In your example the there is still no difference between dividends and buybacks. With a dividend the equity investors receive a total of 198 + 30 = 228. With a buyback the equity investors receive 198 + 30 = 228. You are right that the single remaining shareholder receives more of this 238 in the case of a buyback but in return the remaining shareholder runs much more risk.
For example, let’s take a company with a cash flow of 1400 in a good economy and 900 in a weak economy with both equally likely. The required return for the equity investor is 15%. Without any debt the value of the company is then (1400 + 900 / 2) / 1.15 = 1000. In a good economy the return for the unlevered equity is 40% and in a bad economy it is -10% for an average of 15%.
Now let’s add 50% debt with an interest rate of 5%. The debt investor will always receive 500 + 5% = 525 and so the expected return of the debt investor is always 5%. The equity investor will receive 875 in a strong economy and 375 in a weak economy. In a strong economy the return will be 75% for the equity investor but in a bad economy the return will be -25% with an average of 25%. In other words the volatility of returns is much higher.
The share buybacks in your example also do not inflate the share price. The only way the company would receive the loan is if there are expected future cash flows to pay off the debt. And these future cash flows are already discounted into the value of the company and the share price. The price of the firm is the same before and after the issuance of the debt.
Inflation stayed stubbornly high in April, potentially reinforcing the chances that interest rates could stay higher for longer, according to a gauge released Friday that the Federal Reserve follows closely.
The personal consumption expenditures price index, which measures a variety of goods and services and adjusts for changes in consumer behavior, rose 0.4% for the month excluding food and energy costs, higher than the 0.3% Dow Jones estimate.
On an annual basis, the gauge increased 4.7%, 0.1 percentage point higher than expected, the Commerce Department reported.
Including food and energy, headline PCE also rose 0.4% and was up 4.4% from a year ago, higher than the 4.2% rate in March.
So Jerome Powell pretty much executed any Bulls lol
TWO more rate hikes possible this year.
The central bank’s 18 policymakers envision raising their key rate by an additional half-point this year, to about 5.6%, according to economic forecasts they issued Wednesday.
The economic projections revealed a more hawkish Fed than many analysts had expected. Twelve of the 18 policymakers forecast at least two more quarter-point rate increases. Four supported a quarter-point increase. Only two envisioned keeping rates unchanged. The policymakers also predicted that their benchmark rate will stay higher for longer than they did three months ago.
“We understand the hardship that high inflation is causing, and we remain strongly committed to bring inflation back down to our 2% goal,” Fed Chair Jerome Powell said at a news conference. “The process of getting inflation down is going to be a gradual one — it’s going to take some time.”
Thoughts on high yield dividend covered call ETFs like JEPI, XYLD, SVOL? Not qualified dividends so taxed as income, but yields of 11-17.5% seems pretty good?
On June 22 2023 10:00 BlackJack wrote: Thoughts on high yield dividend covered call ETFs like JEPI, XYLD, SVOL? Not qualified dividends so taxed as income, but yields of 11-17.5% seems pretty good?
I don't know them but do they outperform the market over the long term? I'd also look at downward volatility. In general there's no free lunch in finance and higher returns mean higher risk.
On June 22 2023 10:00 BlackJack wrote: Thoughts on high yield dividend covered call ETFs like JEPI, XYLD, SVOL? Not qualified dividends so taxed as income, but yields of 11-17.5% seems pretty good?
I don't know them but do they outperform the market over the long term? I'd also look at downward volatility. In general there's no free lunch in finance and higher returns mean higher risk.
In the long-term, no. My understanding is they make premium income by selling covered call options, so in a short term downward or sideways trending market where the calls expire OTM they do quite well but in the long-term their upside is going to be capped compared to the market. My thought being it seems like a pretty decent return as a hedge against a market downturn.
Okay that makes sense thanks. Personally, I think niche products like that are not very useful for retail investors. What does an ETF like that add to a portfolio with stocks and bonds. If you want to protect against a downturn increase the allocation of capital to short-term government bonds or cash. If you want more risk do the opposite. ETFs like that usually have more costs as well because it has to pay the premium for the calls and it benefits less from economies of scale.
