From Zero to 40 Markets: The Trading Strategy Nobody Talks About | Time2Talk #209: Lars Weber

Sun and Sun basically said to me, "Would you like to take over the world?" And if somebody asks you to take over the world, you would really say yes. Especially if they ask Lars to do that. So yeah, they had a lot of Excel sheets when I joined and they had a lot more after six to 12 months. How has that development been from Excel sheets? A few people, still a lot of mental stuff. And how accurate is what Mark is saying that you are a quant LV trader fully automated? How do you manage a market in which single players can have so much influence? Sounds like NROM would not have passed the test of the FERC market-based rates license for physical participation. And no, I think that test came after. That's actually one thing that I think very many of the current entrants have to really look out for. There are a lot of trading companies where they're light shifts or they're offices in Singapore. Going from Singapore to Japan is the same travel as going from hour to new year. Both in distance, but also in my sense, some regulators are saying that you have to be significantly supported. And exactly what does that mean? What does significantly mean? As a participant, I actually don't mind that BGM is very picky. On the other hand, as a new entrance, I find that really annoying. Then after two and a half years, you trade one megawatt hour on the Japanese exchange. And then 20 minutes after you submit that trade, the exchange calls you and says, "What is the physical purpose of this trade?" I am so excited about today's episode because we have such a special person in our studio. And it does not get that we actually can welcome someone physically in the office. So, I'm extra excited about that. He needs no introduction. So, this is Lars Weber from Updress Hill. Thank you so much for joining us today. We're so happy to welcome you. Thank you very much for having me, Esther. Thanks for having me. It's an honor to be here. Finally, being in the studio from everybody's seeing how it looks on screen, but I can finally see it live. It's actually worse than you would imagine. No, no, no, no. So Lars, I like to start out a conversation with just touching a little bit based on you as a person who is Lars, behind, obviously we'll talk about it just here, but who is Lars? And if you have any fun facts, that is even better. Yeah, okay. We can do a lot of fun facts. Actually, so I'm born German, raised, Dutch, Paul, knows how I confirm. And I moved to Denmark when I was 24. So, I was just in time for the cinnamon shower. People can look that up, what that means when you turn 25 in Denmark. Back then, I was only here, actually, for an exchange semester. I met a very beautiful woman, another beautiful woman, Esther. And then, yeah, I stayed. That was a matter of my wife and mother of our two children. Now I'm 42, so actually, as of this year, I've lived the longest in Denmark. Oh, wow. That's insane. So you are also part of this noble effect. You're going to come here for your studies, and then this happened. And now, all these years after, still here. I'm stuck. I'm stuck. What? What did you want to say about that, Paul? I'm positively stuck. Yeah. Great. Thank you for the introduction. So, if we would now move on a little bit to your career and professional growth, can you tell us a little about it? Yeah. So, in 2009, 10, I was one of the first non-Danish employees at what was back then, still called Norys Gelhandel, which became NAS Energy, which became bought by Centrica and it's today called Centrica Energy. And back then, it was my responsibility to start trading a little bit between the different countries. Now, NAS, Norys Elhamdes was still owned by the local municipality at that point in time. They were quite successful within Denmark, but at some point, you couldn't grow anymore within Denmark. So the idea was, okay, how do you go out of Denmark? What can you ask him? Can you do it? And I was actually hired to look at the Dutch market at that point in time, which after about three months, we figured the nut, the Dutch market is actually nice to do. But on the other side of North Sea, there was the British market, and that was a lot bigger. It was at the time when the UK introduced rocks, when the renewals boom was taking full place. And yes, for a couple of years, I was trading power two and from the UK via the interconnectors. And then at some point, we also started trading certificates. And if you trade certificates and power, you can also trade PPAs at some point. So in 2013, I and my. Just to ask one question, were you also trading these markets or were you more on the business development side? The first 18 months, it was actually the same thing. So I was doing a little bit of market entry there, which back then, UK is not the most difficult one to enter. And then once you're there, then we also started trading there. But actually, at that point in time, trading was very simple, because there wasn't Euphemia at that point in time. No, in 2013, it was, but then when you started maybe there in 2009, there wasn't. In 2009, there wasn't. There wasn't. And also for the people who are watching a bit more fresh in this industry, UK was coupled in that period in between. Yeah, implicit coupling. It was part of the mark coupling of optimization. And now it's explicit of course. Exactly. It's just a little disclaimer for the youngsters. Yes. And then, so we moved over there, together with Meta. And also got married with Meta there. In the UK. In the UK. Yeah, we actually married there. So you have a British marriage certificate. And then we started doing some PPAs there. Got to know how generators are looking at things, how to price things, how to price balancing, how to take the risk between they had an intraday markets and imbalance markets. And we were quite successful. I mean, Neyaz was growing from nothing to a few thousand megawatts of solar for undermanagement in only a few years. That of course became, they're not some point quite interesting for Centrica who said, who are those guys who just entered our home market and are taking our customers away from us. And then, if you can't beat them, join them. So that's when Centrica bought us. And they were in 2016. We were talking in 2016. In 2016, 2017, we really wanted to start a family, Meta and I, which of course, London is great to be. And it's a great place to live. But it's maybe not the best place to have children in. And being an expert from then we're going to London. I was at the opportunity to come home when we wanted. So we moved back to Denmark in '17 and I said with Centrica for about one and a half more years. Yes. And then two of my, what I have to say, very shortly, former colleagues, Surn and Surn started a company which became industrial, which was trading U.S. power from here in our book, only. So you're trading something which is at least six time hours away, which I thought was seriously interesting. And Surn and Surn basically said to me, would you like to take over the world? And if somebody asks you to take over the world, you usually say yes. Especially if they ask large to do that. So yeah, that was then when my pictures your time started. And if you want to, we can go into that. Yeah, hell yeah. I think we are curious. The audience maybe as well. So let's. Yes. Yeah. So in 20, the company started in 18 and I started in early 19. So I was employee number four plus student assistants. So we were, I was the fifth in the office. And it was really smaller than the current studio and for the people who don't see the studio, it is not that big. Yeah. And then the whole little team, we hired two or three more people from Central Korea, but basically we stuck with around 10 and with those 10 people, we wanted to enter all the US ISO markets. So just like you offer the services to enter them, we were trading day ahead to what the Americans call real time, but we would call imbalance miles. Yes, virtually virtually. Yeah, that is one of the nice things about the US markets. Both the market and the TSO, which are two separate entities in Europe, are the same entity in the US. So it is quite easy to do this virtual trading. Also, you don't have to pay one and then get money back from the other. You're just getting the net from them that makes it a centralized, pretty centralized. Yes. And because there's no intraday market, you don't need a 24/17. You put in your day at market bits in what is actually the within the Danish or European normal working hours. And then you're done. And then you just wait until the next day. Count your money. Hopefully. I have to say, it wasn't that way in the first 12, 15 months. I mean, there was a time when you think I know we have enough money for the next three to four months of paychecks, but the fifth month has to be the profit that I make today. I was going to ask as well like how long were you working