Turning Points interviews Ben Dear, Chief Executive Officer from Osmosis Investment Management

Welcome to Turning Points, Clearway Capital Solutions Podcast Series, where we talk to leading investment managers and general partners in their respective asset classes about the evolution of their markets and how they're responding to these changes. Established in 2008, Clearway Capital Solutions is an independent and privately owned company providing business development and capital advisory services to investment managers in alternative and traditional asset classes, who are seeking to gauge with Australian and New Zealand investors and their consultants. The Turning Points Podcast Series provides wisdom with direct access to the insights of our investment partners. Today we are joined by Ben Dier, chief executive officer and founder of Osmos' investment management. Osmos' investment management manages developed and emerging markets equity portfolios using a proprietary investment database, MORE, or model of resource efficiency. To identify companies utilizing objective, publicly disclosed data, which are generating greater economic value per resource input, energy consumption or consumption and waste production, and their sector peers, Osmos' believes that forward thinking companies that take a proactive approach to a more sustainable future deliver greater value to their shareholders, Osmos' managers core and active systematic quantitative strategies to generate repeatable alpha in resource efficient global, emerging and regional-based equity portfolios. Dennis Mathonius, managing director at Clearway Capital, is speaking to Ben. Hi Ben, thank you for joining us today on the Turning Points Podcast. Could you provide some historical background on as much as investment management? Yes, thank you, Dennis, it's a pleasure to join you again for the second time. At the name podcast, I should say Turning Points, because we are obviously in the Turning point, if ever there was one. So my name is Ben there, I'm the CEO and founder of Osmos' Investment Management, a sustainably focused, long-only equity manager based out of London. Please tell us briefly about yourself and your role at Osmos' Investment Management? Yes, so I should start with the headline points, I'm 54 years old, I set up Osmos' over 18 years ago as the founder, so responsible for the idea, the concept of trying to grow and asset management business initially that I thought would be good to develop products that I personally would want to invest in, that targeted an environmental theme, that importantly targeted better risk adjusted returns through the process of identifying companies using hard quantifiable data that were able to produce more whilst consuming less of the planet's national, planet's resources. So 18 years later, just a bit quickly as a firm, we've obviously matured as a business, there's 38 people, we've managed close to 18 billion dollars in asset-sunder management, that's US dollars, and we predominantly manage investments on behalf of Pension Funds, Insurance Companies, Family Officers and Endowments, not just out of the UK, but more broadly across the world, obviously Australia, we have a very large book of business, North America, Asia, and obviously Europe and, luckily, the UK, we're owned, majority owned by myself and my colleagues, which is great, but we also have long-term institutional shareholders who we've bought onto the capital structure since inception actually, but more recently with a deal with NICC, Symmetomo to open up the Asian market for us. We're a very long-term and delighted to say, obviously, we've been environmental investor, very patient shareholders as well. Great, Ben, can you tell us a little about us most? Is there a variety of investment philosophy in managing resource, efficient equity portfolios? Yeah, sure, I'll try to keep this simple, one story is tried to be as well, articulate your investment thesis as simply and as clearly as possible. So we disaggregated when we launched the firm, the ESG, to focus purely on the the environment. We believed, and I do catch a lot of these interviews I give between obviously when we started, which was just based in belief, and what we're doing today now, which is obviously based upon historical evidence and fact. So 17 years ago, 18 years ago, we had a belief that you could invest with an environmental focus, of which there are multiple, so I'll dig a little bit deeper into what our focus is, but there's a consequence of targeting and environmental benefits, so mitigating environmental risk and equity portfolios, whilst also targeting the opportunities that come from targeting environmental exposures, we believe you should be able to target a better and deliver a better risk-adjusted return than a respected benchmark. And really, the fundamental driver behind that was, we believed, if he could, identify better risk-adjusted returns and have an environmental benefit. There's kind of a double-headed win, and you should be able to transfer and scale capital reallocation in size to have a meaningful impact. Eventually, one would have on the cost of capital of companies within our investment universe, give reward companies by going long or overweight, those companies who can create more value using less natural resource and underweight or indeed short those companies who we deem as environmentally inefficient. So the premise being of resource efficiency is, you know, looking at companies really importantly on a sector relative basis to compare using how quantifiable data across three metrics, so in not just a carbon house, we're very much well broadly diversified in that where we believe the environment is not just a