On May 20 2023 07:08 Mohdoo wrote: That's correct, Blackjack. The measure of "is this a net positive or a net negative" is not "has this existed before". I have not researched dividends to the extent I have stock buyback, so I can't comment on that. But if they are the same thing, then dividends are also bad. If there are differences between dividends and buyback, which I think is likely, i won't comment on dividends.
Dividends are essential for the operation of the economy.
People work together to provide operating capital for an enterprise so that when the enterprise makes money they can take a portion of the profits. That portion is called a dividend. A company issues an amount of its earnings to all of its owners. That’s how all of this works.
Being against dividends is like being against the very concept of private enterprise in terms of how revolutionary it is. You’re somewhat more extreme than Lenin.
I feel like I specifically said I don't know about dividends and said I won't comment on it. What you are describing is a practice which I think is distinct from stock buyback. Can you elaborate on why you consider these 2 things to be the same?
Was editing it, just took a while to write it out on my phone. Sorry, see above.
I understand the comparison, but after some investigating, it appears there is indeed both a qualitative and quantitative difference between the 2. The general gist is the same, but one is significantly more underhanded than the other.
Can you explain what about this article is not true?
I am having a really hard time seeing why this is ok in your eyes.
All of it isn’t true except the part where they said that it’s generally a wash with dividends.
They don’t increase value. If I buy out half the shareholders I have to give them half the cash. The remaining half have twice as many shares in a business half as big.
Earnings per share is irrelevant and nobody thinks it isn’t. Company A makes $20 per share per year. Company B only makes $10. Which offers a greater return on investment? You would immediately say “it depends on the cost of the shares obviously”. Well done, you’ve just invented the P/E ratio, what they actually use. EPS isn’t used in compensation for executives without accounting for the number of shares outstanding. It’s like they’re doing business penis enlargement spam ads “make your EPS higher with this one weird trick the board doesn’t want you to know about”.
They say that stock buybacks don’t create lasting value etc. but they’re not meant to, they’re literally meant to take excess cash out of the business and return it to the owners so that the owners can do anything else with it. They’re a dividend. Apple exists to make money for its owners. It makes a shitload of money and then gives it back to the owners. A growing business may take profits and reinvest them if that’s what the board (elected by the shareholders) select as the strategy but there’s only so big any business can get. If you reinvest your profits then next year you have even more profits and then you reinvest those and eventually there is nothing left to do with the money and so you go “fuck it, it really belongs to our shareholders anyway, they can have it back and get a steak dinner or whatever idk”. And then some moron writes an article saying that literally giving the shareholders their excess money back doesn’t create lasting value for the shareholders. Presumably it’s better for Apple to just stack it up forever?
Their buyback “loss” stuff is laughably bad accounting because you can’t take a loss from giving your owners back their own money because you’re both sides in that transaction. It wouldn’t make sense. Who took the loss? There’s a reason that shareholder transactions are explicitly excluded from the income statements which is something they got around by calling it a paper loss. Like this is something they teach very early in accounting courses. Try to follow their argument for a minute. A company has $100 and 10 shareholders each with 10 shares. The company decides to buy back 50 shares for $50, taking half from each. The remaining shareholders each own 5 shares out of the 50 outstanding. What happened to the other 50 the company owns? Well they could be retired but if not then the 10 shareholders each theoretically owns 1/10 of the 50 which puts them right back where they started. Anyway, now the company only has $50 in cash, not $100 in cash, and so the genius writing their argument will say that the value of the shares has halved and therefore the company has taken a $50 loss. But what kind of loss could that be? There wasn’t a fire. Nothing was destroyed. If they overpaid for the 50 shares then they were overpaying themselves, they gave money to the people that they exist to give money to.
The airlines shit is just robber capitalism. The owners gut the business and pay out the profits to the shareholders then cry when it all falls apart. That’s just Reaganomics for you. You can thank Jack Welch for doing that with GE and he certainly didn’t need buybacks to do it.
The argument that buybacks disproportionately benefit the shareholders is a weird one. You might as well say that high oil prices disproportionately benefit people with oil wells. Dividends would disproportionately benefit the exact same group. When Apple makes a shitload of money that is going to disproportionately benefit people with Apple shares over people without Apple shares. That’s the argument they’re making. But they’re presenting it as a buyback issue that the richest 10% own 84% of stocks. Of course the rich people own the stocks, that’s why they’re rich. If they didn’t own more stuff than regular people we wouldn’t call them the rich. If it turned out that the poorest Americans actually had the majority of the wealth then I would have a lot more questions.