on the system, on the algo before you were like, okay, guys, today we're going live. So we already did trade three ISOs before I was here. And so within the first eight months, the first three people, Sir and Sir and Thomas are, they moved from nothing, from company and exception, to getting the licenses in place, to actually trading. But again, because in the US you only have a single entity, and you in theory can actually do it out of XML files, in normal words, basically an Excel sheet. And that's how the company started. The company had a lot of Excel sheets when I joined, and they had a lot more after six to 12 months. And here we go in an interesting part. And I don't want to skip the whole story, but you started with XML files with Excel sheets, back at nails back then, lots of manual trading software, everyone just clicking trading on their models, but very manual. You seem to be known in the market now as a. Quantrator, right? You are very algorithm and very automated, amazing systems. You trade over 40 markets. Continuously. A few people, still a lot of manual stuff. And how accurate is what the market is saying, that you are a quantilver trader, fully automated, obstrating, bidding, whatever it is? How did the journey go? What happened in between? And how much human interaction is there still happening? So the whole reason why we forced ourselves to automate is because all of our employees are owning the company, which means that every time that you hire somebody, your share becomes smaller. That doesn't mean that we don't want to hire people, but that means that you don't want to hire 100 people. Because either they are. They become unhappy to be there because their share is very small, or we become very unhappy because we give away too much of our share. So you cannot make both happy. That means that you can do three or four or five ISOs and maybe even all seven ISOs out of Excel sheets. But as soon as you start to do more and more, you have to automate or you have to hire. So the. Already when I was there, we said, "Okay, we need to make the interfaces to the ISOs automated." So yes, we still do our strategies in Excel sheets or in other ways of how we calculate where we would like to bid. But then simply the button "Submit" and everything from there until no longer using the user interface of the ISOs and stuff like that. All of that became automated. One more thing was that we really did. We tried as much as we can to not build a whole back office. So we tried to have the whole flow from once the trade is entered and then check if the trade is actually there. It just became a pop-up saying, "Hey, we automated that part as well so that you don't need people to check that." Because it is a. And I don't want to offend everybody in the back office. But it is a function which in itself doesn't create money. It is a function that supports making a lot of money. But as long as it is as simple as a single entity in the U.S. which does both the buy and the sell, you can try to automate it. And it is relatively simple. Also, you don't need any scheduling in the U.S. I see actually I just wanted to add here one point that in terms of back office and headcount and also all the respect from all the companies who do that. But we do see also, for instance, from business development perspective where traditional companies used to have these departments where five, six employees would enter new markets and maybe as an individual you're working at one or two projects at best in a year where it's just in our vision, like at least what we see. And it makes maybe less sense from financial perspective to maintain all this cost that is basically draining all the trading profits. Yeah, and what it is about, we are lucky. We are young enough to not have the technical depth, I think it's called an IT. So that you don't have to use systems for your current business to make sure that you still earn money today. So that you might build a new system tomorrow. We just started with the new system and that makes our life a little bit easier. Don't have a heavy legacy. Exactly, no legacy is a very, very big part of how we could grow this. And then, so then once we had the U.S. set up, we already knew that when we did the last U.S. ISO that we would enter Europe. So we had a European company to enter Europe. Well, it does mean it did make our company a lot more complex because until now we just had one entity which did both the buying and the selling, we had no scheduling, we had none of that. So we tried the easiest European markets, which at that point in time, and I think today would still be, is actually Ireland and the UK. Because there you don't, in the UK, at least in an island, you don't have to schedule. The exchange can schedule on your behalf. That takes a lot of automation and complexity out. And yes, we had to then figure out, okay, but how are we doing that then instead of, then there's one company which is the exchange where you open your position and another company, which is the ISO where you're closing. So that was then the next complexity to figure out. But you do small steps of complexity all the time. So we continuously built this engine, this ecosystem, to take more and more of the whole workflow to become automated. Back to what Esther just said, there's many companies now that have just let's just see people or workflows. And just before we started this chat, in a whole way, we talked about this trend of more service providers popping up like ourselves, and also IT, data vendors, algorithms, which always brings the parties we speak with to the question, build or buy. Where is your facility in that? How much do you build? How much do you buy? We were lucky enough to not make our companies so complex that we had to buy. And our problem with buying would be that at some point it might have made sense to build to buy, sorry, but because we very early in our journey already were in two different continents, there aren't so much different vendors who are active in two continents. Something that your clients probably also are aware of. So we then thought, okay, as long as we're only proprietary trading and as long as we're only doing short-term power, so no curve things, no financials things, only physical short-term, we can manage this ourselves. You don't have to think about what is your var because in 40 hours you don't have a var anymore because everything is over. And that made our company relatively simple. So we built almost everything ourselves, also what we used today, almost everything is still in our house. So a special place to be. And it's also like, I think, you know, obviously you hear the noise in the market and people talk about in Brazil as how, you know, lean the company is going to, you know, if you look at, we can talk about annual reports later on, but I mean, like, you know, considering your annual reports and results and your head count and, you know, set up, it's one of the companies that I think even larger companies look up to and, you know, try to have as lean set up as possible. Yes. And actually our biggest problem, sorry, our biggest, our biggest decision-making is not where do we want to make money tomorrow, or it should be take all the good ideas in. We have to be extremely careful to not make the company complex. So we don't do gas, we don't do long-term curves, we are very, very, very slowly starting taking on asset management in select markets and in very, very specific ways of how we would like to do that. Because if you start to become too complex and those kind of things, we would overwhelm our capacity of doing it in a house. Then you cannot be so lean anymore. So we are actually, we have become really good at saying no, really good. But that brings you further. Yes. It brings you ahead of competition. Yes. Saying that many things. Yes. Yes. Pick your winners. Yes. Pick your winners. And it's really difficult to know upfront, is that going to be a good thing or not. So we are, we have a limited amount of people today. We have only 36, 37 people. Of those are 30 in Denmark and 8 in Tokyo. And they are running the company. So we cannot say tomorrow, oh, let's do, let's also do gas. If we would do also, if we also would do gas, you need at least five to 10 experts in understanding what is the gas market and how does it work. But they need to be supported in all different kinds of function as well. So even if we could have a shared back office and shared financial models and shared IT development, that would mean that you would lose some of the agility in the short and power trading development that we do today. When you enter Europe, you at some point really have to do internet trading, which means that you need a night shift, which means that we had to look at further east, something eight times away. And as you know, a lot of people are looking at Singapore, but Singapore you can't trade. Well, not really. So we looked at what else markets