carbon issue. So we also look at water and waste the act in aggregate. We would argue companies that manage their carbon or their energy consumption, the amount of waste that they're creating and the amount of water they're considering. We believe if you aggregate those three factors to nominate by revenue and identify those best in class on a sector relative basis, those companies who are producing more using less will probably have pretty strong quality management teams. So the belief at the beginning was if we could identify this data, standardize it and integrate it into traditional portfolio theory that our alpha signal might be driven by a proxy for a new form of quality management yet to be priced by the market. There's quite simple. Fine companies do more, who are doing more by utilizing less as resource efficiency and do they, as a consequence, return more cash shareholders. And our initial evidence back in 2008, when we started on this journey, was very limited actually. We were challenged by a lack of data in terms of historical time series, because the amount of companies producing this data, we only really had the quantum of data were available from 2004, 2005. So we had a very limited back test, but within that limited back test from the modeling work that we did, we did pick up a signal, an alpha signal that proved out this very simple investment thesis that we have. The companies who produce more consuming less should have better operating margins, be able to weather both inflationary and we hope deflationary environments, as a consequence of a more pricing power, and ultimately kind of reverse engineering, so rather than traditionally going look for quality style businesses, when you looked at the businesses from a fundamental perspective, we could identify that we were picking up good quality signals, so typical quality approaches. So there was a quality bias to the portfolio is coming through. So we model now, when we started, this is quite interesting, I guess, against the background that we see today, the macro background. When we started, we only had about 400 companies, I think, in the MSCI world, who disclosed on their carbon, water and waste. Today, we have an excess, I think, of 850 companies, just in the MSCI world. More recently, we've extended our reach into the emerging markets, which is absolutely critical, because as many of your listeners might know what the developed markets have done for the past 40, 50 years, is export their manufacturing to less rigorous environmental regimes, and offshore their manufacturing, so on and so forth, while saying that they managed to reduce their own carbon emissions, but exporting them to the dominoe abroad to developing also world countries. So moving to emerging markets now gives us a much more holistic view of the world, and to be able to take a much more pragmatic view for investors to target regional exposures, as well as sector exposures as well. Ben, you've kind of already touched on this, but Osmosis have always asserted that it's important to draw on objective data and ensure third parties. Can you tell us about Osmosis' team of analysts dedicating to verifying and gathering environmental data? And additionally, what effect does AI add on the process? Yeah, sure. So, when we launched the firm, we looked obviously, because we're systematic and quantitative in our approach, so clearly we're data driven, and we wanted to, you know, examine, explore, interrogate environmental data, to see what not it was fit for purpose, and what we found back in 2008, 2009 was very similar, actually, in a slightly different way, but very similar to what we see today, which is the availability of data from third-party data vendors was suboptimal for utilization and investment process, which would determine the allocation of risk based upon that data. And just going off topic a little bit, I think asset management app of this should be, and historically, happy, and we had continued to do so, be accountable for the risks that we manage on behalf of their investors, be that institutional or retail, you know, when we take that accountability very seriously. So, what we didn't want to do is use suboptimal data to drive the allocation of risk. So, we have to take a very expensive decision, one could say, which was rather than rely on any third-party data feeds, to go and collect clean and standardize this data ourselves. And there was no AI back in 2008, not always we could use anyway. So, it was a manual process, which meant we had to build a team, and finding a team, obviously challenging, because nobody was doing this, so people, you know, you couldn't go reach out into larger organizations and identify people to headhunter way. So, we built a team from scratch. We took a range of young-ish individuals, not necessarily from financial markets background. We didn't want to bring old-school thinking into a new investment approach. So, we wanted to kind of open this opportunity to fresh eyes and fresh thinking. So, we built a team from scratch of people with science-based degrees who had a passion for the environment and who, obviously, clearly believed in our investment thesis, and it was, again, after reiterating it was a belief, and that we would be able to prove this out. So, the team now, as obviously scaled as the amount of the quantum, the breadth of the data has increased over time, and obviously our regional exposure has spread into emerging markets. So, the team now, in terms of numbers, I probably have to ask Lisa where we stand in terms of numbers, as probably around a dedicated team of about 10 to 12 people who are solely dedicated just to doing this. So, they're not spreading their time on other