The whole article is nothing but flat out lies and misrepresentations that are somehow worse than the lies. It’s just TikTok accounting. When you actually try to struggle through the implications of what they’re trying to argue it’s mind blowing in its stupidity. It’s as if they made the argument that American welfare spending disproportionately favours Americans over Canadians when Canada is actually geographically a bigger portion of the continent of North America. You spend a minute trying to wrap your head around what you just read and then you just can’t even.
I agree the article is awful, but the stock buyback does have an issue that dividends don't have: stock isn't valued at what the company is worth today, but at how much money it's expected to make in the future. Apple isn't worth a trillion dollars because it has a trillion dollars worth of "assets", it's worth a trillion dollars because shareholders believe Apple is consistently going to make a lot of profit. Now let's revisit dividend and buybacks, but taking the share of future profit that each shareholder will own into account.
The company issued 100 shares, each are valued at $1, so the company is worth $100. It now takes out a very cheap loan of $198 and buys back 99 shares at double what they were valued at. There is now a single shareholder with 1 share. The company is worth $2 on paper (100 shares at $2 minus a $198 loan), but the shareholder isn't on the hook for the loan. His 1 share in the company is also worth $2 now, though, just as all the other shares that were bought out with borrowed money. However, all the company's ideas and things are intact. The company sells lots of stuff next year and pays all its profit, $30, in dividend. The single remaining shareholder now has $30 in cash. If the company goes bankrupt because of its unwise loans the next day, he'll still have his $30 in cash.
Compare this to the case where there is no buyout: the shares don't inflate in price due to a loan-driven buyout, and the next year, $30 profit (maybe even call it $32 because there's no interest to be paid on any loans) is paid out as $0.32 to each shareholder.
The problem isn't directly with buybacks,, which are fine in a vacuum, it's with using cheap, government-issued loans to distort share prices through buybacks.
Could the company instead have taken out a loan and just paid that cash out in dividend? Maybe, I don't know the laws, but I doubt that it'd be legal.
I'm sorry to tell you that you can't do maths.
Let's say the company has $100 of net assets. So maybe $50 cash, $30 equipment, $100 property, -$80 debt, -$100 treasury stock. It nets to 0 because it's a balance sheet and the balance sheet has to balance.
Then it borrows $198. So now it has $248 cash, -$278 debt. But it still has net $100 of assets. Then it disburses $198 in stock buybacks. To do this we're crediting cash $198 (because you credit to decrease an asset account) and debiting stockholders equity $198 (or more precisely treasury stock $99, APIC $99). Our balance sheet still balances, now we have $50 cash, $30 equipment, $100 property, -$278 debt, $98 stockholders equity.
This company does not have a value of $100 anymore, it has a value of -$98. It's bankrupt. Very very bankrupt.
Where you went wrong with your maths was that you debited the value of the treasury stock to assets rather than stockholders equity. You said that the company that has handed cash back in a stock buyback has gotten an asset just as valuable as cash in exchange. But it hasn't, that's not how stock buybacks work. It can't own a partnership interest in itself, it has dissolved a partnership interest by buying back the stock, the people who have increased the value are the remaining other shareholders, not the company. Imagine it as the simplest possible scenario, two brothers inherit a company together but only one of them wants to run it. The company sells half of its property for cash and then gives the brother who wants to cash out that cash. It now, in your scenario, "owns" his share in itself. What we're left with in reality though is one brother who owns 100% of a company that's half the size that it was before.
Your entire scenario is the accounting equivalent of just failing to carry the one when doing division. Sorry. You kept the company the same size while giving away 99% of its assets. Once you imagine the two brothers it should be clear why cashing out 99% of the owners makes the company smaller.
On May 20 2023 07:08 Mohdoo wrote: That's correct, Blackjack. The measure of "is this a net positive or a net negative" is not "has this existed before". I have not researched dividends to the extent I have stock buyback, so I can't comment on that. But if they are the same thing, then dividends are also bad. If there are differences between dividends and buyback, which I think is likely, i won't comment on dividends.
Dividends are essential for the operation of the economy.
People work together to provide operating capital for an enterprise so that when the enterprise makes money they can take a portion of the profits. That portion is called a dividend. A company issues an amount of its earnings to all of its owners. That’s how all of this works.