are there, which actually look a little bit like the European markets. And Japan is a market that has a day ahead market and an imbalance market and an intraday market. So we thought, let's go there. Just two and a half years of my life. That was before chat GBT, but after Google Translate. So and it was doing COVID, so that was my COVID baby. And yes, we started that. We also at the same time allocated some of our traders there. So we actually had them in office and we had at some but also local people that helped us both with the introduction of our company there, but also with managing our night shift. And then after two and a half years, you trade one megawatt hour on the Japanese exchange. And then 20 minutes after you submit that trade, the exchange calls you and says, what is the physical purpose of this trade? And for you and me, the physical purpose, if you're a prop trade with, making money. So we talked about price optimization and all the kind of things, but no, no, no, no, no, no. Physical needs means that you need to have what we would call flow, a requirement to either buy or sell electricity. So production consumption, yes. So in our case that meant okay, we have now spent two and a half years to getting into this market. Do we want to understand what it means to do a Japanese PPA? We kind of have to. Yes, that is what we had to figure out then as well. But we did, we started going out to Japanese asset owners and you have to imagine there's 90,000 megawatts of solar in Japan. I believe the amount of megawatts that was not managed by the TSOs, by the local system operators who were the default, I think it was less than a hundred when we started out of 90,000. So less than almost one tenth of a percent. So here it was handy that you had a bit of origination background. Yes, yes, that helped a lot. But you were going into a market that simply didn't understand what we were trying to do. But so you had to introduce the whole point of what is electricity trading because it was so new. And then once the first customers came in and had an honest discussion with us, they started to say, "Okay, now I see what you're doing." And I believe that that works. And yet, there were some companies who took a leap of faith in us, a new entrant who there are some European-looking people. And yes, there were also Japanese, of course. It was not only you with Google Translate. Yes, we were lucky that we had some some initial customers and that helped us establish at some, well, at the point where we are today, which is about a thousand megawatts on the management. Still, just over one percent of the market. It was not me. There's a lot of very, very, very knowledgeable people in Japan. And that's actually one thing that I think that very many of the current entrants have to really look out for. Exactly. There are a lot of trading companies who have their night shifts or their offices in Singapore. Going from Singapore to Japan is the same travel as going from Arbor to New York. Both in distance, but also in mindset, those we both would call that East and Asia, but they are not the same. And Japanese people like to work with people who understand Japanese work business and work culture and understand what it means to have Japanese counterparts. I think this is a really good topic that you touch base upon and I think what we can see here, also that still, there's obviously a huge interest in the end of the Japanese market, but still a lot of the companies really underestimate this and that we can do it our way. And we're like, well, yeah, of course you can do it, but are you there to stay? If you want to make up actual presence, then you must commit. Yeah, commitment. Thank you. That's exactly the word I was looking for. You must commit. If you don't commit and you show commitment by having local people there, having a local subsidiary, if you don't do that, people don't take you serious and you don't become part of the society there. Yeah. And obviously you can do this with permanent or temporary solutions for a year or two, but really like having the colleagues who both understand the local culture, but also your company's vision, mission and the team, that's something that takes time. Yes, and I think that especially regarding Japan, the reason why you must do that is because you cannot only provide your trading as in trading on your own behalf and trading without underlying assets. Like when we entered the US market, we were trading as you sent before, virtuals, virtuals, meaning I buy and sell from a market and I talk with nobody else. I don't have to talk with a local solar farm or supplier or something like that. It's just me and the market. I have to therefore understand the market very well and the relationship that I need to have with the market, but they are fine. They're a professional entity who is used to having new entrants all the time. But if you are entering and having discussions with local asset owners and they are local banks and they are local asset managers and those kind of things, they have no idea who you are. You need to create the trust. You're no longer only trading from your own money. You're trading with other people's assets. You can't do that from the other side of the world. It's so funny. I just remembered actually that I do have a acquaintance from the industry who's half Japanese and we were talking about this topic with him. I think like three or four years ago that they were looking also at the Japanese market and obviously him being half Japanese. It was very useful. He did a trip down to Japan and even his Japanese was not sufficient. It was not sufficient being half Japanese. It takes also from his perspective a lot of preparation, but again, obviously the hierarchies are really important there. You really choose your people carefully there. Yes, but first of all that, but secondly, you cannot just come in and say, "Oh, I'm new." Anybody who is visiting Japan is visiting Japan. Also, if a Japanese person is visiting Japan, you're visiting Japan. You need to have a local establishment and have people who have been in the industry or at least understand the industry very well to have us representing there. One thing that we see when, let's say, we have U.S. entrance systems or U.S. clients, so we bring them to Europe. We know, of course, full set up. That's our core business. We know it, but then you do need a bank. We know from experience that's challenging. Even with great relations, you know, the people, it still banks. They're heavily regulated. It's KYC. That's a big chance here in Europe. How did you tackle that in Japan? Opening the right bank account in the right place. What kind of things did you run into that world? Did you get a few gray hairs and sleepless nights? Wow. If banks would put a, it takes a long time to even get to that step. So sending out emails from Europe is not always helpful when you're trying to set up a business in Japan. Especially in Covid times. Covid was actually not, was also helpful because a lot more companies were more, yeah, they went online and they were more flexible around when and if you had to show up in person, then they were also okay with an online meeting. Yes, but even after that setting up a bank account in Japan, not easy. Exactly. Luckily, time to market knows how to do it. And so if there's any doubts about it, obviously times have changed as well. Things have become more lean. And, you know, we are also gaining our experiences as well. So that's something. Yeah, but even if stuff gets more digital, the KYC actually gets more hard. And we also, I mean, it does take time. And especially if you go to markets where they're not so used to new entrants, that is one of the big tackle points. I think Japan basically is a summary of just be patient. Yes, but it's not the only one in the world. No, no, of course. But, you know, because now is the hot topic. Yes, yes, and it is a great market to talk about. And it's, and it is a very changing environment, but it isn't the only one which is difficult. And talking here about qualitatively speaking profitability, how can a market like Japanese be profitable under the assumption that you don't need an asset? Is there the same kind of volatility, liquidity that you could trade like UK markets, for example, like a Denmark? Well, first of all, the assumption you can't even make because you must have an asset. You're not allowed to. Hypothetically. Hypothetically, if you would not need an asset. And hypothetically. I love this hypothetical question. No, we can talk about that. Hypothetically. I hope the Japanese authorities will hear this episode. It is a hypothetical. I mean, the market data for Japan is online. You can look at what the imbalance prices are. You can look at the data, market prices. Japan is a market that had a lot of events. So in Japanese, you would, for example, Fukushima, the Fukushima, what we call the Fukushima disaster, they call