FRMO Corporation (OTC:FRMO) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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This was very popular and textbooks are written, case studies are written at major universities about using equity to buy a variety of businesses. The idea was, it was very similar. If you think about to what we now call modern portfolio theory, you would use equity to buy a variety of businesses. Every business has its own cyclicality and if you’re very clever about it, you’d buy a bunch of businesses where the cyclicality of one will offset the cyclicality of the other and you will develop a stable earnings and revenue stream. But the problem is every business is like a human being. It has a finite life and the equity has an infinite life. So ultimately it’s not a sensible strategy and I don’t think very highly of it. And when the reason is why we don’t use equity very much to buy things at FRMO.

So that’s how I feel about that.

Thérèse Byars: Next, being on the Board of Directors and large shareholder of TPL, would management be able to speak on why Texas Pacific Land Corporation does not publish any kind of “proved, probable and possible reserves” analysis in their annual reports as other royalty businesses like Brigham, Blackstone, and Fifer Energy do? The TPL 10-K does not exactly make clear why these figures are “unavailable”. In March, 2022, Bloomberg article noted that the Permian, the “Permian Basin is uniquely positioned to become the world’s most important growth engine for oil production.” So it seems like making the data public on TPL’s reserves should be beneficial for shareholder returns, unless it wouldn’t, in which case shareholders should know about this as well?

Murray Stahl: Well, all I can say in the answer to that question is given my position on the board, number one, given the current circumstances, which if you read the SEC filings, you’ll know what the current circumstances are. I’m just not in a position to comment on that particular subject. So I just, I normally like to answer every question, but I’m just not liberty to answer that question in the manner that is phrased. So unfortunately I’m going to have to decline to answer that.

Thérèse Byars: Okay. The next question. Could management give us an update on FRMO’s MIAX Investments now that Miami International Holdings has filed for an IPO, what is the outlook for MIAX’s asset classes? Does management think it will gain market share? For example, spike futures appear to trade in a similar manner to MIAX, but with the added friction of lower liquidity, why would traders want to switch to trading with this new instrument? Does MIAX have any pricing power versus other exchanges?

Murray Stahl: Well, let’s put it this way. The best way to judge MIAX is just to go on the website and look at the volume. So all exchanges, the profitability is really a function of volume. So to do more volume, it raises the expenses a little bit, but doesn’t raise the expenses a lot. So in a really bad market, the volume contracts, and in MIAX’s case it actually didn’t contract, even the last year was a pretty rotten market. The volume contracts and there’s very little you can do to cut expenses because it’s so efficient, the margins are just so high. So what I can tell you is that in the world of exchanges, we’re going to create just completely new and just amazing, and I think that’s the best way to talk about sets of assets.

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