Moelis & Company

Good afternoon and welcome to the Moelis & Company first quarter 2021 earnings conference call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please note, this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Chet Mandel, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us for Moelis & Company's first quarter 2021 financial results conference call. On the phone today are Ken Moelis, Chairman and CEO, and Joe Simon, Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin, I'd like to note that the remarks made on this call may contain certain forward-looking statements, which are subject to various risks and uncertainties, including those identified from time to time in the risk factor section of Moelis & Company's filings with the SEC. Actual results could differ materially from those currently anticipated. The firm undertakes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements. Our comments today include references to certain adjusted financial measures. We believe these measures, when presented together with comparable gap measures, are useful to investors to compare our results across several periods and to better understand our operating results. The reconciliation of these adjusted financial measures with the relevant GATT financial information and other information required by Reg G is provided in the firm's earnings release, which can be found on our investor relations website at investors.moelis.com. I will now turn the call over to Joe to discuss our results. Joe?

Thanks, Chad. Good afternoon, everyone. On today's call, I'll go through our financial results and then Ken will comment further on the business. We achieved $264 million of revenues in the first quarter, an increase of 72% over the prior year period. This represented our second largest quarter of revenues ever. Our growth during the period was primarily attributable to increased levels of transaction completions. Our M&A activity remains robust as we are participating in assignments broadly across regions, sectors, and deal sizes. We also continue to see strong levels of restructuring and capital markets activity. In fact, our private funds advisory activity during the quarter was the highest it has ever been. Moving to expenses, our compensation expense was accrued at 59.3%, consistent with our full year 2020 ratio. Our first quarter non-comp expenses were $35 million. The increment over the expected $30 million was primarily related to transaction-related charges. The non-comp ratio was a solid 13%. We expect our non-compensation expenses to be close to $30 million We achieved a quarterly pre-tax margin of 29% exceeding our 25% target. Moving to taxes, our underlying corporate tax rate was 26% for the first quarter. The discrete tax benefits related to our equity award settlements contributed approximately 27 cents per share of EPS and resulted in an overall net tax benefit for the quarter. Regarding capital allocations, The Board declared a regular quarterly dividend of $0.55 per share and a special dividend of $2 per share, the second special dividend that we've declared in the last five months. In addition, we repurchased approximately 1.4 million shares during the first quarter. The dividends and the buybacks together approximate $250 million in capital return to shareholders. We remain committed to returning 100% of our excess cash. And lastly, we continue to maintain a fortress balance sheet with substantial liquidity and no debt. We ended the quarter with $228 million of cash and liquid investments. And I'll now turn the call over to Ken. Thanks, Joe.

Good afternoon, everyone. We continue to see strong momentum in our business. The pace of our new client activity remains high as there is a real and necessary desire to transact, driven in large part by the acceleration of long-term strategic positioning and Thank you for joining us today. with deep product experience across the capital structure on both the public and private side. We have a well-balanced and durable business. I've never felt better about our go-to-market positioning with three powerful and highly collaborative engines to provide innovative solutions for our clients. Combined with our ongoing expense discipline and focus on profitable organic growth, I'm confident about our ability to deliver value for our shareholders in both the near and long term. I'll now open it up for questions.

We will now begin our question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press star then 1 on your telephone keypad. If you are using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. To withdraw your question, please press star then 2. Our first question comes from James Yarrow with Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.

Hey, thanks a lot for taking my questions. So I'd like to start with restructuring, and forgive me, I have a couple questions here. So maybe you could talk about the cadence of the restructuring opportunity this year, and whether you think the opportunity is the same size or different than perhaps last quarter's earnings, and then any way to size what portion of the revenue it was this quarter, and then if there's any way to think about when it peaked last year.

Well, I don't believe it's peaked for us. I don't know for the market. We've always said we don't break it out, but we've said restructuring is naturally 20% to 25% of our revenues, and it's actually in that range, probably at the high end of that range in the first quarter. And that's on a good revenue. That's with a lot of M&A as well. And I continue to believe, you know, looking for the near term forward, it feels like it's going to continue, or at least our backlog seems like that's going to continue. Again, so I don't know when it peaked because I'm not sure it peaked. And I think, you know, there's this feeling that there's a very good economy out there and maybe that will change restructuring. There are two things that I'm optimistic about. First of all, for restructuring, First of all, is that the world changes rapidly every day. There's a lot of leverage in the system. And oftentimes, different sectors of the economy, even though the other sectors are going full speed, they have issues. And the last one that I think is underappreciated is that, well, number one, we have the best restructuring team on Wall Street, so that's another reason. And second, they're very good at doing out-of-court restructurings. And I think That's a very unique attribute, is being able to fix companies without going through the Chapter 11 process. Most companies would prefer that. And our team's very good at it. And I think in an economy like this, where there are opportunities to be innovative around capital structure, that's an asset that might keep us busy longer.