the Fukushima event. Because you don't give any negative connotation to what happened. So you have to, but that is actually a really big thing. What happened is that before the Fukushima event, in 2011, you had a lot of stable call generation in Japan, you had a lot of stable gas generation in Japan, and you had a lot of stable nuclear generation, which means that prices were very boring, very, very boring. But then indeed, Fukushima happened. And what people don't realize is that the Japanese authorities as a precaution has taken out not only the Fukushima nuclear power station, but all the nuclear power station, which is 30 percent of their generation that has led to energy shortages. So big industries like steel, but also all the Japanese car manufacturers, they were only allowed to produce according to certain schedules so that they don't interfere with the normal energy consumption of our houses. That was a very big problem. So the Japanese gave insane, I mean, extremely profitable subsidy schemes to renewable energy. Wind power is difficult in Japan, because Japan is an island, which is a mountain in water. So you either build on top of a mountain where you can't build wind because people want to look at the mountain, not at the turbines. Or you build in the water, but offshore wind in 2011 was still very, very expensive. And the water is not too much as deep, but very deep. So it's expensive. But solar, you can build. So a lot of solar was built. So we went from this almost zero megawatts to 90,000, what it is today. But the bulk, the first 60,000 was built in three years, which from a TSO spot, from the system operator point of effect, of course, from your stable. Then you have not enough, but you're still stable because you have gas and coal. And now you have the problem that you're definitely not stable anymore. So here in Denmark or in Europe, we had the introduction of renewables over a period of 15, 20 years. They did it in three. Can we say that Fukushima event was the direct reason that the Japanese palm market liberalized in the catalysts? Yeah, officially there was a little bit of that already before. But you're absolutely right. This is what was the biggest game changer. And then you had the full liberalization in 16. And you had in 2020, you had another event. And that was that was in January, I think it was 20. Could I be 20? Well, in that January, it was very cold. It was also it was more longer cold than what it usually was. So Japan, in Japan, there are no natural resources, there's no coal, there's no gas. So they are importing everything, energy. Now you're you're planning your energy because those ships don't come overnight. You have to a few months before they come, right? So Japan had the problem that they did not have that they might not have had sufficient gas for the whole cold period. So at some point people started to just hope if I use my gas now, then I might not have gas in the future. So the gas price went crazy, which means that the power prices went crazy. And all the votes instead of goes to Europe, yeah, they're all turned around, all of them turned around. And because that happened, a lot of this applies, but then there was no financial market in Japan. What? There was no trade at financial market. Power financial, yes. So from the, I guess, 700 suppliers that were there, 200 didn't survive this in the end, which was the second catalyst for the Japanese power markets. That is when it was very clear that hatching might be a good idea. You were mentioning Japan, Fukushima, gas dependency, LNG, let me think about the boats, of course, the TTF hub, JKM, and handry hub in US, the LNG, come all around, where you have, of course, your weather, your risk, and diversification. It's all related. Power prices are related, if it's called the US, it's in Japan, La di la di la, do you use the kind of information in your models, or is it just nice to have the diversification, but do you still trade mostly just purely isolated spots? This is a really, really interesting question. So we are doing, I think that this is where we are very different to, let's say, the bigger entities in this company, in this market. We are trading every market for itself. We are looking almost, what we're doing is we're 98% or more of our volumes and our profitability comes from trading in the next 48 hours. So we only look at what is today happening, what is tomorrow happening, and that is local weather. So we now we have global coverage, and if you look 48 hours ahead, weather cannot move more than 3,000 kilometers each in 48 hours. So the weather for tomorrow in New York, and the power price is there for tomorrow in New York, do not impact the weather and the power prices in London or in California, or in tax 48 hours. For the next 48 hours, you're fully correct with your TTF, JKM, and handry hub correlations. If we would trade futures for coming month, then of course everything is again connected, because you can move the gas, you can move the shit. But for the next 48 hours, it's islands. And that gives us a very, very big risk diversification. Our annual report for over the last 12 months came out. And what you can see there is that 94% of our trading days are profitable. But that doesn't mean that every one of our strategies is profitable in 94 days. Because we have this geographical spread, and because the weather doesn't influence each other over long distances, we have, depends on how you count, between 5 and 7 points, which are not correlated with each other. Now, of every single one of them is only profitable in, let's say, 60% of the time. It's like for our own dices. If you roll a dice and you make, you have a one, two, three, or four, you make money, five or six, you lose. If you have one dice, you would lose one-thirds of all days. So, you use geographies to hedge between the positions. You want a hedge fund. Yeah, a physical or financial spot power hedge fund. I would actually go so far and say that we today spend maybe more time in sizing our strategies correctly according to geography to maintain a high average hit rate than actually finding more strategies. Of course, that's also a very big focus. But how do you make sure to not lose? And that I feel like, okay, but correct me if I'm wrong, but maybe that allows you to test the waters in the new market, because you know that I don't know, just the example. In the US, we expect our profitability to be this. We're just entering, now I'm saying Japan, that they take back two and a half years ago. Should we try to see what happens, take larger volumes, and because I know that, you know, our expectation for the US will be good, and then you can do this until you feel like okay, I have an edge now with Japan as well, and then you kind of replicate this strategy. Yeah, so there's a couple of things that you mentioned there. The first thing is, a wind turbine doesn't know where it stands. A wind turbine just knows what the amount of wind is. And the solar panel just reacts to solar irradiation. They don't know either it's just physics. Exactly, it's just physics. They don't have a. Oh man, so disclaimer, we both studied physics. They. But that means that they just react to weather, the assets react to weather. And therefore, the impact on the market, borrowing special regulations, stuff like that, should be relatively similar. So yeah, of course, if you are in the US, and then you move to European markets or to Japanese markets, the first batch of strategies that you have is just copy-paste, because again, it's weather doing something to renewable assets. After a while, and then you get also local market insight, that will be adjusted. But the starting point is copy-paste. So you have these three. You have World coverage, you have your three hubs, Japan, Europe, US, the weather cannot travel from one hub to the other within these 48 hours, each, but it can from country to country. Of course, so when we start zooming in, when you trade Holland, Denmark, Belgium, France, Germany, maybe UK, Ireland, are your strategy still as isolated for country? Or do you have more of a cross-effect that you would not apply the same strategy everywhere, because you scale up on volume? Let's say your indicator is 5% bandwidth of wind, very high wind, and it happens to be everywhere, because your low pressure area is not covering all of them. If you would size up on all of them and you're wrong, you could get massively hurt because you have a big volume in every market, same strategy everywhere. How do you make sure that doesn't happen? So if you would have asked me seven years ago, I would have said, "Don't know." And when we started in the US markets, it is also relatively not a problem, because the ISOs don't have a lot of capacity between them. So you're saying, "Okay, what I do within these ISOs, it doesn't affect, but I do within the other ISOs." Ish. But indeed, within Europe, that's not the case. You have Euphemia, you have