activities. Their day jobs are collecting data, cleaning data, standardizing data, understanding, importantly, the interaction of that data at a company level, to the balance sheet. So, the environmental balance sheet, how it interacts with the financial balance sheet, and, as importantly, understanding and continuing to reach into external start-party data, which a lot of our investors use, to understand and spot where the flaws are, in order to help guide and form educational investors where there might be a misallocation of risk occurring as a consequence of poor quality data. And that has two impacts if you're using bad data. You're misallocating risk, but unfortunately, also, when you come to do the environmental footprints, the environmental footprints don't really stand up. And we have so many multiple evidences of sub-optimal data, driving poor risk allocation, and therefore, fictitious, we would argue environmental footprints. So, neither serving, you know, the opportunity to get better risk adjusted returns, or to mitigate environmental risk in your portfolio. So, everything we do from the data research team, excuse me, is about the quality of the processes that we put around the collection, cleaning, standardizing, and then the integrating of our data into our portfolio construction. You refer to water and waste previously. Carbon emissions has always been the key focus of investors over the last few years, but we're starting to see more regulations in water and waste. As you mentioned, osmosis have always maintained that water and waste is equally important. Can you talk us through that rationale? Yeah, sure. I mean, I guess everything starts with an idea. So, nothing particularly sophisticated about the thought process around this, excuse me, but when we started discussing what data signals we wanted to use, I mean, firstly, you need to identify data where there's both the quantum, you know, the availability of that data and scale and size to be able to make relative observations between companies. So, you needed to be able to not just say, well, this is a good idea, but also be able to gather enough information to prove that idea around. And actually, sitting at home, no doubt as many, again, your view or list has may have found over the last five, 10, 15, 20 years, your water bills have been going up exponentially, depending on where you live in the world. And try going to dispose of your waste at landfill, so your waste costs. And that's just on a personal level at home. So, energy bills going up, water bills going up, waste bills going up. You really just magnify that and scale it by, in a thousand, 10,000 times, depending on the size of the company, relative to your household. And we kind of just assume the corpus would be feeling the same kind of pressure. So, was the data available to look at these other metrics? Would it provide a signal in its own right? So, was it meaningful? We just didn't want to bring in noise into the portfolio. And if we could prove out that there was the quantum, that there was an independent signal from waste and water as well as carbon. And then importantly, if you aggregated the three together, the question we often get asked is, how do you wait those individual factors, where hindsight bias is a wonderful thing. And we now have to optimise that to give a wonderful back to us. But we have no really perceived view of the future pricing of these, either as an externality risk or as a physical cost of the balance sheet. So, we just equally waited each of those factors in the portfolio into a one factor, which is our resource efficiency factor. And what we found as a consequence of that was a much more stable signal. So, if you're just focusing on carbon, they can be wrong. It's a great thing to be doing. Investors should be reducing their carbon exposure if they can within relative risk budgets. But carbon, you know, as an individual factor, is incredibly volatile. As is water and waste, as you could imagine, you know, there's lots of different drivers that can affect companies around the world, depending on their jurisdiction, you know, the way the political wind is blowing, as we're seeing in North America, the moment can have an impact. Things like carbon pricing can have an impact, societal pressure can also have an impact. And of course, the weather, it also can have an impact. So, maybe we should want to say the climate, but on a date. Of this data available, we were surprised in the beginning to identify as much data as we could, to be able to integrate it into a single factor. But once we had that, then we've obviously been collecting that now in some section. And companies disclosing this data, you know, again, we kind of believed in the beginning, why would they be doing this? Not every company has a good corporate citizen, as we all know. But often, you know, and as we see today, it's the dirtiest sectors and the dirtiest companies that often have the best disclosure. Now, are they just good corporate citizens wanting us, people like us may as a favor to provide the data. To some extent, yes, investor pressure obviously has helped that and made sure disclosure has become more meaningful to companies, not just in dirty sectors, but across the whole economy. But they do it because clearly, you know, if you're measuring this data, you know, any corporate that measures any form of data seeks to manage it. And if that data is related to a cost or potential cost or potential risk, then you seek to reduce it. So, you know, again, just common sense. If the company is measuring it, they're managing it, and if it's a cost, then naturally they should be managing to reduce, and those that do that better. Whilst also managing