Makes a lot of sense. And then in terms of the hiring environment, How competitive is it out there in terms of bringing in new talent? And how should we think about how this could impact the comp ratio for the year? And are you seeing stronger competition from some of the bulge brackets for retaining talent?

We're not at the senior level having any issues with the bulge bracket. Most of our senior bankers don't really want to go back. I don't think we have a lot of problems. There's a lot of talent hunting out there for junior talent, so we see that everywhere. I'd say the environment for talent is similar to what it's been. There are people looking and there are people available. I think one of the differences is it's a little... It may get more expensive because you've had financial stocks run up in the last year or maybe year and a half. And remember, we have to pick up a lot of deferred. You pick up deferred. So I think the overall expense of hiring people has gone up. Possibly, you know, if you look at our own stock, it's more expensive to hire our own people on deferreds. And it's pretty, you know, that's common across the street. And I think a lot of firms have their stocks up. and comp is probably a little higher so you know marginally more expensive and it's always been competitive so I'd say you know most people don't they make they're making a life decision and I think it's always been competitive to get them to leave a place that they're at and and change so it's about the same okay that makes sense and then if you could just touch on your non-compensation costs over the longer term

as the economy continues to reopen and you begin your return to office.

I'll take some of that. I think you're thinking more about travel. I know Joe had some thoughts on the quarter. Again, no one knows. The marginal differential I think you're talking about is travel and T&E. Obviously, we're going to give back some of this because we've gone to almost zero or very marginally I think, though, that a lot of travel is going to change. And my guess is that we end up somewhere with a third to a half of our previous travel. But I'm not quite sure. You know, I can't say that I know that. I just think we're going to eliminate some of the more commodity travel that can be done by Zoom and over the phone call. But the real relationship building travel, I think, will be pretty intense and might even be elevated further. when, you know, maybe the back half of next year when everybody tries to catch up and go see somebody they haven't seen in two years.

Okay, thanks so much.

The next question is from Devin Ryan with JMP Securities. Please go ahead.

Hey, Kenneth, how are you? Thanks. Let me just start here with a bigger picture question. Looking back, the company went public in 2014. Revenues were around $500 million. Obviously, we'll see how this year plays out, but a lot of momentum, and so a billion dollars or maybe even something higher doesn't seem unreasonable, so roughly a double from when you went public. So as you look out into the future here and think about kind of the next double from here, maybe just talk a little bit about what some of the big drivers of that might be, whether it's, you know, the M&A business still having kind of a lot of white space or, you know, the international opportunity. I'd just love to maybe think about broad strokes of what some of the bigger and most compelling opportunities are to kind of take revenues to the next level.

You know, Devin, I think it's not, well, there is white space. We have white space. But what's even more encouraging to me or what's really almost stunning to me, I'd say, and it's why I think this is the busiest time I've ever seen in my life. And the reason is, you know, a few years ago, maybe only 10 or 15 years ago, it would take a decade to build a business to the point Where we kind of would be interested at our minimum fee level or where we'd want to participate. I don't know many companies that got to be worth a billion dollars 15 years ago, you know, in a short period of time. And today, that could be weeks. I mean, months. I mean, there are new companies being formed, created, and reaching relevant value in terms Record time. So like when you say, you know, how deep is the M&A market? I would suspect there's, you know, like 30 to 50 companies or more that didn't exist 18 months ago that are in the range of something we'd want to talk about. I'm sure a light on that, by the way. So the creation of value and by the way, and also the creation of market cap. So the revaluation is amazing. The amount of middle market companies that are now worth $5 to $10 billion fairly rapidly, that's a large fee event for us, and they are in transition, and other companies are looking to buy them to fill in their digital strategy. Look, I think that the creation of market capitalization alone, and then the need for almost every company in the world to rethink how they go to market, ESG, Digital, climate change, the amount of change going on is also rapid. So I think the velocity, and lastly, again, something we didn't even talk about, the amount of capital going to alternatives, which are in the business of transacting. And you put all that together, and I think it's what's leading to the incredible robustness of this market. And I don't see it stopping. I mean, I guess it There could be an external event, but without an external event that I can't foresee, it feels like it's going to continue.