all different kinds of marked coupling. You're absolutely right. So what you can start to do is looking at, "Okay, if I have a strategy which works here and I have a second strategy which works there, you can basically do a back test and see how are these correlated?" So if I have strategy, one strategy in Holland and let's say one strategy in France, then you can say, "Okay, how much do these strategies make when only one is active or the other is active, and how much do they make if both are active?" So do I then want to create a kind of artificial ceiling over those two strategies and saying, "If both of them are active and I can see historically that they're performing worse, if they're both there because they eat into each other's profit, then I might want to bring it down a little bit." Yes. So you do cross strategy correlation back to essence? Yes. We even go further. We call that we have certain buckets, and then what you do is you look within the bucket, how they affect each other. How many buckets do you have? How many strategies? I mean, you must have solar strategies, wind strategies, mean reversion, arbitration. I think that at some point the answer was always hundreds, but I guess by now it's thousands, if not many thousands, but thousands of strategies. But then it depends on what do you call a strategy? Like you can have a strategy for every market in case of icing. Now, how often does that happen? That happens maybe five times a year, and it doesn't happen five times in every market. So yes, there is a strategy and that strategy is always running, but it doesn't mean it's active. Just to take one minute, you call it icing. Maybe not all of them with fundamental information, because they don't know. Tell us what is icing. icing would mean that if there is a lot of water in the air and it is cold, then that water can freeze on the blade of a wind turbine. And if there's ice on the blade of a wind turbine, the wind turbine is not allowed to spin because if it would spin with ice on it, those ice particles could become projectiles. So they shouldn't run. And do you then make the difference on, let's say, offshore or unsure, where they may be treated with? Exactly. So you can go, how far do you want to go in detail? You can embed some, you get thousands of strategies, right? Yes, exactly. So you can either say, I'm just keeping two very global strategies. I have one strategy or three strategies for the UK. One looks at, is it sunny? Is it windy? Is it cold? And that's it. Then, of course, over the whole globe, you have a couple of dozen strategies, maybe. And then all of those strategies would run, let's say, an 80 or 90 percent of the time, or give a trigger if they should or shouldn't run or go up or down. Or you can start to become finer and finer and finer, and then it becomes hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of strategies. The downside of doing that, and so if you do back testing, those tens of thousands of strategies would probably give you more money because they are quite and quite always right. But you have less instances and when they are used. And you also start to get a bias with overfitting your model and those kind of things. So you have to be a little bit careful in becoming too specific or to becoming too general. And that's just that is, I think, what funds are spending 80 percent of the time, I guess. So people that are just, you'll leave nothing to fight. Very balanced approach. We have a very balanced approach. Talking about balance. Many of our clients are acidless speculators. I love where this question is going. We were as well. We were as well before Japan. And many new to these markets don't really know what is it like. Where you have your regulation, then you have the practicalities. Some users are very liberal and open to speculation. In balances, others are not. We have an idea, of course, what is possible. Where we know a lot of stuff. You know as well. But how did you figure it out? Is Udrasil or is Lars? Just goes to a market, sets it up in good faith, makes a little cross. I hope I can speculate in this market. I hope it's worth my time and investment. And if not, there is another market where I can try. Or do you have more? There are some things that you know from previous work. Some, but of course, not all 40 miles. And as you said before, my background is being an originator and also trading, which means that I'm used to not having 100 percent hit rate. So in business development, we have the same approach. We, in good faith, try if we can. We also talk. We are extremely open with all the regulatory entities and TSOs. What our goal is. Our goal is to make money, preferably without assets. But if with assets, then of course, we will also comply with that. And then the TSOs are very open and saying, okay, this is what you can do. This is what you cannot do. And we are, sometimes you cannot have those conversations before you actually show what you're trying to do. And then you have that conversation ongoing. And that, you're absolutely right. Some markets are very open. Not only about what you can do, but they also sometimes very open, but you cannot do. And enforce that really quickly. Some other markets are not really responding to your questions. That's why. Exactly. And then you can either, either you have somebody who can help you with that, like yourself, or if it is a new market for everybody, you have to force the question. How is that saying Paul? Do you the crime? Apologize later or ask not don't ask permission. Help me. I've got to ask for forgiveness. Exactly. Tell that to the TSOs and legal later. Indeed. And it's totally not something that we would suggest to anybody, but we do see that some, you know, take that. It's the trade or approach, right? Sorry. It won't happen again. Now, I mean that you can do that, but you cannot do that systematically, of course. Of course. No. No, because if you do that systematically, then after three nothing strikes, the context strikes, then you out. But what you can do is say, okay, there are sometimes regulations like some regulators are saying that you have to be significantly supportive. Right. And exactly. What does that mean? And of course, every TSO has a different definition of significantly. And there might not even be a definition. And there might not be. And it might not just be the person who sits on the other side of the table to think about how do I have my own. I have no idea. So then what you're doing is you're saying, okay, you're doing, you're creating an action, an action which in our point of view is okay, falls within significantly supportive. And you can then have the discussion if our, if our understanding of the definition is the same understanding as a regulator. I find Lars a significantly supportive person. I think you're right. I also find you guys significantly supporting. But this is exactly where the challenge lies that if you look at the grid code, your key contracts, indeed, a BRB intends to be balanced at all time. Yeah, but what does that mean? Exactly. They add intraday imbalance for how long, for how big some parties that know more specifics at, if you look at the German regulation, they have a bit more guidance, but then there are also a bit more strict. But what about all the other TSOs? Well, we know that indeed TSO is also saying no. I mean, as I said before, we talked about the example of what you shouldn't. And that's actually the market. It's not the regular. It's the market who already starts to enforce you. But there are other markets. I mean, the Scandinavian markets say don't go to imbalance if you are a, a, a proprietary trader. Don't, just don't. And that's okay. But that also is one of the points why we also have to evolve as a company. I mean, we are now having global reach. That global reach is great. And it gives us a lot of risk diversification. But we also know now how to manage assets because we're managing a thousand megawatts with those 36 people. So we are now also in the process of saying, okay, there are a certain amount of markets in Europe where we are not trading today. Why not? How are you going to tackle the challenge that you now as a portfolio manager, asset manager in Japan, pretty harmonized, octo as one platform. So to say to do all the communication, how are you going to have assets and schedule and nominate physically in maybe your next 20, 25 European markets? Well, not growing too much that you lose too much of your life. Saying a lot of no. Saying a lot of no. So no assets in many markets. Yeah. So in markets where we are, where we already can trade as much and as flexible as we can. We will, it doesn't make sense to also engage with customers so that we can have more exposure to other market prices. So in Ireland, you can do whatever you want. You don't need assets for that. For us, offering a PPA in Ireland would then the PPA in itself would become the goal. We are a trading company. That