Being against dividends is like being against the very concept of private enterprise in terms of how revolutionary it is. You’re somewhat more extreme than Lenin.
I feel like I specifically said I don't know about dividends and said I won't comment on it. What you are describing is a practice which I think is distinct from stock buyback. Can you elaborate on why you consider these 2 things to be the same?
Was editing it, just took a while to write it out on my phone. Sorry, see above.
I understand the comparison, but after some investigating, it appears there is indeed both a qualitative and quantitative difference between the 2. The general gist is the same, but one is significantly more underhanded than the other.
Can you explain what about this article is not true?
I am having a really hard time seeing why this is ok in your eyes.
All of it isn’t true except the part where they said that it’s generally a wash with dividends.
They don’t increase value. If I buy out half the shareholders I have to give them half the cash. The remaining half have twice as many shares in a business half as big.
Earnings per share is irrelevant and nobody thinks it isn’t. Company A makes $20 per share per year. Company B only makes $10. Which offers a greater return on investment? You would immediately say “it depends on the cost of the shares obviously”. Well done, you’ve just invented the P/E ratio, what they actually use. EPS isn’t used in compensation for executives without accounting for the number of shares outstanding. It’s like they’re doing business penis enlargement spam ads “make your EPS higher with this one weird trick the board doesn’t want you to know about”.
They say that stock buybacks don’t create lasting value etc. but they’re not meant to, they’re literally meant to take excess cash out of the business and return it to the owners so that the owners can do anything else with it. They’re a dividend. Apple exists to make money for its owners. It makes a shitload of money and then gives it back to the owners. A growing business may take profits and reinvest them if that’s what the board (elected by the shareholders) select as the strategy but there’s only so big any business can get. If you reinvest your profits then next year you have even more profits and then you reinvest those and eventually there is nothing left to do with the money and so you go “fuck it, it really belongs to our shareholders anyway, they can have it back and get a steak dinner or whatever idk”. And then some moron writes an article saying that literally giving the shareholders their excess money back doesn’t create lasting value for the shareholders. Presumably it’s better for Apple to just stack it up forever?
Their buyback “loss” stuff is laughably bad accounting because you can’t take a loss from giving your owners back their own money because you’re both sides in that transaction. It wouldn’t make sense. Who took the loss? There’s a reason that shareholder transactions are explicitly excluded from the income statements which is something they got around by calling it a paper loss. Like this is something they teach very early in accounting courses. Try to follow their argument for a minute. A company has $100 and 10 shareholders each with 10 shares. The company decides to buy back 50 shares for $50, taking half from each. The remaining shareholders each own 5 shares out of the 50 outstanding. What happened to the other 50 the company owns? Well they could be retired but if not then the 10 shareholders each theoretically owns 1/10 of the 50 which puts them right back where they started. Anyway, now the company only has $50 in cash, not $100 in cash, and so the genius writing their argument will say that the value of the shares has halved and therefore the company has taken a $50 loss. But what kind of loss could that be? There wasn’t a fire. Nothing was destroyed. If they overpaid for the 50 shares then they were overpaying themselves, they gave money to the people that they exist to give money to.
The airlines shit is just robber capitalism. The owners gut the business and pay out the profits to the shareholders then cry when it all falls apart. That’s just Reaganomics for you. You can thank Jack Welch for doing that with GE and he certainly didn’t need buybacks to do it.
The argument that buybacks disproportionately benefit the shareholders is a weird one. You might as well say that high oil prices disproportionately benefit people with oil wells. Dividends would disproportionately benefit the exact same group. When Apple makes a shitload of money that is going to disproportionately benefit people with Apple shares over people without Apple shares. That’s the argument they’re making. But they’re presenting it as a buyback issue that the richest 10% own 84% of stocks. Of course the rich people own the stocks, that’s why they’re rich. If they didn’t own more stuff than regular people we wouldn’t call them the rich. If it turned out that the poorest Americans actually had the majority of the wealth then I would have a lot more questions.
The whole article is nothing but flat out lies and misrepresentations that are somehow worse than the lies. It’s just TikTok accounting. When you actually try to struggle through the implications of what they’re trying to argue it’s mind blowing in its stupidity. It’s as if they made the argument that American welfare spending disproportionately favours Americans over Canadians when Canada is actually geographically a bigger portion of the continent of North America. You spend a minute trying to wrap your head around what you just read and then you just can’t even.