Yeah, thanks, Ken. Great color. And maybe this is somewhat interrelated, but kind of more in the near term. Obviously, the SPAC market has been kind of a big development, and I know you're Very familiar with what's going on there and involved. And just thinking about the amount of SPAC IPOs that we saw in the first quarter, more than all of last year, there's a tremendous amount of SPACs out that are going to be looking for targets. And just kind of thinking about, I guess, maybe the opportunity that that's creating for Moelis to be involved with SPACs. Also, maybe a bigger picture, kind of how that's affecting kind of sponsor clients and that crowding out The opportunities for them, or do you think it will? And on the flip side, I think they're all benefiting from selling assets into the market as well. So just maybe some thoughts on how that is also affecting activity within Moelis or the outlook for M&A activity.

So I think the SPAC market is here to stay. You're going to have valuation and repricing changes. And also, you know, refocus. I think, you know, was focused for a while on hyper growth companies in certain industries. Maybe it'll move a little more to cash flow. But again, Devin, I think what is interesting is the rise of what I call the very large late stage venture, almost venture capital need. And there's a huge hole in that market where these companies are getting to three to five to, you know, 10, I mean, of private companies. Thank you for joining us. a market that didn't exist three years ago which is very large high growth companies that need a lot of capital to get to the next stage and it's like I was saying before those companies are being created weekly and so I think there's a lot of SPACs out there but there's a lot of growth capital needed and a lot of great entrepreneurs and there's a lot of businesses that that you might not have heard about, but that are fundamentally changing the world and disrupting, and they're going to meet each other. And I think that's a funding source that will continue, and I think it's additive. So it's a long way of saying I think you have private equity will be booming in their own asset class. I think this is almost a new class of a very late-stage venture, and it's needed.

Okay, great. I will leave it there, but really appreciate it.

The next question is from Ken Worthington with J.P. Morgan. Please go ahead.

Hi, good afternoon. So I can clearly see and knew that the business is doing particularly well in what's typically a seasonally slower quarter. What areas maybe were more subdued, either by region or by service? What hasn't been working quite as well as the majority of the business, and what might be the outlook there?

By the way, Ken, first time since we've been published, you were not the first question. I'm very, very disappointed. It's like when Lou Gehrig ended his streak there, so I just want to note that. I dropped the ball. What's slow? Look, it's the classic stuff. I think it's the parts of the economy. And we're pretty strong across most of the sectors that are important. But, of course, things like retail, there's not much to do. There's not much aggressiveness. I even think even the restructuring part of retail sort of got in the cycle early last year. And maybe I'd say oil and gas, that part of the world is still slower than most. But really those are very episodic. Those are very unique as to what they're facing. Most of the rest of our sectors were pretty slow. I'm trying to think of one that you would consider outside of those two which seem fairly obvious on the outside. I don't know another one that I'm missing that would have been unusually slow.

And then Europe, cross-border, Asia, anything stand out as being slower or weaker than the other regions or is everything sort of white hot by region two?

As usual, the U.S., when things are, you know, slow, the U.S. is the busiest. When things are hot, the U.S. is busy. So I think, you know, the U.S. stands out again in terms of its velocity of transactions. But interestingly, I think we had, you know, white hot might be too, but we had a very substantial and very good business in almost every region you mentioned. I think in every region you mentioned to be clear. Okay.

Well, great. That's it for me. Thank you so much. Thanks.

The next question is from Steven Chewback with Wolf Research. Please go ahead.

Hi. Good afternoon. Good afternoon. Before I start off with a question, just given some of the potential tax changes that could be forthcoming, whether it's higher corporate tax rate or just changes to capital gains, How that's impacting any of the C-level discussions that you guys are having?

I haven't seen a lot. I assume there's a transaction or two we have where somebody thinks they're going to get a capital gain out before a tax increase. It's hard to define that because we don't get told that. They may be thinking that. I assume it's I don't see it driving right now. I think the other things I talked about are what's driving the market. Now, if somebody put in place a 43% capital gains track and said that's effective January 1 of 2022, you might see some real step up in activity, but I don't think people are expecting that. For right now, I'd call it marginal and hard to measure.