their financial balance sheet, so it's not just all in, you know, we're just going to do this at any cost. There are companies clearly that do do that, but they have to be growing their revenue. It can't be an absence of like no financial performance. And that's what our models ultimately detect. So, a three-factor approach is very unique. We're not aware really of anyone else doing this, how we do it. It is possible to go through external third-party data and get obviously these individual factors towards now, but then you're going back into the discussions around the quality of that data, having no in-house expertise to be able to ascertain whether or not that data is fit for purpose. And really, you know, it's caveat mentor, as we say, by the way. So, again, having that in-house process to give us the in-depth understanding and knowledge to be able to ensure that we have one of the cleanest and longest duration data, surround environmental data, we would argue probably in the world. Engagement has always been a strong focus at Osmosis, and last few launched a collaborative campaign with your clients to target some of the big corporates that are failing to disclose their data. Can you tell us about the campaign and what you're seeking to achieve? Yeah, so engagement, for me, was a challenging conversation. It was a boutique asset manager and I'd argue, obviously, even with 18 billion dollars, where we are still a boutique. We're emerging from that kind of status, but we are a boutique. But engagement, it was always the premise of the firm that you couldn't engage, really, or have a loud voice, you know, when you're running 500 million or billion dollars, you know, your engagement ladder, we probably just get discarded and ignored and, you know, you're a small voice in a large ocean and you just have no impact, and it's expensive. You know, it takes time to do this properly. So, as a firm, you know, despite pressure from mainly consultants and people that score you externally on your activities, over the last 10 years, I guess, was you're not doing that, so we're going to score you down, you should be doing it. It's like we need to focus on what we know, which is really building portfolios and integrating this environmental data. In order that we can find the alpha, so we can scale to a size where engagement matters and you can have some impact. And you've got a client base that, ideally, you could kind of collegially bring in together and utilize the weight of that access and conjunction with yours to have real impact, because the scale of fact comes into play. So, I think it was beginning of last year, you know, we broke through 15, 16 billion dollars of assets, which is reasonably meaningful, but we were running money for some very well-known, very significantly scale pension funds around the world, and we know where there are holes within the data and was kind of a, you know, a red list inside the firm, companies that should be doing better. Around, you know, they might be disclosing only one of the three factors, but we kind of would have seen that they've got access to that data internally, and, you know, why they're not disclosing on, for example, their waste methods. If they're disclosing carbon, and they're disclosing water, why aren't they disclosing waste? We want it for our, you know, selfish purposes internally, because of, you know, strengths and signals statistically, the more data you have available, but are they hiding something, you know, and as stewards of other people's capital, you want to know that answer, you know, is there something this company does not want the wider investment audience or society just to generally know? So, rather than just rushing in, which unfortunately, a lot of engagement campaigns are, and there's been too many of them, and companies complain consistently that there's too many investors asking too many questions in too many different ways, and it just clogged up. Nothing happens, nothing changes. We refined our list, you know, just to a very, there are a few companies that we wanted to start the program with. We reached out to, you know, a group of our clients, and said, look, we believe, and then the first target was Amazon, we believe that they should be disclosing on the state of point, and they're not. Do you agree, don't you, would you join forces with us, so we have more meaningful impact in the scope of that engagement? And maybe, you know, through, you know, this kind of aggregate approach, collegiate approach with all our respective AUMs added together, our position sizes in the company, maybe they might respond, and maybe we might be able to have the meaningful dialogue with them to understand, why not, why not, or, or be, obviously, hopefully, to get them to put into the public day to main this information. And maybe, to some extent, you know, we've seen this before, to educate them on why we need it, you know, we're using this as an investment signal. It's not just a nice to have, it's a need to have, and if you have it, it allows you to score you more effectively, and, you know, if you're doing a good job, and it makes you more efficient relative to your peers, through our models, then, obviously, you get a higher weighting, and more capital is attracted to your company. So, there are net benefits to this. So, we launched the campaign several months ago, filling in excess of $750 billion of combined assets, is now engaged on that campaign. We're trying to get it up to a trillion dollars, so it would be a nice number. We are now getting inbound calls from asset owners saying, who we don't actually manage money for, saying that we've heard about this, could we discuss potentially joining this joint