~ The Fed chair emphasized that 2% is still the target rate for PCE inflation. We’re nowhere close. (Also Bloomberg.)

~ “Under inflation, bonds are no longer a good diversifier,” says the subtitle of this Financial Times chart of the week. (Other periods, say 1970-1982, before disinflation kicked in, would be good to see in comparison.)

~ Fund managers are in “party mode.” (One of several BofA charts via Robin Wigglesworth of FT Alphaville.)

~ The loss at Situational Awareness didn’t seem to be as consequential as many of the others on this list of biggest trading losses from Toby Nangle of FT Alphaville. (Highlighting each bar on the site tells you more about that particular debacle.)

~ Thematic funds have historically produced subpar returns; will the big dollars being put into ETFs break that pattern or will it be more of the same? (Moses Sternstein from Andreessen Horowitz.)

~ Is the tide turning for the UK market? (Aurelion Research and AP Research.)

~ The wobbles in the Mark Walter empire have caused ripple effects across the private credit and insurance landscape — and has hit Guggenheim’s debt hard. (Bloomberg.)

~ This chart, from Sebastian Kian of Morningstar, is through the first quarter. It shows the non-accrual holdings of public BDCs. (The adjusted number includes all of the debt of a firm if any of it is in non-accrual status.)

~ Investor flows in non-listed BDCs have shifted hard in the last eighteen months. (Leyla Kunimoto of Accredited Investor Insights.)

~ Will a Boomer bust hit Sun Belt real estate (which has been weakening recently)? From Nick Gerli of Reventure.

Over on the main site, the latest Fortnightly edition of curated links dug into the usual broad mix of topics of investment importance. Among them the wisdom of crowds, sell-side analysts, those hidden hyperscaler commitments, codependency in the Treasury market, asset owner strategies, and much more.

~ Analysts are extrapolating this year’s strong earnings (driven by the big tech companies) into huge increases for 2027. (Goldman Sachs, via Daily Shot Brief.)

~ The high level of concentration in the S&P 500 from the big tech names doesn’t fully reflect the active risks involved. (AllianceBernstein.)

~ From Torsten Slok of Apollo: “The AI capex boom is so far only showing up in the sellers’ margins, not the buyers’.”

~ Slok again: “The market is asking three fundamental questions,” reflected in rising CDS spreads.

~ Also, seeing this historical decline in costs, AP Research comments on GPUs as collateral: “A lender may currently be financing multi-year debt against assets whose economic usefulness can be repriced significantly over a relatively short period.”

~ The composition of capital spending has changed dramatically; what happens when tech reverses? (Andreessen Horowitz.)

~ What are the implications of the much steeper Japanese yield curve? (Wei Li of BlackRock.)

~ Increasing creditor-on-creditor violence upends historical patterns; “recovery rates are plummeting, with more first-lien lenders getting close to nothing” when firms file bankruptcy. (Bloomberg.)

~ Toby Nangle explores the land of CCC bonds for the Financial Times.

~ It’s taking longer and longer to get your money back from private equity funds; can we call them “zombies”? (Wall Street Journal.)

~ Despite the big push from the purveyors of private assets, defined contribution plan sponsors are dragging their feet. (MFS.)

The most recent issue of the Fortnightly includes sections on the artful dodges of some life insurance companies regarding affiliated entities, the implications of reduced guidance, and, yes, situational awareness. Plus a host of other interesting topics.

~ The PEG ratio is very low and below the “magic” level of one. (Chart via Yardeni Research. Some perspective on the ratio.)

~ The last three years — and especially the first half of this year — have shown an unusual amount of divergence between price and breadth. (Spencer Jakab, Wall Street Journal.)

~ Charts of margin debt often prompt different interpretations from market participants. Here’s one look from Sakonnet Research.

~ Short funds are disappearing. (Caitlin McCabe in a Wall Street Journal profile of short seller Fahmi Quadir, who is switching to activist investing.)