Okay, and I appreciate that color. And I just wanted to ask a follow-up with regards to the restructuring outlook. And I appreciate a lot of the context that you had provided earlier. The challenge, at least from my seat, is every other corporate has indicated that we're seeing restructuring rebates to pre-pandemic levels. And just wanted to get a sense as to whether, one, are you comfortable at least – Indicating, or should we be comfortable underwriting, I should say, 20 to 25% of your revenue still being from restructuring, even with the better backdrop that you had cited. I guess just secondarily, if you can just provide maybe a little bit more perspective in terms of what are some of the other idiosyncrasies that are maybe driving greater resiliency in your business relative to some of your peers.

So, I would feel comfortable, you know, in the near term thinking that we're going to stay at 20 to 25 percent, you know, as far as like, you know, for the relevant future that I could see. I would tell you the biggest risk to that is I think that the numerator changes to the high side and shrinks the ratio because of the strength of M&A more so than that restructuring shrinks, if that makes sense. And Again, I do believe we have the best team. It's a phenomenal team. We've kept it together. We have a lot of people who are junior bankers seven or eight years ago and now moved up and bringing in their own fees. They're very innovative. They tend to keep companies from filing Chapter 11. And when you have access to capital markets and you can figure out ways to use them to stave off bankruptcy... I think that's a real asset, and it could be why we continue to have a good level, because right now, you don't have to go, but, you know, there's a good chance that there's a solution that is innovative and around the markets and not, you know, just going through Chapter 11, and I think that's a specialty of ours.

Thanks for that, Karin. Just one quick ticky-tack question. I guess numbers or modeling question. Could you share just where the banker count as well as where the MD count stands as of the end of the quarter?

I think I have it in front of me. So I think the MD count as of today is 127, and the banker count is 618. That's as of today. At the end of the quarter, it was a little less, 126 and 615.

Okay, great. That's perfect. Thanks for taking my questions.

The next question is from Brennan Hawken with UBS. Please go ahead.

Hey, good afternoon. Thanks for taking my questions. I want to circle back, Joe, to some of the comments that you made on non-comp in the prepared remarks. They were quick. You guys jumped right to it here today, so I might not have gotten it right, but And I appreciate not messing around and just getting straight to it. But non-comp came in a little bit heavier than we were expecting and that was suggested last quarter. It looks like it's in that other line. So wanted to try to understand maybe what was there. Were there some one-time items in there? Just sort of understand the composition of that. And then I think, Joe, you'd said $30 million in non-comp per quarter before transaction-related. You know, can you kind of put a little bit more context around that so we can understand how to frame? Does that mean basically that as revenue is humming, you guys are going to have some transactional-related, you know, expenses which will flow through that line? If that's the case, why didn't we see that last year? Sorry, I know it's a multi-parter.

So let me start with the first part of your question. The $5 million is made up of a combination of professional fees as well as new CECL reserves that related to some age receivables. On those reserves, most of that we fully expect to collect. So this is just A function of the new gap and how we it's more formulaic. There's less judgment involved. And ultimately, we we absorb some additional costs this quarter that we weren't expecting. So ultimately, we view both those things as episodic. And we continue or I continue to believe that 30 million is the underlying run rate. And that really assumes, you know, continued We're thinking travel might pick up, but we're thinking that that probably won't happen until the back half of this year. Does that answer your questions?

It does, but it sort of leads to more. Cecil reserves, Jesus. Ken, you're a bank, huh?

No, but unfortunately receivables are credits. and it applies to everyone and we you had to create a methodology around it and ultimately we had a few million dollars that ultimately emerged in that due to some aged receivables but again we fully expect those to be collected um in the short term okay so and is it is it that based upon how sometimes these receivables can age we should

We should expect this might crop up from time to time and that it's basically related to just a little bit of a lag to billing and there might be some noise in that regard.

It could be, yeah. It could, but it should be unexpected. We're pretty good about keeping on top of this. There were just some specific client situations that gave rise to this, but it's nothing to be alarmed about and it's nothing that concerns us.

Got it. Yeah, sure. And you said that was like two or three of a million of the five? Yeah, exactly. Got it. Okay. All right. When we think about the quarter, and this was quite a quarter for SPACs, and, you know, Ken, you were early to embrace this. We seem to remember it being the July call last year when you particularly flagged how this was powerful, this shift. It was prescient. How much of a factor were capital markets? We spent a lot of time this afternoon talking about restructuring, and that's fair. I'm curious about capital markets. I think capital markets last year was a record setter for you guys, if I'm remembering this correctly. How did the quarter fare? What was the pace? Was it running hotter than it did last year? And as we've seen SPACs start to slow, has that had a likewise impact on your capital markets business or are you staying busy?