is what our goal is. And if there is assets which can help us give more trading, getting more trading exposures, we will take on those assets. So that already takes out half of Europe. Now, then you have countries left. So how do you manage assets in more than 10 countries with 36 people while not blowing up the company in complexity? Very, very carefully. So you, so when we are doing this and we have started approaching customers, we are extremely specific in what we can do. So we do not do fixed prices because that would what mean that we internally would have to start doing financial trading on the curve. Otherwise, we have just an open risk and we just, we will not do fixed prices in the foreseeable future. I'm never going to say never in the foreseeable future. And we will, we would like to not have hundreds of smaller customers. The reason for that is that the amount of customer into interaction would just not be something that our company would be good at. Customers use time. Customers use time. And rightly so. I mean, they, they, you are charging them for service. You should give them a service. And that is absolutely fine. We are not a, we are not born as a service orientated company. We are born as a trading company. And as a trading company, we would be willing to partner with a few quite large entities who are willing to work with us so that we have more exposure to the markets that we would like to have. And they are understanding that that exposure gives us a value. And we share that with them. So, okay. But then we discuss, you know, the history for Japan, you know, and how you look at the market. Let's circle back to the US a little bit. Was a really great introduction. Yeah. Obviously you have started there. That's where, you know, the address is became the home. Yeah, that's your home. That's a home. That's a little bit about US. So US, just like in Japan, you have to understand why is the US today as it is. Why is it the case that there's like some just over half of the US is covered by ISOs. And the other half isn't. How can that even be? So, it's comes back to like, I mean, I think it's even Reagan, like 70s 80s or something like that, who said we should have ISOs. We should bring in competition. Great. And then they started to build up the ISOs, you know, slowly growing them, growing them, growing them. But introducing markets without proper supervision, because it was the first one in, I think even in the whole world, there must have been a big UK at the point in time, but nothing else. And one of the companies which was up the point in time was Enron. And Enron did a lot of good things, but also did some not so good. And one thing that Enron realized was market power. So you could simply say, if you own a large amount of assets, and you don't, and if all of the assets are running, or most of the assets are running, you have a decent amount of profit, but it's relatively low. But if you take off just enough, so that you might not be able to supply exactly everybody, then prices go bananas, because everybody wants to have power and is willing to pay more or less whatever they want. And this, what I believe is market abuse, and what was difficult to enforce, because there were no rules around, or not really rules around market abuse, created a very big problem for the regulator in the US. Sounds like Enron would not have passed the test of the FERC market-based license for physical participation. No, I think that that test came after. Sounds like it. Yes, inspired by the good end of that. Yes, and because that happened, there was just one or two decades of, we don't want to do anything until we figure out that our regulatory framework works. And I think that only now in the last couple of years, you start to see that, you know, MISO is becoming a little bit bigger, SPPs, some are becoming a bit bigger, and there are some initiatives that both SPP and Kaiso will cover a very large chunk of the Western US. That is one of the things that we have to realize, it's not that they are slow, it's actually, they were the first, but because you can, as the first one, you can also hurt if you don't oversee the consequences of opening up a market. Now, we have a cool article about exactly that expansion of the whole MISO SPP stuff, and we should read it if nice. One of the things is you hear a lot in the market, we've only got PGM, PGM is difficult, lots of requirements, restrictions, and all, which also had to do, of course, with a huge bill field. Do you know more about that? So I think that they are different, they're seven ISOs. They, all of those seven ISOs are governed by FURG, by the underlying framework, which is a little bit the same as with Octo and the different nine ISOs that we have there, but because you have FURG, it's just that they're saying, this is how your rule set should look like, but then, but that means that every one of these ISOs, which is a market entity or so, can, how do you say that nicely, interpret things like significant, as we've talked about before, in a different manner. So that means that their rules are different, and that means that the way of how they can onboard customers or enforce customer behavior is always slightly different. You're absolutely right, PGM is, it meets more conversations to make sure that they understand your intentions and are willing to let you participate. Other ISOs are very, very, I think it's the word is called deterministic. So they say, this is the list, please check all the boxes, once you're done, let me know, and you're in. I see you also, we have a few cases where SPB was also quite picky in some of the areas, and you know, like, are you sure about this check again? Check again, and then you have these windows and, oh, you just lose another quarter and you just lose another quarter and ah, and then, and then the phone call to test if you can respond within five hours by phone on a Danish holiday. You have to, that is actually holiday days, we can talk about that a little bit longer. That is one of the things that you have to get used to. You are not the one who is setting the rules for the ISO. The ISO has rules, you have to comply to it or get out. Or you won't even get in there, you won't even get in there. And I think that that's fair. It's just, it's, it's, there's nothing wrong with being strict, especially in light of what happened with Enron. I mean, there is a reason why these ISOs have to be strict because they have experienced, okay, it's a while ago now, but they have experienced that these kind of things are just, if people start to slacken the rules already on day one, the chance is that they might overstep it later. The chance is bigger. We, like, that's such a good way of doing it. And I, but I do think that those who are going there with, you know, we call them cowboys, you know, they will eventually do that as well. And, you know, and these, there is a little bit of protective mechanism and like, or maybe that more selective mechanism that these ISOs enforce, firking, enforces, and obviously, at the end of the day, only those who are playing by the game, by the rules are allowed to play. Yeah, yeah. And there's another example. I think it's called green hat. That's the one I was referring to. I was still looking for a name. That's the, that's the party who, who causes major hole in, basically, the, it's called exchange. Like I know, I asked it in, in, in, in, in, here in Europe, green hat did it within PGM with way too much, long term, FTR exposure that wasn't properly hatched and covered, and that you were holding the system, yes, financially speaking. Yeah, we had to pay, did see tiny amount of that, but yeah, we also got an invoicing, why do we get an invoice, and that's how we also experience it. So what happened was that green hat and, and this is actually something that can theoretically happen everywhere. The maximum amount of loss that you can have on especially financial trades is much more than the amount of security of collateral money that you put on the day that you start with the trade. What do we call it margin? That's why they call it margin. And if the trade goes against you, then that margin increases. So that means that you have to put more and more and more and more money with the exchange or the ISO in this case. And if you come to that at some point, the ISO says, okay, now it's enough. I know that you can't pay for this, but if I let you continue even further, it will just blow a deeper hole in it. And then, and those are some of the rules that we discussed before, then those rules have to be enforced and that enforcement then means that, okay, first of all, green hat gave us your collateral is now ours. That's still only a fraction of which is Azure? Yes, your act, the total losses is more than what you gave us and all the other participants have to pay pro rata part of that loss. So as a participant, I actually don't mind that PGM is very picky. On the