collaboration engagement project with you? And that's, I mean, for me, you look at it and think, wow, that's really a maturing of our business, you know, scaling the firm to an institutional class style business, and actually having the confidence of our own investors, and those now calling in, to want to work with us, because one of the challenges of the small asset manager is, you know, so he's always, he's going to be here tomorrow, you know, reputational risks signing bits of paper with clients, you know, together, and to kind of cross that boundary as well. Really, it kind of indicates to me that, you know, the meaningful impact we can have to scales, and I've always said this, the bigger we scale, the faster we scale, the more assets we run, the louder the voice we have, the more impact that we could potentially have as investors, alongside our clients, and we're kind of seeing that now, which is a really exciting place for the firm to be. You mentioned backlash before, there seems to be a growing backlash against climate mitigation strategies, and seems to be accelerating under Trump's administration. What are your thoughts on how might it impact Osmosis' business? I could talk about this for hours, I could barely after five pints down the pub to be honest to get it all out, but the, so is there a backlash on climate style investing? That's question number one. I would argue not, you know, we added, I didn't know, three billion of assets last year, I mean, we're a small microcosm of the overall, you know, peak as fair asset management, so, you know, but with the exception that proves the rule, I don't know, to be honest, we are seeing obviously in witnessing outflows, but more generally I would argue seeing outflows around more broadly ESG themed funds and investment strategies, and we don't do ESG. Going back in several years, when tech collapsed, an oil went up to 120, 130 baths. Most climate strategies and ESG strategies hemorrhage performance. Multiple reasons for that, you know, mainly down to kind of portfolio construction and really a lack of consistency on the understanding of what it is to be sustainable. That portfolio construction ended up really with portfolios that were just, you know, long tech and long growth and short value, so long tech, short utilities, oil and gas and so on and so forth. So at the end of that year, they were all negative, and that's the large majority of assets, you know, I'd say a 80% of assets run in ESG, maybe 90% were underwater and some quite significantly. And that gave power to the, certainly in the US, of the right-wing movement to say the ESG is a scam, doesn't work, because look at the performance, it's so bad. And rather than the industry turning around and saying, oh, you know, we're kind of facking up, it's not that it doesn't work, it's just that we're really bad at portfolio construction, we didn't really understand, you know, what sustainability meant, you know. For us, sustainability doesn't mean buying more Facebook Apple Netflix and Google, I mean, it's ridiculous. No impact at all. Well, minimal impact, you know, on the environment, there are asset light businesses for, so, you know, where are you going to get the most impact? It's going to be in utilities, the dirty sector, it's not in the asset light sector. So that kind of underperformance gave fuel to the fire of a narrative. Certainly in the US, mainly in the US, actually, this doesn't work, it's a scam, and the pushback started that, you know, that was really, you know, selling the seeds of chaos that one could argue that we're kind of entering into at the moment. And then the US, there is pushback, big pushback, to the extent that, you know, there are many firms, large firms, you know, multi-trillion dollar asset managers who find themselves in a bit of a, also a bit of a dichotomy. So in the US, they are rolling back, teams have been let go, you know, we see that because we get their CVs, you know, coming through. And so, but, and regulators, you know, at a state level, you know, making inroads into legislating against the integration or ESG data into portfolio construction. So, you know, if you suffer a loss as an investor, you know, that leaves you very exposed as an asset manager to litigation. So what do you do? Well, you jumped on the train to begin with with a lack of experience and knowledge, and to develop sub-ultimate portfolios, and what do you do? You need your reaction and get the hell out, because you don't want to open yourselves up to litigation risk under the new Trump administration. That's in the US. What do you do in Europe? It's these big firms. What do you go around telling all your European pension fund clients? And then they were still all in. So you're, you're saying this kind of bifurcation in moral responsibility, you know, in the US, we're doing this because this is what the audience wants to hear. And in Europe and the rest of the world, we're doing this. And that makes no sense at all, you know, it's morally ambiguous at best. And that for us as a firm is opportunity. So, you know, we say we're doubling down into this, because politics is transitory, you know, for your terms, depending where you are, maybe five years, rhetoric is high, emotions are up. Let's dig more coal. Let's make coal great again. I think I heard last week, and you know, it's nonsense. It's compounding the problems for the next administration to come in and address. And those companies or asset managers, my peers or competitors of great scale who have drifted in the proverbial wind on their morality and knowledge on these issues are moving backwards. And into any vacuum, you know, gets sucked in, you know, we would argue new opportunity. And we are