an opportunity I think Murray would have certainly considered. Both Bitcoin and Litecoin mining right now is very challenging. It’s barely profitable. They had another coin where we could probably mine that coin, sell off a good chunk of it to buy Bitcoin, and still fund the operations of buying the machines to mine that coin. Things are being looked at, things are being paid attention to, and still very optimistic about what we’re likely to be able to turn that crypto business into. With that, Therese, unless Steven wants to add something, I’m-

Steven Bregman, Co-Chief Executive Officer, FRMO Corp / Horizon Kinetics: Well-

Peter Doyle, Co-Chief Executive Officer, FRMO Corp / Horizon Kinetics: ready to jump to questions.

Steven Bregman, Co-Chief Executive Officer, FRMO Corp / Horizon Kinetics: I look at some of the questions. One of them is relevant to what we were talking about, Peter. One of the questions, a number of them are about Winland. As Murray might like to say when he was asked about an ancillary company, he’s, "Look, I don’t represent..." I might paraphrase here. "I don’t represent Winland. It’s not for me to speak for Winland." Part of the question was, is it not possible to move more quickly to acquire the remaining shares to get to over 50% in an orderly manner to move FRMO to its next phase of life as an operating company? If acquiring Winland is still... We need to plan. Moving more quickly to get there, my sense of it is that we are actually moving in an orderly fashion, and the goal is to get to 50%.

Don’t believe it’s going to take us very long. In fact, one aspect of an orderly fashion is to do it in a way that works best for FRMO Corp. One pays attention to what fiscal year you want to complete it in, so you can efficiently combine the financials when they have to get audited. If you go through all that process, yes, you absolutely want to do it in an orderly fashion. We’re heading there, and we pretty much know when we’re going to do it. I think we have the resources put in the broad sense, not just the cash, to do that, and we’ll be hearing more about that. Well, since I’m on that, I see there are other questions about Winland. There are questions about Winland’s revenue mix.

One question, someone noticed that Winland’s mining revenues have been a smaller and smaller mix of the total revenues, with electronics and crypto making up 66% and 34% of revenues in 2021 and gradually shrinking down and kind of getting into some details about what it means about Winland’s efficiency in some fashion. It’s not exactly like that, Phoebe. It’s not that we’re trying to organize a different mix. It’s not that we’re slowing down the job somehow. The profitable revenue possibilities in cryptocurrency mining have their cyclicality. I know Murray’s spoken at length about this over time. Our current approach of the Halving and the predictable and historically empirically observable results around that time is that the Bitcoin might fall because miners need to sell some of their accumulated Bitcoin to maybe get ready to buy more mining rigs and so forth and so on.

That’s part of the cycle of what goes on with crypto mining. It’s not a management decision other than our very careful and deliberate decision to not buy rigs in order to have market share, in order to generate near-term revenues that would be unprofitable in 24 months. We’re very careful about not making capital expenditures and having more mining revenue just to not show that mining revenue is smaller. There’s another question I saw about Winland Electronics. Someone’s apparently following this closely. They see that the revenues and margins have been improving in ROA for some years since 2022. He’s looking at customer concentration and thinks it looks like a good business. FRMO and Winland management have been actively managing this segment with growth, meaning the legacy and ongoing operating business of Winland with the sensors. Or are these growth numbers just due to external tailwinds?

This person has observed the development cost of enhancing Winland’s INSIGHT SaaS product, that’s a software as a service product, has greatly reduced with modern AI. Those are all excellent questions. I don’t know if it’d be appropriate, but our in-house counsel will tell us. A better person to answer that question would be Matt Houck, CEO of Winland. I don’t know if it’s appropriate for him to comment here at one of our earnings calls. I will tell you that they operate that business as best they can. They’re hardworking. They’re very detail-oriented. They have more spreadsheets in their board meeting reviews of every angle at which to look at how their business is progressing and what the weaknesses are and what the strengths are and whatnot. They work very hard at that. As well as they could manage that business, they are doing so.