other hand, as a new entrant, I find that really annoying. Yeah, but this is later rules find book, right? Exactly. I mean, generally speaking, anywhere you go, you cannot enter this industry or the market with pennies in your pockets, you know. Especially in the US. And especially in the US. And also, like, if you only want to show this margin on your bank account once a year, it also puts you in great exposure and do you want that? Yeah, I don't know, like you still, like, obviously, there are different games to play in this industry, but really like I so we internally always think about we are working with them. This is not the same kind of communities as chocolate is or mangoes or apples. Those are quote unquote not life necessities that you need in every minute, where we are working within a system that is part of the national infrastructure and is extremely important to that. I mean, you see that in Europe with the cyber security enforcements and all that kind of stuff. And because of that, we simply have to behave like that. We are not trading apples. We're trading power. And if we do, I think that a single participant, if they're big enough, could create a very, very big problem to a complete society. So, of course, you have to behave by the rules. I think there has been some Danish parties involved in close to these kind of situations in the German markets a few years ago, right? We're blackouts where, like, we were, there was a close to the situation. And I fully understand why the German TSOs are being harsh as they are, or I'm sorry, are being strict as they are, simply because they say, if we don't do this, we might have a situation where we cannot control it. Yeah. And then you have parties who are for financial gain, acting around in the markets where security supplies at risk. Yeah. And we are, of course, having the wrong way. I'm not saying that that is the wrong way. I think that's only saying that you have to look at from TSOs point of view. The TSO actually doesn't care if they lose money. The TSO cares that there is security also. And one actually, one more important point with TSOs, and that is something that we learned in almost a decade at this company. TSO even if you make mistakes, even if you go over the line, as long as it is us saying to the TSO, hey, we have made an internal error. There was a problem in our procedures. Whatever reason, there was a data center where our systems are running on, which went offline. Whatever the reason is, as long as it is us informing them, if we in fact know that we knew it. But if we are not saying it, they don't know if we are doing it. On purpose. But even if we wouldn't know it, that is the biggest problem. The biggest problem is for them not knowing and not knowing why the other side does it. It's easier to just say, okay, I went across the line, I'm sorry, I'm not going to do it again. This is when it happened. And is there anything that we have to do as well? Do you as a BRP know and do you know why? Yes. Two things basically. If you don't or do know, and you do know why and you don't even tell them that it's not a big case. Yeah, because. Yeah, hey, that is not a great case. But if they don't know that you know, then from their point of view, you don't know. And then you're just to be known. No, no, no, no, no. The DSL has to assume the worst, which is you either you don't manage your systems, which means that you're reckless. You're just basically a car without a driver and going down a highway. And everybody else has to deal around you. You don't want that. You can't get messy. You don't want that. So even if you make mistakes, even if you drive too quickly, it doesn't make it it's it's bad. But if you can say, hope I drove too quickly because I had to take some over or whatever. As long as you know it, and you know it was wrong, people tend to be a lot milder towards you. I also always smile and wave to the flesh machine. It's so do I think. Well, one interesting thing, and we have heard with some parties that we spoke with, and this is then relating to these all physical operations, acting in the markets, which is about the curative supply, that we have heard some parties say, we're a financial trader, which were a B or B and registered on e-bex. Yeah, but we only trace financially. And like some parties who are relatively new to this industry don't realize that there's a difference between financial settlement and physical activity. You are a physical trader. You just don't have an asset, but you are physical. You trace physical. You are acting in a physical market with risk of affecting security supply, things go wrong, and they think they're financial because runs from an elbow, it runs on a piece of software and they don't have an asset. And there wouldn't be more wrong. Well, I can understand why people think that because you don't have a warehouse full of electricity. So you don't see that there's actually a physical thing that you're moving. But I believe that players have to, or actors have to understand that as soon as you send a schedule, you are notifying that the flow of electricity will be different. The physics will be different. Key of law. Yeah. Yes. So as long as you don't do anything with a schedule, like the US, which is virtual, where you are not actually moving power or having creation of electricity or off deck of electricity. But you do affect the price. You affect the price. So there you can discuss, is that financial? Is that physical? They call it virtual for a reason. And you're not sending schedules because it's within their own system. But in Europe, we don't have that. In Europe, it is simply a physically settled market. If I send a schedule, I am doing physical stuff. Funny anecdote. Our, our quants have never seen a schedule. Yeah. So we can go back to this is one of the points where we say we might be different to other plies and lean business and stuff like that. Scheduling is part of our IT stack because we see the retrieval of data, the interaction with the market, that's what more than the IT development part would do and the IT department would do. But your trades are just as depending on the sending of schedules. So that's why we see that is something that our IT part should be able to fully automate. So our trade is an hour's, our quants don't have to think about it. So now a legacy that could be against that. You do have a bit of legacy already. A small anecdote we're talking about, physical power trading, the warehouse, and the early days of time to market, figuring out customs obligations, physical import exports. Let's say towards UK or Switzerland, that the LEMICAL, the Swiss, like customs agents, and I'm explaining physical import exports, Germany, uphill data, Italy, and the person on the other line asking with a Swiss accent not being used to energy traders or service providers calling, asking. Sir, is your good transported by truck? That was the moment that I knew I'm gonna just thank this woman for her support and hang up the phone because clearly we're not coming anywhere. And it was just the money and then go how indeed this is also the challenge of this industry, especially if you're new to it. A TSO does no specifically about all exchange trading and regulation and remit obligations and then you have the customs reporting which is on the side and then you have regulatory reporting towards the regulator where there's licenses and there's just so many bits and pieces and then there's the technical side, there's the legal side compliance and it's all intertwined and that's why we love being there in the middle, being connected to all these elements and that you are of course a trader, market participant, but you're basically in the same seat. That's why you're sitting here today of course. Yeah, I mean so my role has been and still is that I'm trading the first megawatt hour which means that if I'm trading the first megawatt hour, I have to understand what is everything before that. So that comes from a very simple question, do I need a local entity or not? Japan of course is one. Let's say Italy doesn't require local entity. Our European one works also in Italy because within European Union, but you then have to go through all the hoops like when all the other requirements. So you need to talk, how do I get access to the great, how do I get access to the local market, how do I do I need a local megacount? Which is a quite important question and how do I settle if I don't need a local megacount, can I actually make it to pay every day because you might not necessarily need it from a regulatory point of view, but you might need it from a practical point of view. A point of view. Exactly. And those kind of things is quite, it can be quite specific, but yeah, in our company what we then do is saying, okay, I trade one megabot hour. And once I've traded one megabot hour, I say, this is the process that I've went through, DRIT automate that. And then this is the process I've went through, this is the market. Dear Quants, here you have the data, have fun. And because we in seven years have entered around 40 markets, you kind of do one every two or three months, right? So it's not like with the current established players that you're creating a project and then you do a project and then afterwards that project team doesn't do anything anymore. In our company, it's just part of your normal work routine to always add a market or to always add a new sub market, which could be like intraday options or something like that. And that makes us, that keeps us lean because it's not additional FTEs which are doing this. It's just part of the job. I think a lot of our customers also can relate to this and we see a lot of effort, you know, because we're now serving nearly 50 clients all over the world where they see the, well, the upside of being so lean and not needing to hire, find the talent, experience, because the knowledge, you know, the market acts as generally, you need, you need your experience. And, you know, also supporting three, four, five employees to enter these markets. It doesn't make sense anymore. If you want to be a lean AI at least or like quant trading company, it doesn't make any sense. So I think that's why we really like that. We also are able to support this initiative for other companies as well to enter as many markets as possible with the least amount of cost. Yes, but it is, it is not only about the entering. It is, so once you're there, that's great. And once you have one megawatt, that's also great. But indeed you have to, you have to service this. Exactly. Yeah. It is not a project. It has to be taken on internally by your clients, by hours, to make sure that you're not doing a one-off, but you keep doing this. Exactly. Because one of the things that I've learned is, rules change. That's why we're going to be here in the next years. I think then, you know, we'll always have something to do. Thank you so much for all this insight. It was so interesting to hear. First of all, the creation of Yggdrasil and the partners there and the background. So, you know, are you already planning your next markets, where you guys, you know, in the next few years? So this is actually interesting because I think that according to our latest overview of the world, so let's take, we have, we are in 40 markets. Are there more market questions? I already heard this. You're not out. There's not so many markets that are now liberally easily accessible. So, you know, we're a bit stuck right now. No problem. So, that two things that we are looking at. The first thing is the status we talked about before, there's around 10 markets in Europe where exposure to ambulance prices would require assets. So we need assets. I think that's going to take a few years. Right. We'll keep you busy for a while. But of course, entering markets and new markets is our bread and butter. We've done this for so many years and we've shown that we can do that. Are there new markets which are rarely available to enter? I don't think that there's a lot of them today. But you, there's 140 markets and every market is building more renewables. And the more renewables you have, the more difficult it is for a single monopoly, tiers or single asset owners to manage everything. So you start to see that more and more markets will liberalize. And if there's 140 markets, and let's say liberalization is a once in a generation incident. Once in a generation, let's say that's 30 years. 30 years divided by 140 countries is on average every third month. So who knows what I'm going to do in three months. Well, you're not retiring at least. No, no, no, I have fun. So you have, according to Danish standard, maybe a small, what is it, 35 years to go to your pension? Where's you to receive going to be in 35 years? When you wave, you'll receive goodbye or not? Where is it going to be? The question is, what's actually, we always ask our question, what do we want to make this into? So five years ago, the idea was we want to be a pro trader all around the world and just be risk-deversified, have a nice income for all the people who are there and just enjoy. You check that one out now. Along the way, we figured out, okay, sometimes you need assets. So now we're doing the same thing with assets, where assets are complementary to what we're doing. Not done yet, but we're working on that. I think that what will become interesting is we have a platform now. And what I find interesting, and I guess you guys are seeing the same in the market, it could be interesting to see how our market accesses can be used for more people, for more entities. There can be whole new countries like when they are opening up, but it could also be that companies who are, companies who are really good at calculating and are really good at math and AI and stuff like that, maybe they should themselves also manage their own power, like more directly, rather than having a supplier in between having some way of how going directly into the market. If they would do that in a house, with you guys, if they would do it with help of a half outside partner, which could be us, is up to every individual company. But I think there's something there that will change the next few years. I mean, 20 years ago, it was all monopolists, right? Now there are hundreds of companies. And that's exactly what we see already, more and more parties who just want to say, thank you, service provider, thank you to the party for your fees and your cuts on this long-term contract that we have. Let's just do it ourselves. We can do it now. There's all the service providers like us, like the others, scheduling service providers, Ethereum system providers, you name it, we're going to build these ourselves. And I see exactly that. And of course, there's not a one-size-fits-all answer for everybody, but I believe that there will be you know, there will be more and more players who will enter this market, more and more types of companies who are into this market. Who knows? I mean, Tesla, for example, is getting supply licenses everywhere around Europe. They do that. In my point of view, it makes perfect sense, because if you build a 200 megawatt battery, and you have the AI technology behind it to run it, makes sense. Yeah. Makes sense. There's a lot of companies who are building hundreds of megawatts or gigawatts of batteries. I would assume they will enter the market as well. I love this crystal ball moment. We always do. It's snowing on the table. And no, I think that there will be more of those. And I think that those, it's great. It brings more volatility, sorry, it brings more liquidity. It gives more training opportunities. And it makes our market more liberal, and in the end, it will make it better for every consumer. Well, for optimization. Yeah. Thank you, Lars. Yeah, thank you very much. Yeah, I think we could go on for a few more days, and we would love it. Obviously, we'd love it. But I think we've had an amazing one and all of our, at least, great chat. Many interesting topics. There's one question I like to ask. We like to ask here a time to talk these parties that you mentioned that aren't during the sphere. What would be your advice to them? So it is actually relatively easy to receive, let's say, to understand pricing data and embedded data and all the kind of stuff. And it is not, quote unquote, that difficult anymore to make maybe strategies and AI's and triggers and all the kind of stuff. But they have to all run on a platform underneath it. So you need to have your integration with the with the TSRs. You need to make sure that you're regular, so you comply and you need to make sure that you have enough money, not only on your bank account, but also with the exchange and with the count parties at the right time. That's a lot of boring stuff, quote unquote. But if you don't have the boring stuff, you can't do the fun stuff. So take that serious. Either spend internal resources, talk with the service provider who can do that, but don't underestimate it. Because yeah, I can also make a strategy tomorrow or whatever, but that strategy has a value of absolutely zero until you can actually execute it on a market. And that might take half a year or a year. So don't spend too much time on the financial stuff. Spend more time on actually how do I do it? That's such a good point that we keep saying this all over again. Don't underestimate your time. Focus on what you do best, and don't try to figure everything out because you don't have to. There's no reason why you should do that. I'm think bigger than your elbow. You're back there's my show P&L, but there's a lot, a lot, a lot more. Many just underestimate it. Exactly. So don't underestimate this market. No, don't underestimate it. And the set-up time, the time it takes. Yeah. We can help with between the shortening. You might be. Thank you, Lars. You're welcome. Thank you so much. [BLANK_AUDIO]