being drawn into that vacuum and still seeing as a consequence, not just that, because obviously we have our own brand recognition now, but as big investors step back, it gives specialists the opportunity to flourish. So, we're doubling down, scaling up the firm, seeing more flow come through the doors of consequence. And indeed, you know, just over Christmas, we launched 2 ETFs into North America. We're very contrarian. But the narrative around what we do is not we're here to solve all societies, ways in one for failure by looking at 135 ESG factors, we're just focused on efficiency. And actually, the narrative tying into North America for us, you know, with the Department of Government Efficiency, you know, the words in there, isn't it efficiency? So where are they learning that efficiency is a good thing, you know, like them all, or maybe like them, very marmite style individuals in the administration, there is a pragmatism behind that efficiency narrative. So if you really believe government can do more with less and society will benefit, where if that learning has come from somewhere, yes, I mean, it's common sense, but the learning has come from somewhere, which is from the private sector, you know, so companies do more with less, generate more profit, pay more back to shareholders, take more dividends as owners, so with that narrative plays into what we do, which is where we're talking environmental efficiency. It's efficiency used less, great more. So we're hoping, and again, I'm kind of almost going back to that belief factor that I have back in 2007 and 2008 when we launched the firm that this factor would deliver. I'm kind of also believing that in North America that, you know, not everyone voted for this administration, you know, that I think goes, what is it, 37, 40% of applicable votes are something voted for the Republicans, so, you know, it is a minority, but out of the conversations we're having, there's very much a pragmatism still there that, you know, we can't just talk ourselves out of this problem, and certainly if we're going to compound it, it's only going to be worth, and therefore from an investor's perspective, you know, taking off the morality hat just from a, you know, return targeting perspective, that alpha opportunities should potentially scale greater, because companies will have less time to do more actions with, which require more capital, at probably a greater cost, because a lot of the policies that the US are potentially seeking to bring it are also inflationary, which means there's dive to zero interest rates. The administration is crying out for, and I think it's interest rate decision date today. We'll see whether or not the Fed holds the line or whether or not they are, or also barring the knee. One would imagine that they are independent and they will use the data that's in front of them to make the decisions, rather than a nasty tweet. And if we are seeing a higher for longer environments, then it's going to be a real challenge, and for investors, I mean, it's bad news for the environment, but it, you know, conflict with that, it could be reasonably good news for investors, saying, you know, we wear these two hats at those places where, you know, sometimes bad news is like good news on one side, you know, saying we, I think we hit 425 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. This week, which is way above expectations, and the scientists are saying that's filled by you know, the forest fires around the world over the last 12 months. That's awful. I mean, that's really bad, and it's just kind of at this doom loop, the more aggressive the climate becomes, the more you get the fires and kind of the end of this unfortunate loop. But on the other side, that kind of other side is okay, so that means we really do need to add corpus are going to have to prepare. They're going to have to make investments, along with they delay them, the more it's going to cost them, and our models pick out those companies that are already addressing this, so they're kind of ahead of the curve because of relative observation at a sector level. So I would rather personally be with position in companies that are addressing this and doing it in a financially astute way, rather than bearing my head in the sand and buying companies that really aren't taking any action, or going to use this new administration cover to reverse policies. It's a very long-winded answer, as I said, five points appear down the pub, and I could talk about it for hours because there's multiple different aspects to this that can be discussed, but that's kind of a short form early London morning, no points, conversation about the topic. You know, industry has been more focused on biodiversity of late, and of course, we had our first biodiversity caught in 2024. Is this most of us being here by diversity? Yeah, we haven't implemented this. It's really important, clearly this, but again, one of the challenges of being in the asset management industry is not just to jump into trends, quickly, is you end up regretting it, and we've seen a lot of biodiversity funds launch over the last few years, actually, this is just a pissier thing. The meaningfulness of the data, the quantum, again, I keep going back to that. It's not really there. It's very subjective. It's very third-party driven, often not by actually the larger firms and more specialist firms, and you see a lack of correlation between obviously those potential data sources as well. So you've got to choose whose version of the truth you want to believe, and then you're tied to that version of truth forever, pretty much, because jumping ship and going to another version of the truth, you then need to explain to