There are even strategic opportunities for them, perhaps even in data centers, because data centers have a need to monitor constantly and remotely moisture content of the air, stuff like that, temperature. They’re doing what they’re doing. No one’s managing them. They’re managing themselves. It’s a question I’ll ask of Winland. Somehow I suspect I’ll be told it’s not appropriate for someone else’s CEO to come and speak at an earnings call. Of course, they probably have their own earnings calls. Our interest in Winland, as you know, has got broader goals. We like their business, and we think their business can probably be expanded. If we can help try to expand it strategically, there are opportunities for that. We will help them do that. Do you want to take a shot at any questions, Peter?

Peter Doyle, Co-Chief Executive Officer, FRMO Corp / Horizon Kinetics: No, I thought maybe we’ll let Thérèse read them so people can hear them, and we’ll answer them to the best of our ability. Just to remind you, Steven and I can tell you more or less when the Punic Wars were fought and who were the two sides. Murray could tell you why there was blunders by specific generals at a given time, and why Cato the Elder might have called for the burning of Carthage. His recall on so many subjects, it’s going to be impossible to replicate. We will do our best in answering all questions as they come.

Thérèse Byars, Corporate Secretary, FRMO Corp: One of the questions had to do with Murray’s holdings of FRMO Corp. David Arndt, if you would want to explain that. Could I turn it over to you for a moment?

David Arndt, Chief Financial Officer, FRMO Corp: Yes. Sure. Thank you, Thérèse. Yes, as Thérèse mentioned, one of the questions we’ve received from multiple shareholders was regarding what appeared to be a change in Murray’s ownership of FRMO between our 2025 annual financial statements and then our financials for the first quarter of 2026. It appeared that his ownership increased by 857,000 shares. What occurred was that we thoroughly reviewed both the direct and beneficial ownership requirements of the table in our filing and discovered that some of the affiliated entities controlled by Murray and Horizon Kinetics were shares that were inadvertently excluded. These other accounts should have been included in those prior periods as well. It was by a de minimis quantity of shares.

Peter Doyle, Co-Chief Executive Officer, FRMO Corp / Horizon Kinetics: David, are you there?

Thérèse Byars, Corporate Secretary, FRMO Corp: David, I think we lost you. We’re getting his connection back.

Steven Bregman, Co-Chief Executive Officer, FRMO Corp / Horizon Kinetics: He’s back. Yeah. Okay.

Peter Doyle, Co-Chief Executive Officer, FRMO Corp / Horizon Kinetics: With regard to TPL and MIAX, I know there’s concerns about that, and those are very strategic assets for us. I’m sitting here with Jay Kesslen, our counsel, and we are exploring all opportunities. I don’t think that I can say much beyond that. We are having discussions with both companies, and our hope is to be engaged at all times with those companies and potentially getting a board seat on either one or both of those companies.

Steven Bregman, Co-Chief Executive Officer, FRMO Corp / Horizon Kinetics: Yep. That is our intention. I think I can share this because it’s a fact. It’s not a projection. It’s not a judgment. The CEO, Tom Gallagher of MIAX, came to Murray Stahl’s memorial along, I think, with his in-house counsel, I think his chief operating officer. They were examples of people who wanted to be there and pay their respects. That’s one.

Thérèse Byars, Corporate Secretary, FRMO Corp: Yeah. You might be back, Peter.

Peter Doyle, Co-Chief Executive Officer, FRMO Corp / Horizon Kinetics: There’s also a question regarding MIH, which, Miami International Holdings and MIAX, and there’s a difference between the two on the balance sheet. One just really had to do with being temporarily restricted because it was part of the IPO, and the other one was freely traded, and they’re both now, I believe, freely traded. There is no distinction any longer.

Thérèse Byars, Corporate Secretary, FRMO Corp: Thank you, Peter. David, do you have any more to say about Murray’s holdings of FRMO?

David Arndt, Chief Financial Officer, FRMO Corp: No, I apologize. I lost power at my house for a moment.

Thérèse Byars, Corporate Secretary, FRMO Corp: We’re here.

David Arndt, Chief Financial Officer, FRMO Corp: Again, apologies for that. No, depending on where I got cut off, essentially it was just a reporting error. After our investigation, we determined that those shares were inadvertently excluded. They should’ve been there from the beginning as part of the annual 2005 financial statement filings in prior periods. The summarization is that Murray did not acquire 850,000+ shares between the end of 2025 and the first quarter of 2026. We’re unaware of him selling any shares in any quantity in that period of time.

Thérèse Byars, Corporate Secretary, FRMO Corp: Okay. Thank you. There is a question. I’d be interested in your feedback, Steve and Peter, as it goes like this. In 2019, FRMO shareholder letter, management describes the process where new asset classes are used as learning experiences. It is noted that every employee in all of Horizon Kinetics has the opportunity to develop new knowledge and skills in small experiments free from pressure of substantial loss of capital when expanding gradually into new asset classes. This process is noted as conferring the ability for employees to return to their former responsibilities or transfer to other related more successful projects should the current experiment fail. Could management please share, excuse me, some examples of how this has actually functioned within the Horizon Kinetics complex for still new as well, call it, now matured asset classes and other areas of interest for HK?

Peter Doyle, Co-Chief Executive Officer, FRMO Corp / Horizon Kinetics: Sure. I’ll give you a few examples.

Steven Bregman, Co-Chief Executive Officer, FRMO Corp / Horizon Kinetics: I’ll take that, Tom. Oh, go ahead, Peter.

Peter Doyle, Co-Chief Executive Officer, FRMO Corp / Horizon Kinetics: Well, I’m going to give one that touches on it partially, but I think it’s critical in reflecting on who we are. James Davolos recently did a podcast, and he went through how he started at the firm, working as an assistant on the trading desk, and then how we encouraged him to go to school while he was still working. As he grew his talents, he came back and moved into the asset management side, and he started the inflation beneficiary ETF. That’s one very positive example of that. The second one I would say is that the cryptocurrency business.

We sat down with two gentlemen today that still have responsibilities at HK, among other responsibilities, but they also got into the mining aspect of the business and they’re reconciling all of the cryptocurrency that we might be mining, making sure it’s paid out correctly, securing the cryptocurrency that we have on the balance sheet, et cetera. They’ve learned a whole different skill set. That has been very successful for us.

Steven Bregman, Co-Chief Executive Officer, FRMO Corp / Horizon Kinetics: Actually, they are now at a level of expertise that an extremely small population in the world. They know cryptocurrency mining up, down, forward, back, and sideways in an operating sense. From securing and sourcing equipment to negotiating it, to testing it, to negotiating leases with hosting facilities, to visiting them around the country, to managing rigs, to monitoring them, to setting up teams to do that. They had none of that a handful of years ago. Any more, Peter? Because I’ve got some.

Peter Doyle, Co-Chief Executive Officer, FRMO Corp / Horizon Kinetics: Howard, after you.

Steven Bregman, Co-Chief Executive Officer, FRMO Corp / Horizon Kinetics: Okay. Windland. Matt Houck reminded me in recent weeks. It completely slipped my mind. Matt Houck said I’m the reason why Windland in its current form exists. I said, "You’re joking. What are you talking about?" He came on originally, he wanted to work for us. We thought he could add some value. I think he’d been working. Was he working at Goldman?

Thérèse Byars, Corporate Secretary, FRMO Corp: Yes.

Steven Bregman, Co-Chief Executive Officer, FRMO Corp / Horizon Kinetics: He’s really got a-

Thérèse Byars, Corporate Secretary, FRMO Corp: Yes, Goldman.

Steven Bregman, Co-Chief Executive Officer, FRMO Corp / Horizon Kinetics: Yeah. He’s got a math mind. He reads advanced mathematics books for fun, when he’s on the treadmill, believe it or not. He says, "What should I do?" I said, "Well, we’ll find a place for you. You’ll find a place. Just hang around." "What should I do in the meantime?" I said, "Read our research, get to know what we’re doing." He’d pop his head in my office every once in a while, like late in the evening and say, "I feel like I’m not pulling my weight. If there’s anything I could do, let me know." I’d say, "Don’t worry about it. You know why? I’m not worried about you. You know why?" He said, "No, why?" He’s a very earnest person. I said, "Because you’re worried about it. So I’m not worried about you.