I think our capital markets guys regret coming over here in September. They haven't slept. You know, it's funny because we're producing across the board. There's lots of privates and very innovative transactions. I think, Joe, we tried to look at SPACs. It was fairly minimal in the quarter.

Yeah, it was modest in the context. I mean, again, capital markets has historically been kind of 2% to 4%. I think this quarter We saw 10% to 13%, and certainly SPACs was a component of it, but not all of it.

Because a big part of it, you know, SPACs, I think we made some money. We were called book runner on a few, and, you know, that's a good fee. It's not an M&A type fee, but it puts you also inside of a, you know, now you're the company's banker, and, you know, there should be other things that come in the future. So, Yeah, we didn't see, you know, like, there weren't a bunch of big D-SPACs, which is where the fees would be. It was more the beginnings of the capital markets raising the money.

Right, which you would think could end up turning into the D-SPAC, you know, down the line.

Look, the point is to stay with them through pipe. Now you have the ability to do the pipe, which is a decent fee event, and the D-SPAC.

Right. And how about the more recent velocity? It seems as though there's been a bit of a slowdown in some of those markets. Have you seen that too, or has that velocity not really slowed for you all?

You're talking about SPACs specifically?

And capital markets, both SPACs and capital markets more broadly.

Okay. Capital markets broadly, no. And in fact, you know, the M&A market just continues to go from strength to strength. And so, and similar with the broad-based capital markets. But let me say on SPACs, there was a point here where the SEC came out and said they want to change some accounting. That affected, that was just sort of like a four-week hiatus as people tried to find an accountant that was available to redo their financials. The next question is from Michael Brown with KBW. Please go ahead.

Hi, Ken. Hi, Joe. Hi. Just to start off, you know, maybe kind of close the loop here. You know, obviously you had some very positive comments on the momentum that you're seeing across the business, but I'm just hoping you could characterize your backlogs, you know, specifically for advisory. I think you had said on the last call that They were running at record levels. They had never been at that level before. Just curious after this first quarter how they stack up relative to last quarter.

I think significantly higher. We're at our highest levels. I don't want to get used to reporting that, but they continue to increase. We have a We have a thing called NBRC New Business Review Committee and the amount of submissions is, you know, up significantly over any period we've ever seen.

Okay, great, great, very impressive. And then to follow up on some of the SPAC commentary, you know, obviously there's going to be a lot of M&A activity industry-wide Related to the de-spacking process as SPACs find targets, what is your general timeline on when you think that activity will really pick up meaningfully? Is kind of the back half of this year a fair expectation or because there's kind of a lag between when those will be announced and ultimately close? Is it more like a 2022 event? Just trying to think through how that could play out, you know, looking forward to it.

I think it'll start again quicker than you think. One of the reasons, you know, I think there was a repricing of a lot of pipes. There were a lot of deals that were negotiated in, I think, January, February, that then did their LOIs and went to the pipe market. And there was a change in, look, it's really an IPO market in some sense. And there was a change in that market. There was a pretty significant change in how... I call it almost hyper growth, but high growth companies were valued and so the pipe market started to, I think, reprice. And I think there's a lot of transactions out there under LOI that are both waiting for their accounting so that they can file and are repricing pipes as we speak and changing values. And so I don't know that you won't see a summer of D-SPAC. But I think it'll be pretty you know look again there's 500 of them I don't see them all but I think that's going on and I think it'll be pretty even like I said there's a lot of growth companies it is a bridge it's a new way of raising capital almost very very late stage venture in large chunks of money those companies need capital and they want to grow and they're going to come and you know I think it'll be fairly significant once this hiatus both accounting and repricing I think that's in the next three or four weeks.

Okay, that's an interesting comment there. And maybe just one last one from me. You obviously saw the 8K about the changes to the board structure to shift to a controlled company. What am I interested in? A non-controlled company. Correct. Thank you for that clarification. Very important. But, you know, one of my key observations there was that after the announced resignation of the co-presidents and COO, that there would be just five members on the board, three of which were independent. I know this is really a board matter, but just curious if you could get some comments about, you know, the desire to grow the size of the board and bring in maybe, you know, bring in more independent members every time.

Look, we'll probably, I think we'll probably bring in at least one more. But I don't really want to have a gigantic board. We've got a good board. We can make decisions. Last year when COVID hit, I think we're moving very rapidly to make decisions. I think we have enough. I don't really see the benefits of having what I would consider a pretty unwieldy board, both expense-wise and ability to move. So we're going to have an independent board, and it'll probably be more to just spread the workload around and get some expertise. But I'm not that interested in building a gigantic board.