I agree the article is awful, but the stock buyback does have an issue that dividends don't have: stock isn't valued at what the company is worth today, but at how much money it's expected to make in the future. Apple isn't worth a trillion dollars because it has a trillion dollars worth of "assets", it's worth a trillion dollars because shareholders believe Apple is consistently going to make a lot of profit. Now let's revisit dividend and buybacks, but taking the share of future profit that each shareholder will own into account.
The company issued 100 shares, each are valued at $1, so the company is worth $100. It now takes out a very cheap loan of $198 and buys back 99 shares at double what they were valued at. There is now a single shareholder with 1 share. The company is worth $2 on paper (100 shares at $2 minus a $198 loan), but the shareholder isn't on the hook for the loan. His 1 share in the company is also worth $2 now, though, just as all the other shares that were bought out with borrowed money. However, all the company's ideas and things are intact. The company sells lots of stuff next year and pays all its profit, $30, in dividend. The single remaining shareholder now has $30 in cash. If the company goes bankrupt because of its unwise loans the next day, he'll still have his $30 in cash.
Compare this to the case where there is no buyout: the shares don't inflate in price due to a loan-driven buyout, and the next year, $30 profit (maybe even call it $32 because there's no interest to be paid on any loans) is paid out as $0.32 to each shareholder.
The problem isn't directly with buybacks,, which are fine in a vacuum, it's with using cheap, government-issued loans to distort share prices through buybacks.
Could the company instead have taken out a loan and just paid that cash out in dividend? Maybe, I don't know the laws, but I doubt that it'd be legal.
I'm sorry to tell you that you can't do maths.
Let's say the company has $100 of net assets. So maybe $50 cash, $30 equipment, $100 property, -$80 debt, -$100 treasury stock. It nets to 0 because it's a balance sheet and the balance sheet has to balance.
Then it borrows $198. So now it has $248 cash, -$278 debt. But it still has net $100 of assets. Then it disburses $198 in stock buybacks. To do this we're crediting cash $198 (because you credit to decrease an asset account) and debiting stockholders equity $198 (or more precisely treasury stock $99, APIC $99). Our balance sheet still balances, now we have $50 cash, $30 equipment, $100 property, -$278 debt, $98 stockholders equity.
This company does not have a value of $100 anymore, it has a value of -$98. It's bankrupt. Very very bankrupt.
Where you went wrong with your maths was that you debited the value of the treasury stock to assets rather than stockholders equity. You said that the company that has handed cash back in a stock buyback has gotten an asset just as valuable as cash in exchange. But it hasn't, that's not how stock buybacks work. It can't own a partnership interest in itself, it has dissolved a partnership interest by buying back the stock, the people who have increased the value are the remaining other shareholders, not the company. Imagine it as the simplest possible scenario, two brothers inherit a company together but only one of them wants to run it. The company sells half of its property for cash and then gives the brother who wants to cash out that cash. It now, in your scenario, "owns" his share in itself. What we're left with in reality though is one brother who owns 100% of a company that's half the size that it was before.
Your entire scenario is the accounting equivalent of just failing to carry the one when doing division. Sorry. You kept the company the same size while giving away 99% of its assets. Once you imagine the two brothers it should be clear why cashing out 99% of the owners makes the company smaller.
I'd be insane to argue accounting with an accountant, but bankruptcy nor size of the company are relevant when the only thing that matters is "ability to keep creditors happy". If one of the creditors is the US government giving out really cheap loans, they aren't bankrupt, because they are able to pay back those loans at the rate required regardless of what they are worth "on the books". Bankruptcy is a legal state, not an accounting one, and if nobody declares bankruptcy, it doesn't happen. In this case, everybody with a stake in the company is happy. The owner is getting rich, the employees are getting paid and so is the bank.
The same goes for the brothers. If the brother cashing out is happy to take installments at a slow and steady rate, with interest, then effectively you're no doubt right, the company is "half the size". But it has the exact same amount of employees, equipment, intellectual property, etc. But any profits go to the single brother who is sole owner of the company.
RvB's counterargument about risk was considerably more convincing.
if anyone here is risk averse and have at least 1 million dollar in liquid assets I can hook you up with my friend and his friend. (one was a nuclear scientist turned trader, other being one for 20 years). purely technical strategy. Proven by many high networth individuals. focusing on many Non-correlated asset classes/stocks systems running together, with short position safety net and market crash knife catchers. (so you don't need to spend a lot of time on it) so extremely low down side. If interested let me know and I can make referral for a seminar class / presentation (phone call then travel, they don't take you if you are not good fit even if you have 10m since they tutor each student personally).
Again 1million liquid cash minimal. This system is programmed by a real nuclear scientist turned programming and his partner, writer of the The 30-Minute Trader (4 and half stars on amazon, 450 ratings) so no joke. serious people only, made for high income professionals who doesn't just want to leave their money in the hands of a typical fund manager who is happy to tell u when your funds beat some w/e index by 5% and in bear market didn't lose as much as w/e index. Their method of robust testing and many levels of non-correlated trading system stack on top of eachother (taylored for individual's profile) can be quiet complex but nothing anyone can't learn.
Anyway, just putting it out there. This is not biased, the guy was one of my art student and I know him for many years. It's legit, that's why it's important for them to teach you everything and make sure you know how it works instead of blindly follow some pattern or simple principle that offers some guarantee, which are 99.9 bullshit you should smell a mile away.
On July 13 2023 07:53 micronesia wrote: Is being a (former) nuclear scientist going to make you good at operating a hedge fund?
Let me count up my liquid assets real quick and see
(it's not a hedge fund (which is a separate thing from normal fund manager), they don't do management for you, they don't play the game for you, they teach you the game and they have access to pro build orders if you like to think it that way) well the mathematics and brains you need to be a nuclear scientist, then work in programming for many years, then turned trader is a hella a lot better than formal janitor, and his partner is one that is in the business for a lot longer. Your question is like, "so being a formal broodwar iccup A player is going to make you good at sc2?" well, most likely, and your chances are Hella of a lot higher than a formal tetris player. Also to clarify:
1) it's one of the biggest myth that fund manager have some special knowledge and prowess. You need to pass the bar to be a lawyer, pass med school and residency to be a doctor. what test you need to pass to be a fund manager? nothing except bachelor's, some experience in industry and not completely horrible track record. and
2) They are NOT going to be your manager, they teach you the system, how and why it works, and their proprietary software. They get you good enough so that you can design the systems yourself, if you don't like it, nothing is binding. You are going to be your own manager.
to roughly quote movie Margin Call "so you are a rocket scientist, why do you work here", "it's all math, and frankly, this pays a lot better". And I can give you graphs of their student's portfolio performance vs random index, vs w/e fund manager and it's a pretty big difference, but since I can't prove it's real unless you go call up all their clients, not gonna bother. Not trying to sell anyone anything. They set a min cap at 1m, most who has 1m in liquid are not dumb. They tried a lot of other investment routes before land at their door.
It's the ones that tell you u can invest with $1000 following some X chart and u'll make money that's the scam artists. Plus i personally have 0 stake in it. 0 of my income comes from this type of investing ( specifically the type of investing that need to pay taxes) or referral. Just so happens to see this thread. Also if you like to do intuitively and speculative investing this is not for you.
I did hear that trading firms were desperately looking for people with graduate level technical science degrees a number of years ago because the math skills were particularly useful at the time, but my comment was actually based on the fact that I work in a building and program flooded with nuclear scientists
The second comment was because I think I fall short on the minimum funds requirements (by a factor of 10 or so) and am not even remotely a candidate.
On July 13 2023 08:26 micronesia wrote: I did hear that trading firms were desperately looking for people with graduate level technical science degrees a number of years ago because the math skills were particularly useful at the time, but my comment was actually based on the fact that I work in a building and program flooded with nuclear scientists
The second comment was because I think I fall short on the minimum funds requirements (by a factor of 10 or so) and am not even remotely a candidate.
yeah the only unknown I have at this point is in few more month what Ai is gonna do and how it is gonna disrupt this space (it already started). but then, to what degree is AI gonna disrupt ANY space. (it already is disrupting everything but of course few month it would be way more pronounced) I thought plumber would be the last ones to go (which probably is the case) but there are robots with tiny little arms that can navigate small spaces and inject chemicals or turn screws. If ai reaches that exponential part, we going into a blackhole, unknown territory.
EPT