I’m worried about the people who don’t worry about whether they’re doing a good job or not, or pulling their weight." It finally came to me when he repeated the question, plaintively. He said, "Well, is there anything you need?" I said, "Well, you know what we could use? We could always use another publicly traded vehicle." You know, kind of like FRMO Corp. I explained to him how we built that up. That can always come in handy. He said, "Oh, okay." I had no idea. He told me that set him on a path, and he started scouring the stock market for some small company. Some deep value kind of company. He found Winland.

It had all this extra cash on the balance sheet that was trading below the level of cash, and they were bleeding cash because they were spending on R&D that they shouldn’t have been spending on. He managed to get hold of it. Here we are. Now, you might say that’s old. You’re looking for new things. Peter and I have been, and Tom Ewing, we’ve been touching base and our operations managers, touching base bit by bit with employees and making sure we know what’s going on. This weekend I was just touching base with Eric Seitz, I mentioned earlier, about a trip to Bermuda with the new team up in the Boston Stock Exchange. I said, "Well, how are you doing?" He said, "Fine." We talked a little bit and said, "What’s up?" He said, "Well, I’m down here in Texas.

I’ve been living here five years, and I’ve been doing some interesting things and developing relationships and working with Murray on some of these." I said, "Like what?" Three hours went by. I said, "Can you write up a kind of a precis of what you’re working on?" He said, "Sure." He sent me a list of four or five very different business opportunities he’s been working on. He’s actually very, very good. He’s got a good personality as a kind of a business diplomat. He’s got a soft touch, and he seems to be good at developing relationships. Two or three of these are actually nearing a point where we might be able to do some real transactions with them, become investment products or something else.

One in particular might become, inside of an investment management business, an investment product for us. Others are a little more strategic in nature. James Davolos, our investment committee meeting is on Monday. He reviewed about three of his. We talked about a particular group he came across that might be interesting in terms of uranium. I won’t say more than that. It turns out that another one of our analysts actually follows that closely, just on a personal basis. We’ve now engaged him in being the person who can represent us in some meetings with people in that sector because he kind of has a good sense of what’s going on. We do that kind of stuff. It’s a meritocracy in that if someone wants to, and we think they’re at the right level for a certain engagement, we’ll let them do that.

Murray used to think of it as the communist Chinese idea, Mao. Let a thousand flowers bloom. You just don’t know which ones will take root and keep growing. That is part and parcel of the way we operate research and let’s call it career development.

Thérèse Byars, Corporate Secretary, FRMO Corp: Thank you. Are there any of the other questions that you would like to address? Because we could wrap this up, and you could invite shareholders to submit more questions or

Steven Bregman, Co-Chief Executive Officer, FRMO Corp / Horizon Kinetics: Well, there’s one that pops out. Peter and I might both take a crack at it. I’ll say it’s not a new question. It’s a classic question. It’s touchy to answer. I don’t know. Really, it’s not that it’s touchy. It’s more that there’s a different conception in mind or understanding. That has to do with education and discussion. There are a couple of questions. I’m not looking at them. I’m just going to casually go by memory. That have to do with, are there things we can do or are planning to do or will do, with respect to the poor performance of FRMO Corp.? By that they mean with the stock. Where the disconnect or the difference in perspective comes is that it’s a kind of question that sometimes I have to address. I know Peter certainly has to also.

When we deal with individual, let’s say investment advisory clients, and every time a significant holding goes down a lot, let’s take TPL. We get a lot of questions saying, "What’s wrong with TPL?" And, "Should I be concerned?" In many cases, it doesn’t even matter how long the client’s been with us and how many cycles they’ve gone through. I’ve got a client who’s been with us for, I think 20+ years. The last time TPL went down a lot, not so many months ago, he called me up, he said, "Should I be concerned?" He loves us. He actually says, "I love you guys." I said, "Do we have to have this." I didn’t mean it in. There wasn’t an edge in my voice. I didn’t mean it, and he understood. He understands me.

I said, "Do we have to go through this again, Barry?" He said, "Well, it would make me feel better." I took him through the reasoning. Sometimes what I’ll do is this. I’ve had occasion to be in a room with a client once, I think, with someone who came to evaluate Horizon Kinetics for some advisory business and wanted to go through our process, and I think he asked about TPL, and it being down so much, "Are you thinking of doing anything about it?" I was prepared for him. I had 3 charts I think, maybe it was 3, maybe 4. In the first chart, it showed TPL, it said TPL in bold letters, large letters up on top, and a chart.

It showed a chart of TPL stock, just cratering and coming down, and it was flat for a while, not for a long time, but it was just a snapshot. I said, "Oh, so here we are. You see, it’s down 40%." I said, "Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t put the dates in." But people don’t look at that, right? I said, "This is from 12 years ago. It was my mistake. I’m sorry. Here’s the chart." I gave him another chart, and it shows TPL going down even more. Maybe it was 55%. I go, "Oh, I did it again. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. That was a chart from eight years ago. Here’s where we are today." I gave him the chart of the entire period. Those prior declines, it’s like they barely show in the long-term chart.

I said, "Look, it’s not reflexive for us. We don’t keep holding it just because we believe in it. We evaluate it. We evaluate it very carefully, and we think it’s worth a lot more. So why should I sell it now?" We get to other discussions which are complicated for them. Why can’t you sell it and buy it back, and that whole discussion, which is not necessarily here. There are periods of time when TPL or other investments have simply flat for a long time. Our response is, I’m not concerned about the share price if financially, the company, its intrinsic value, its book value, its earnings capability, whatever particular measure you need, is actually doing what it’s supposed to do. If that’s going up 10%-15% a year, then I’ve got a compounding machine, and the price will catch up.

People can be discomforted by that, say, "Yeah, that’s fine for you, but I can die while I wait for this to happen." The thing is, we can’t do anything about that. That’s the market. The market’s doing that. Someone can tell us, we go round and round in circles on this logic. Why can’t you buy back some shares to push the stock up? Separate from any academic study you can look up that tells you that only lasts for so long. We could buy it back, but there’s not an awful lot of float. Right? If we do buy it back, some people say, "What will you do to increase the float so people will recognize the stock and therefore give it a greater market value?" You see, I see the complaint and I understand the reason why. I’m not insensitive to it.

We come from a different perspective. That’s we do what we do. For instance, we’re working on, actually I have a mock-up in front of me. It’s an inactive mock-up of a webpage, a series of webpages, a website actually, for FRMO Corp. because we’ve been remiss in not giving FRMO Corp. its own more updated website. We have our own IT department. The head of the IT department at Horizon Kinetics helped me put a mock-up together, and we can work with outside programmers to build us a website, not unlike the functionality of the Horizon Kinetics website. Among the things I thought I’d put on there, we still have to get everybody’s input, but that’s why we have the mock-up. I put a stand-in title for the front page, Strategic Thinking / Strategic Assets. Right? I put together a table.

Actually just, I updated a table that our dear and extremely respected former board member and shareholder, Lester Tanner, had started once. This is a history of FRMO Corp.’s growth in book value per share. Many of you are familiar with it, and maybe you’re sighing, I don’t know. It starts on February 29, 2000 with the $10,000 I mentioned earlier, which rounded to 1 cent per share. By May 31, 2020, 20 years later, the $10,000 had become $115 million. The book value has grown from a penny to $2.61. That’s 19% a year compounded for those 20 years. As of May 31, 2025, five years beyond that, we’re up to $353 million, $8.02 a share of book value. That’s a 20.5% annualized compounded after-tax accumulation, for the most part, of after-tax earnings and appreciation from our strategic asset.

I would ask, not pugnaciously, but really as part of a debate, a constructive debate, a thought experiment, what else would you have us do? That’s a really fine result. We did it without leverage. All I can say, maybe Peter might have something else to offer, is we can just keep doing what we know how to do best, and not to step out of our circle of competence, and continue to do things deliberately. Which means try to know what we’re doing and why, just like that Burger King discussion Mao and I first had, before we do anything else. There’s a story maybe I told someone recently, like this week. I may be talking too much. I was reminded of, I was on a bus 15 years ago or so, or 20 years ago.

This stayed with me, never left me. I don’t know where it was. It could have been on Third Avenue in Manhattan. I was on the bus already, and the bus stopped somewhere, and a woman got on and she stepped inside the bus, and she’s about to pay her fare, and the bus driver closes the doors, and they start moving, and I was close enough, I could hear her. She’s asking him, "Is this the bus that goes to such and such a place?" He said, "No, it’s not. What you want is this other bus, and the next stop you get off on, you get off there and you walk back a block and it’s this number, okay? This number." He gave her the number of the bus. After that, she got off. He just seemed dumbfounded.

He couldn’t reconcile this, and he was speaking out loud as if to himself, but loud enough that everybody in the bus could hear. About 20 iterations of this. He went on for a couple of minutes, and he’s basically saying to himself out loud to all of us, "How could somebody get on a bus and not know where it’s going? I don’t understand it. If you don’t know where you’re going, why would you get on a bus before you stand and figure out what bus you." He went on and on like this. Basically, we have to know where we’re going. If we think it’s a good idea, we always entertain new ideas. We’re doing what we can. I don’t know what to do about the stock price.

I’ll confess to you, other than, I don’t know, maybe get more people to come and ask questions of us, not that we answer them all. Peter?

Peter Doyle, Co-Chief Executive Officer, FRMO Corp / Horizon Kinetics: Maybe I’m an optimist, Steve, but my intention is to hang on to it. If you studied the career of Warren Buffett, you would’ve seen that, I think from 1964 to 1982, he was compounding his book value at a very high rate, and the stock went nowhere. I think you would’ve lost money as a shareholder, and then it took off. Returns come in a very episodic fashion, and we have intentions of trying to grow this business and compounding at the rate that it has historically. I’m just going to conclude from my standpoint. One of my new roles in life is helping to spread the legacy of Murray Stahl and the lessons he gave us, the way he lived his life. He is not replaceable, but he did give us the foundation.

He did give us the skills and the tools to basically grow and make things better for our organizations, and that’s our intention. I can tell you that the sadness here is also offset somewhat by the willingness and the energy of the people to step in and to fulfill roles that they probably didn’t think they would have. That’s been very gratifying to see. Again, I know a lot of you, I’m not going to say liked Murray Stahl. I know you felt love for Murray Stahl, as did Steven and I. If you like to reach out to us, talk to us, we’ll happily share more private stories with you. That’s all I really have to say for today, Steve.

Steven Bregman, Co-Chief Executive Officer, FRMO Corp / Horizon Kinetics: Okay. On that topic or any of them? Should we wrap up or?

Peter Doyle, Co-Chief Executive Officer, FRMO Corp / Horizon Kinetics: Pretty much anything.

Steven Bregman, Co-Chief Executive Officer, FRMO Corp / Horizon Kinetics: Answer a few more? Okay. A couple pop out to me, and I’ll confess, I don’t mind being honest about some things. They’re easy ones. I picked a couple easy ones. This one. Jay, are you allowed to speak for us here? I’ll tell you what the question is before you answer it. It’s about when FRMO reports its top five holdings. This person noticed the delineation between MIH restricted shares and MIAX. Can you explain the difference in how one could determine the value for the MIH shares? And, for example, is there any fixed look-through ratio of MIAX shares represented per restricted MIH shares? And I think this is no longer a consideration, but maybe you can explain it in the proper fashion.

Jay Kesslen, General Counsel, FRMO Corp: Yeah, that’s correct, Steve. There were some shares that were previously restricted. All of the restriction on the Miami shares is lifted, so they’re eligible to be traded. They still may carry the restricted legend on them, but that’s a fairly simple process to have that removed. As we sit today, all of the Miami shares owned by FRMO are unrestricted. In fact, all of the shares owned by Horizon Kinetics are unrestricted or eligible to be unrestricted.

Steven Bregman, Co-Chief Executive Officer, FRMO Corp / Horizon Kinetics: I see one more. Looks like an easy one. If our analyst, James Davolos, was here because one of his specialties is energy. He would talk to you about this for 10 or 15 minutes in very rapid fashion, I might think. The question is, unlike the oil in Venezuela, Guyana oil is a very similar grade to that of the oil extracted from the Permian Shale, and the oil reserves in Guyana have much lower breakevens. Do you have any thoughts on risks to Permian Shale oil prices posed by the development of the oil industry in Guyana, especially now that the threat of invasion by neighboring Venezuela has been significantly reduced because of U.S. involvement in the Venezuelan government affairs? No, I would say no. No for probably a lot of reasons, and James has had more reasons, more detailed reasons.

Maybe Peter can offer some. While you wait for development of some foreign oil fields and all the risks that go along with it, and I’m not familiar with them, so, will I know they’re ready to produce or they’re another five years away from production. Then shipping them to us, if that’s the question, would we import? Well, we’re a net exporter, although we do certain kinds of oil ourselves that we import within that whole mix. I don’t know that something that’s technically at the wellhead cheaper than oil in West Texas, if we’re talking about importing it here, maybe that’s not the question whether it remains so once you have shipping costs and so forth.

We have plenty of use for our oil here, and in fact, the one of the challenges and opportunities in the United States is that all the extra natural gas, particularly the associated natural gas that comes up with oil, we don’t have enough takeaway capacity for it, and we don’t have enough consumption for it. It’s problematic. It’s one of the reasons why natural gas in the Permian Basin has been collapsed to negative prices for years now, because there isn’t enough pipeline takeaway to bring it places, and basically, it has to be paid to get rid of it. It’s a challenge for the oil producers here, because if they can’t get rid of the excess natural gas, they actually curtail some of the oil drilling. Yet, now we have extra demand coming from two places.

We have extra demand coming from data centers, who realize now they have to make their own off-the-grid sources of electric power. Predominantly, the method of choice will be natural gas-fired cogeneration plants. There’s going to be a lot more demand for natural gas from there. We have LNG capacity, which is going up tremendously to ship to other nations overseas, predominantly Asia and the South Asian continent. The oil market is way more complicated than that. I don’t see it. Maybe people know more than I do, I think it’s an issue, but it doesn’t trouble me.

Thérèse Byars, Corporate Secretary, FRMO Corp: Steve, if I remember correctly, Murray used to talk about, it isn’t just the oil in Texas, it’s also the availability of water for certain of the processes for producing the electricity.

Steven Bregman, Co-Chief Executive Officer, FRMO Corp / Horizon Kinetics: Oh, yeah. Well, that goes to the center of the value of TPL. People listening, I presume they know this, but maybe it should be mentioned that water is now the limiting factor. It always was. Certainly Wall Street was a bit weird, didn’t think it through. I think even an awful lot of billion-dollar class data centers weren’t really thinking it through, that is, water, not natural gas, is really the limiting factor for data center build-out. Because, not least, for the cooling, the data center itself, but the data center needs the electric power, which has to come from its own associated power plant. That’s a thermal plant. It burns stuff, makes heat to boil water, to make steam to drive turbines. That whole process, it requires a cooling process, and we need water for that.

For those of you who don’t know, and surprisingly, the first time one comes across it often, if you go to the U.S. Geological Survey, they keep track of all the water users in the United States, and where they are, and where the aquifers are, and where the aquifers are being overextended and so forth. They’ll give you information about the largest water users. Actually, all the different users, whether it’s factories, industrial, commercial, so forth, households, so forth and so on. The largest water user in the United States, by industry sector, most people would say it’s agriculture. It’s not. It’s electric power. It’s utilities. Because they need the water to cool their plant. It doesn’t matter, actually, whether it’s nuclear or coal or natural gas. They all need water. Natural gas needs the least amount, natural gas-fired plants.