Okay, great. Thanks for taking my questions.

The next question is from Jim Mitchell with Seaport Global Securities. Please go ahead.

Hey, good afternoon. Maybe just a question. I mean, everyone's been pretty optimistic about activity. It seems like dialogues are strong. It doesn't sound like there's been any yet pushback on valuation from financial sponsors or anything. Are you sensing Any hesitation at all creeping into dialogues just based on valuation, or is it, hey, we're in a recovery and it doesn't matter?

Well, that would be unkind to some of our clients to say they don't care. But let's just say that things are trading. There's not a lot of deals that go broken, and that usually means people are getting their value. And I'll tell you one of the things that is, I always say this, in a bull market, people find a way to get around issues. You know, like in a bear market, a pebble looks like a boulder. You know, you're running down a deal and a little pebble in the road comes up. And if things are negative, everybody goes, oh, we don't know how to get around the pebble. And in a bull market, you can put a boulder in front of a deal and people drive right over it. And so things accelerate. They close quicker. They reach agreement quicker. And I think you're seeing some of that. and that'll continue, I think, as the recovery happens. But, you know, I don't want to say people aren't trying to find value. They are trying to find value and they, you know, people do have limits as to where they want to go. But we are finding most processes find a buyer.

Right. Okay. Well, that's helpful. And maybe just on the dividend, you know, is there a A level of cash, we think about, you know, going forward, you know, prior to COVID, you guys were pretty consistent with two specials a year. Are we kind of back in that flow? And is there a way for us to think about what kind of a minimum cash level you prefer to keep and how we can better estimate excess for you guys?

In a second, I'll let Joe do that. So one of the reasons, look, I do think about two because We talk about it, and we don't like to hold it for more than a... You know, we don't like to hold it. We have it in treasury bills earning nothing. And we don't think that's a good use of your capital or shareholders' capital. So as soon as we get it to a large enough amount, which is usually in kind of six-month cycles, it's large enough to be administratively good to pump it out. This year, you know, because we... Because we were conservative going into the crisis, we ended up with more cash at the end of the year, and then the reason, you know, we paid a $2 dividend, right, I think three months ago we paid it, and we're doing another two. One of the reasons was also the fourth quarter was so strong that by the time we had organized and paid a $2 dividend, you know, it was so strong that we ended up probably with more cash from that quarter than we, you know, we wanted to get that paid in 2019 in case Thanks for joining us. We'll be right back. We probably would go to twice a year. And Joe, you want to talk about what you consider minimal cash?

Yeah, so our minimum capital remains around $50 million after earmarked amounts for things like taxes and bonuses. And as Ken said, our primary focus is beyond that amount. We consider it excess, and we just want to distribute it or return it in some form. Okay, that's great.

Thanks.

The next question is from Jeff Hart with Piper Sandler. Please go ahead.

Hey, good afternoon, guys. A couple of kind of cleanups and maybe a strategic one. Cleanup-wise, Joe, as far as the share count creep outlook goes, is it impacted at all by the ramp-up in kind of price we've seen recently, or should we still think of the same kind of quarterly creep going forward?

Yeah, the creep is, you know, kind of with prices being stable are somewhere around 800,000 to 900,000 shares per quarter. So, you know, when you have a lift under the share price, it will ultimately accelerate that. And that's why you saw something closer to a million, a little more than a million shares this quarter.

Okay, and you wind up asking us every quarter, but is there anything to highlight as far as 2Q closings, kind of having revenues pulled back into the first quarter?

I mean, the pull forward you're referring to, it was a couple of transactions that added up to, I think, about $11 million.

Okay, and then you mentioned earlier the SPAC book runner. Seeing you guys show up at the equity underwriting league tables did catch our eyes. Is your involvement there really just something, an opportunity within SPAC specifically, or do you guys give any thought to kind of equity underwriting, you know, business beyond SPACs going forward?

Yeah, you know, one of the things that got me interested last year in beefing up is we had done two direct registered placements on utility companies of substantial size. And by the way, we had done equity. I mean, it was equity, direct equity. So, I started to think there is a virtual method to do this without the overhead of all the trading floor overhead. And yes, we are talking about ways and programs and different things that we think are innovative around equity offerings with the This concludes our question and answer session.

I would like to turn the conference back over to Ken Moelis for any closing remarks.

I appreciate all the support and I look forward to talking to you at the next quarter. Thank you.

The conference is now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect