David Willetts: Yeah, I think much — appreciate the question because it’s an important question. When you look at what we do, which is activism, our view on activism hasn’t changed. We have — I’d have to count them, but probably eight to 10 companies that we have invested in, where we have a degree of board representation. Those companies are in different stages of maturity in terms of what we’re doing, and you can look at any number of the ones that are out there. When you take a look at what happened in the second quarter, sometimes the companies move in predictable ways, sometimes they do not. In quarter two, we had a confluence of events that across multiple positions. We had reductions in many of the positions, right?
When I look at the actual plan and the actual capability of management and what they’re looking to do over the next, not just, months, but quarters and years, we weren’t actually very encouraged by our positions. We do adjust them from time to time, but I’d say with our long positions, I’m very proud of a number of positions that we have, right? You can point to each one of them, and see, I think, a clear progression over time, but it is over time, turnaround, which is effectively what we’re doing with activism, oftentimes are bumpy in and of themselves, but we’re very comfortable in our long positions, right? We do reassess it, not everyone is a winner, but we’re comfortable in where we’re headed. So nothing has really changed in terms of our longs.
We continue to execute the play that we’ve executed. When you take a look at the short positions, I think that’s where you do see a change, not necessarily in strategy, but the philosophy is then, we want to make sure you attempt to balance risk with the, between our long and our short positions. I think as Carl, put out in the earnings release, and we’ve said several times, we need to adjust those because it was overly bearish. So it’s specifically what has changed. It’s not the degree of interest in hedging our position as to have a rational balanced portfolio, but we said the level needs to change. So just to quote some numbers, and I refer you to the documents that have been filed in the Q this afternoon, I think that 04 o’clock, you’ll see that the overall size of the short position has materially changed if you go back to December quarter four, right?
Just directional numbers, I think you will have the specific ones. I believe last year at the end, it was a net negative 47%, right? You get to the end of quarter one, it’s negative 38%. At the end of quarter two, it’s negative 18%. So you see a market reduction in the shorts through that time. Now obviously some of that was because longs performed differently in quarter one, quarter two, but the primary end mover of that was the shorts. So I’d say the strategy hasn’t changed in what we’re doing with longs, I think the strategy of shorting still makes sense, but as we’ve acknowledged that needed to change in terms of the overall balance, and we are — you are constantly reviewing the shorts, we’re obviously taking a very hard look at what is the right position to have, not just on a macro basis, but within different sectors and we reevaluate it, and that’s — sorry, Dan, that’s — I’m remiss, because I’ve been talking about our invested companies and our shorts, but I think the operating companies also, you’ll bear some mentioned, right?