You can have a data center somewhere, you can have all the land you want, it’s not near a town, nobody’s bothering you as far as the politics goes. You found a significant source of long-term natural gas. You’re ready to go, but you don’t have water. You’re dead in the water. You really can’t do it in farming areas because it’s already a different kind of crisis. It depends where, or the challenge, but they’ve overdrawn their aquifers for many, many years. There’s been land subsidence, and there could be permanent damage of the aquifers. They don’t want you there, even if you’re out in the middle of nowhere. The geology and the geography and the engineering needs and so forth, they all kind of like a slope.

It all kind of leads toward, not exclusively, but it leads towards the Permian Basin, where they have all of that right there, including an excess supply of the cheapest natural gas in the world. As far as TPL goes, water is the fastest-growing part of their business, and at some point, it will surpass the revenues from natural gas and oil. There’s a reason for that, if you understand why. It has to happen. It has to happen because as wells in the Delaware Basin age and/or as you go deeper for the next layer of oil, the amount of water mixed in with the oil, because that whole area was once an inland sea, increases. Without having been doing anything, so long as there’s continued drilling in the Delaware Basin, the ratio of water to oil that comes up will climb and climb and climb.

It’ll climb from three barrels of water per barrel of oil to four to five to six. For the drillers, getting the oil and getting rid of the water is also a limiting factor. If they can’t get takeaway capacity for that water, they have to stop drilling. Like, where’s it going to go, right? They have to have, and it’s a growing business, somebody who’s reliable, who’s got the network to make alterations to what the volumes are or takeaway volumes are necessary at one well or another. They need a company that can both take away water, but also, oddly, deliver water to them, different kind of water, for injection into the well to actually do the fracking.

that is a really important growing business, and TPL is there too. There’s a reason we own it. There’s a reason we don’t sell any shares.

Thérèse Byars, Corporate Secretary, FRMO Corp: Thank you very much, Steve. Are there any other questions you’d like to address?

Steven Bregman, Co-Chief Executive Officer, FRMO Corp / Horizon Kinetics: I don’t know. I’m scrolling through. Peter, anything pop out at you?

Peter Doyle, Co-Chief Executive Officer, FRMO Corp / Horizon Kinetics: I think we hit all of the ones that we could possibly answer with any degree of confidence. I think we’re only leaving one or two that are there that I don’t have any insight, but I would certainly research them and get back to whoever asked those questions.

Steven Bregman, Co-Chief Executive Officer, FRMO Corp / Horizon Kinetics: I like that. Yes. There are some questions there I’m not sure I could do a responsible job of or answer with confidence or competence. We do have the resources at Horizon Kinetics to compose some answers for the people who requested a response.

Thérèse Byars, Corporate Secretary, FRMO Corp: Well, thank you. Was there more that you wanted to add?

Steven Bregman, Co-Chief Executive Officer, FRMO Corp / Horizon Kinetics: No, I’m good.

Thérèse Byars, Corporate Secretary, FRMO Corp: Okay, I just want to thank you both for stepping up and giving our shareholders this information and for the beautiful tributes to Murray. If there’s nothing else, would either of you like to make some closing remarks?

Steven Bregman, Co-Chief Executive Officer, FRMO Corp / Horizon Kinetics: Yeah, I’ll do a bit of a sign-off, and maybe Peter wants to. I can almost hear Murray’s words in my head at the end of a call like this, which is that we do thank you for showing up and for asking questions and for listening and next time we hope to be able to give you responses at a more detailed level. We have to start somewhere, and we’re starting where we think we can provide appropriate answers. Next time we can do a better job, I hope. We thank you for being here.

Peter Doyle, Co-Chief Executive Officer, FRMO Corp / Horizon Kinetics: Yeah, I have nothing further to add other than thank you. Steve and I will endeavor to make this successful. As Steven pointed out and I had also said, we’re on rock solid foundation, and we should be able to navigate this difficult time pretty easily as a result of that. I think we’ll have good things in the future.

Steven Bregman, Co-Chief Executive Officer, FRMO Corp / Horizon Kinetics: Till next time, then.

Thérèse Byars, Corporate Secretary, FRMO Corp: Thank you both very much. I believe this is the end of the earnings call, so you may now disconnect.