investors why you made the wrong decision in the first time. So rather than just jumping in head first and saying, "Oh, it's a great way to raise money quite quickly," and you know, often they've got a small cap focus to these funds as well, so there's not much capacity, so how much rarely are they investing behind it? You know, there's a short-term grab for a billion dollars, and let's hope it all works out, and it sounds good, and we can take a few boxes. We took a step back, again, really like we did when we launched the firm, which is this is really important. Let's do a study. Let's see if the data exists. There's a possible twin to integrate. We reached the decision that it wasn't. So instead of leaping in, we took one of our guys, very smart guy, as you should go off and do a PhD in this, and we'll fund it. So I always forget whether or not he went to Oxford or Cambridge. I think it's Oxford, and he's into year two or coming up to year three now as that project, and his job is obviously to advance, you know, his own knowledge and his PhD, but to come back to the office afterwards and tell us how to do this, and to do it well and properly, and be at the forefront, a robust and, you know, defensible approach to integrating, either by investing into existing portfolios, or creating new portfolios to cater and absorb, you know, not just 500 million, but significantly more capacity. And I caught up with him a couple of weeks ago, and he said, he said, it's fascinating, it's amazing, we were absolutely right. I found all the reasons why we shouldn't be doing this. And I said, I was so exciting, and he said, yeah, I'm writing a paper about it. I said, and I said, but if we found the solution, yeah, unfortunately, the answer was no. So we say, rather again, then just saying, okay, come back to the office, let's start building someone, we have to wait, you know, patiently wait while he does his research to find a credible solution. And if we can't find it, we won't do it, you know, this is not gathering assets at any cost, is trying to do this the right way and the best way for our investors in a way that we can be held accountable, defensible, defending our investment pieces, the strategy, the data, and be accountable for that risk that we're privileged to run this risk, you know, where's how we feel. We've got to be accountable for that as well. You know, we're not there yet, but we hope to be, maybe next year. We've seen poor quality momentum driven markets in recent months, given Osmos as natural buyers to high quality companies, to these short-term low-quality rallies focus Osmos as even more on risk control and challenging your research assumptions. Yeah, of course, yeah, you know, it's not an optimal market environment for, you know, where momentum is really the only factor that's delivering returns. And I read an interesting paper last night on this kind of passive-active debate and the amount of passive assets that are driving this kind of market-captored exposure. And, you know, I know many of my peers who are kind of more fundamentally based active managers are kind of almost threatening the towels. You know, you're seeing earnings reports come in with, you know, great earnings, nice forecast, and stocks falling, 15, 20%. You've got utility companies, the kind of however, an AI link in the US, one's called Vistra. You know, it's moving around like a mean coin, you know, it's not normal market dynamics up play. And there's lots of things, you know, again, we could talk about it for hours, liquidity in the markets, the market structure changing with passive-relative to active. But we are, so much as we've always counseled investors that if you get, you know, long beta style, you know, you can argue whether it's junk or not. I guess that depends whether or not you believe in AI, you know, and this company is like Apple on record P's, again, up 3, 4% a day. If that's normal, if that's the future, and that does challenge us, obviously to re-look and we don't change our risk exposures because we are a long-term investment strategy within very tight risk frameworks. But the quarantine, we're obviously always, you know, trying to identify, you know, what are the market environments where it's work better, which sectors are working in, which regions, what's driving that. In order to enhance the models, but enhancing models is not something you do overnight. You know, we're not active managers where, you know, we can make a decision on Friday and come in the next year to do our money. And the advancement to our models can take years, you know, the last big adjustment we did was taking three factors. We need to have companies disposing on all three factors. And we did a, I think, an 18-month study on two factors. Was there a signal in that we identified that there was, but it shouldn't be scaled strongly with the risk, according to a two-factor company. I think that was two years from start to finish, and bringing all the clients in to make an adjustment to the model. So, while we see what we're going on in the markets today, is it a cause for concern? No, not a tool, because the long-term trend is clear. I mean, if rhetoric means that climate change goes away, and we just want to pollute for, you know, in scale, maximized profits, deregulate everything, the pendulum will swing the other way. It's really like politics in itself, yes. You know, you get a government that comes in, and it goes too far to the right. The next thing you get is a government that's far too far to the left, you know, the way we've seen, where we are in the UK at the moment. You know, we've gone from kind of the Tory party who are, you know, leaning into the extremes of the right, trying to