So it still hasn’t discounted reality, so you just had to stay away. What we did in FRMO is, we were nibbling away when we thought it was appropriate at Winland shares and we thought that was the best use of the capital given what was going on and based number of shares and Winland itself is not, we have liquid, we didn’t buy a tremendous number of shares, but the price we got Winland at so far we made a, I would say a respectable profit at. So that’s how, that’s what we’re doing in investment sense. During the collapse it just didn’t make sense to be very active in this area other than what I just told you and we weren’t very active. In the future, we’re getting more constructive and we’re probably going to be interested in buying some equipment at some point.
But we want to buy and it’s not everything we do. We really weren’t interested in buying used equipment that had been used for three plus years because it’s nearing the end of its useful life. Yes, we could, we could have repaired it and throw some money into it, but I don’t know if we’d ultimately break even or not. We didn’t want to do that. So our next move, if we decide is the right move, we’re probably going to buy some state-of-the-art equipment. And don’t forget, we did very, very maybe a month or two ago we did buy some equipment in consensus mining, brand new state-of-art equipment, which is now functioning and earning a very high rate of return. Remember, when you buy equipment, you always have be cognizant of the approaching halving.
So at this stage, we’re going to have to buy some new equipment. At least we think that’s the best value. So I hope that’s thorough enough.
Thérèse Byars: Next question. What are management’s thoughts on oil royalty businesses making acquisitions right now at the expense of shareholder dilution, for example, as is the case for Sitio Royalties acquiring Brigham Minerals?
Murray Stahl: Okay, well, let’s just say that’s a very elegantly phrased question. Thank you so much for phrasing it that way. And basically we don’t want to, I or let’s put it this way, I don’t agree that it makes sense to acquire royalty interests for equity like we’ve done in a transaction that you described. So I’ll explain why. The royalty, no matter how good the royalty is, the royalty is finite. Sooner or later, so every oil royalty has a decline curve. Sooner or later it will produce no oil, even if it’s great and lasts long period of time. The equity is forever. So equity is a perpetuity. So generally speaking, that’s one of the reasons, and this is generalizable to acquisitions in a lot of businesses. You buy a business, whatever it is, in this case it’s royalties, but it could be technology, it could be machinery, it could be even pharmaceuticals, it could be anything.
However brilliant, let’s use the example of pharmaceutical, however brilliant it is, however wonderful it is, the pace of human knowledge and human progress, it continues. And let’s say it was a pharmaceutical, one of two things are going to happen. Either A, it’s going to go off patent and you’ll get a lot less revenue for it, or B, which is more likely in the fullness of time, some company will develop something which is a superior treatment to what currently exists. So when you offer stock for someone else’s business, the business you buy is going to have finite life. The stock you were offering has changed to that has an infinite life. And that’s the problem with using equity in acquisitions. Now, books are written about in the seventies.
