Steven Bregman: That falls on my broad shoulders. One of the deficits, well first of all, I’ll simply say my fault, I should have done it. And as happened with this particular cycle, I had that document in front of me on my computer screen for quite some weeks and other things kept coming up and I never quite got to it. And that’s been a bit of a pattern and it’s not a pattern that should be repeated. And one of the deficits we’ve had operationally is we haven’t really had the kind of professional at Horizon Kinetics. I’ll call it professional editorial and editing function or layer for various kinds of public facing documents and content producing. And I’ve been on the lookout for qualified people to do that for quite a long time.
And I’ve had different experiments with people with different qualifications. And just so happens a contributing reason why this one was actually posted to our website is that in recent weeks, and I mean this only in the last two or three weeks, I’ve been beginning to work with somebody who I think fits the bill and he’s an extremely qualified, very seasoned professional author and journalist, particularly financial journalist. And he’s actually started helping me out in recent weeks and he’s freed me up to take a look at this kind of thing and he can do it himself. We’ve so far been playing around with kind of like who takes which assignments. And if he works out overtime, it’s early yet and but if someone like him actually works out on a longer term basis, I think we would actually establish a department and proper style, style book and so forth for everything we do and things will work more smoothly.
So anyway, I think we’re on track for that. And next order of business on this small end of things is to catch up with the prior two or three that have been skipped.
Murray Stahl: Okay, thanks Steve. I’m sure we’ll get up in due course and okay, what’s next Thérèse?
Thérèse Byars: Next is management has mentioned that they, apart from Jay Kesslen, Thérèse Byars, and now there are three new directors, are they only employees of FRMO and that management takes no compensation. Could management explain what the costs are in the operating expenses of the income statements as well as what determines the fluctuations in FRMO’s operating expenses? Operating expenses were broken down into more detailed lines in annual reports. For example, €œemployee compensation and benefits€ until 2019 where they began to be rolled into a single SG&A expense line. So it is no longer as clear.
Murray Stahl: Okay, well maybe we should reveal it. So Steve and I, we’re not taking any money, so we’re not getting anything because we own the stock and if it goes up, we’ll make money on it. The expenses primarily are the professional fees of the audit, the accounting, that line of country, that’s the primary. There’s the primary fees. There’s some fees associated with OTC markets. There’s some computer stuff to the degree that we buy electricity for cryptocurrency, there’s that. That’s the primary stuff. Directors don’t get cash compensation. We give them some options to buy FRMO stock and sometimes the stock goes up and they exercise it and sometimes the stock doesn’t go up and they expire unexercised and that’s what directors get paid.
So we’re not giving cash compensation to directors. Occasionally we have a legal bill, nothing big. There’s a question, we need research, can we do X or should we not do X? And we go to an outside law firm and that’s an expense and doesn’t always happen. So that’s a variability. Those are basically the expenses. I don’t think I’m missing anything important. So anyway there you have it. If you need to break down, I’m sure we can obtain that view.