capture kind of that further right, far right vote. And then we end up with a Labour government here to lean slightly more left, and now it's balancing a little bit as they're worried about growth, trying to be more sensualist in their approach. And investment styles swing in a similar way, you know, it's on a, you can't pre-determine the timeline, ask any value investor that, or any kind of conservative low-voltile investor, you know, factors come in and out of fashion as the macro changes. The one thing we are confident of, though, unfortunately, I have to say, is that the climate is not transitory. The political and the macro is, and if we were to try and second guess, you know, what the market is we're going to do tomorrow or next week or next month. We're going to be crazy. You know, we're not market timing. You can almost argue that we're almost trend following. You know, the trend is clear. The climate is deteriorating. There will be more environmental risk within portfolios, and where do you want to position your wealth, your clients' wealth, for the future, and for the longer term. I would argue it's in a risk-controlled, environmentally-aware investment strategy that will do well, as pressure comes back into markets because of that kind of natural quality bias that we have, but also protecting you against, you know, these not even black swan events, but against, you know, these environmental catastrophes, as we've just seen in, you know, LA and Valencia, I mean, you can go on a long list. Those are two the meta headlines, but all over the world. You know, insurers are going to be feeling that banks will be feeling that, and that will start eventually to be getting priced into the market, but it's not an overnight reaction. Markets, you know, have their own momentum at the moment. I see today that the tax is just another record high. You know, markets are not responding to what people are feeling, but there is kind of one other aspect that, you know, is the governments around the world, and I'm pretty much sure it's the same. In Australia, it is over here in the UK and across Europe. And the end in the US is the one thing they have in common, as they also, they've got no money. There's no money for, you know, social services. We're cutting back on everything. Meanwhile, they're all less stock markets are trading at record highs and earnings are coming in pretty strong, profit margins are widening. And I mean, somebody at some point will connect those dots and maybe decide where's all the money gone. You know, we'll banks are up what 40, 50, 60 percent on a one-year basis, but there's a bit of a signal there, you know, corporate earnings, you know, as I said, are pretty strong when earnings season at the moment. So the corporate's making record profits. Society has no money. What's the next thing? Well, it's taxation possibly coming to corporate's. Where do you want to be positioned? A portfolio outside of the environmental aspects, where you own companies with better margins, operating margins. What's one of the things that leads companies to have better operating margins, according to our models, those companies that, you know, have adjusted their operating models to mitigate environmental risk, so they could see in less energy water or waste, because that's a proxy for lots of other things going on inside a company. And again, going back to that quality management argument. Our signals don't just pick up these, but they lend themselves to identifying other things that a company is doing that we're not targeting. Because if you're managing measuring and reducing your environmental balance sheet as a corporate leader, you're probably managing your financial balance sheet and other aspects of the business just as well, if not better. Ben, thanks for joining us on turning points. Is there any sort of parting thoughts? Well, we're coming to Australia. Again, at the end of February, some deeply hoping that it's not a climate change event that we arrive in. One of the times I'm flying into Australia, I've taken photos out of the window of smoke. I remember standing up, never been. I think I've been once, twice before, and I'm taking a picture of my colleague Robbie and Sydney. I think it was a maybe Sydney element to see how far away it was before he disappeared through the lens, through the cloud of smoke. So firstly, we're truly hoping that we arrive and it's just nice, lovely weather. And secondly, we would just ask investors. I guess investors are smart. They're long term and they need to separate their long term investment philosophy from that of the political rhetoric. And that's what we're hearing and seeing. Core puts have been pretty poor in the US so far, responding to Trump. Last time he announced he was leaving Paris, there were multiple state level responses saying we're here. We're going to keep to Paris. There have been some still, which is great to see. But in the corporate world, it's been reasonably silent as they're deciding how to navigate this challenging period. But some of the conversations I'm having with corporate leaders in America are that they think this is kind of insane, that it will probably backfire and that investors, you know, when momentum starts to build against this, because they know it's the right thing to do, not just for the environment, but economically as well. It's going to be investors, asset owners and society, who kind of take that stand of common sense, you know. You know, as you're on the streets and protests and throw paint over, you know, such paintings in museums and things. But, you know, you can vote with your money and vote with it a long time. That's all we pass. Thank you very much. It's been pleasure.