~ The SpaceX IPO has been a disappointment (so far), which fits with the recent underperformance for IPOs over the last several years. (Torsten Slok, Apollo.)

~ Corporate bonds have remained at very tight spreads; how far will they blow out in the next recession? (Telis Demos in the Wall Street Journal.)

~ Company exits from global buyout funds were mostly above their carrying values in the years from 2012 to 2025. (MSCI.)

~ “A co-investment is not a lower-fee version of a diversified private equity fund. It is a concentrated bet on a handful of companies [or just one] drawn from that fund.” (Verdad; note that the analysis is based on simulated groups of potential co-investments within actual funds. Therefore, the fund results are net returns and the co-invesment simulations are gross returns.)

~ Inventories of energy products continue to decline (from Josh Young, Bison Insights) . . .

. . . and input costs are rising. Delta was first to report its fuel costs for the second quarter. (Calcbench.)

~ Coders with less experience are facing a changed job market. (Bloomberg.)

The most recent piece on the main site was a Fortnightly titled “Market Players, Flows, and Common Language.” As always, it contained a wide variety of great readings from across the investment ecosystem.

~ And then there are valuation problems — high valuation hurts long-term returns (big chart), but the timing is uncertain (small chart); via AJO Vista.

~ “The Wildest Value Gap Since 1999,” says Samuel Ziff of Oldfield Partners.

~ With the surge in capital spending and decline in free cash flow at the hyperscalers, their buybacks have dried up. (Jeran Wittenstein, Bloomberg.)

~ Equity exposure is baked in for most defined contribution plan participants; will that change after a prolonged bear market? (Meketa.)

~ “Flip-flops may expose a weakness in cap-weighted indexing.” (Rob Arnott and Lillian Wu, Reasearch Affiliates.)

~ “Retail remains the strongest structural buyer of US equities.” (Scott Rubner, Citadel.)

~ According to Bloomberg, “The buyout shop-turned-blue chip lender is muscling in on the turf of Wall Street stalwarts.”

~ “What Medallia’s faceplant tells us about private credit,” from Toby Nangle for FT Alphaville.

SpaceX stock has been falling and has given up its post-IPO pop; but yields on its debt have risen a lot in a short time. (Toby Nanagle, FT Alphaville.)

~ “Computer Costs Are Supposed to Go Down,” says Joe Weisenthal of Bloomberg (but see the recent bump).

~ A flashback from the financial crisis, via John Authers of Bloomberg.

~ Derek Thompson takes a look back at social trends in 1926. Here’s the trends in the composition of employment at the time. Among the other charts is one on life expectancy.

Since the last set of “clippings,” there have been three postings on the main site.

Most importantly, an essay on “The AI-Native Asset Manager.”

Plus two Fortnightly collections of items from around the investment ecosystem:

~ Expectations, Expectations, and More Expectations.

~ Fully Invested, Semi-Liquid, and Investment Hyperscalers.

~ Higher-valued stocks are becoming an increasing share of the U.S. market (Goldman Sachs, via Mike Zaccardi) . . .

. . . but some software stalwarts have had the air go out of them. Here are Adobe’s valuation numbers on a hundred-point scale for the last ten years (via Koyfin).

~ While the headline is about retail’s somewhat higher weight than ten years ago, the punchline is in the footnote. (International Financing Review.)

The employment report earlier this month continued the turnaround in expectations for Fed policy moves that began with the attack on Iran (Augur Infinity) . . .

. . . while yesterday’s debut of the Warsh Fed led the market to price even higher short-term rates (John Authers, Bloomberg).

~ As expected, AI dominates the funding interests of limited partners, via S&P Global.

~ There are signs of speculative activity everywhere, including this six-fold increase in levered ETFs in Korea and Japan just this year. (Tracy Alloway of Bloomberg, from Nomura.)

~ As an evergreen fund shrinks, the capped redemption amount falls, even if the shares tendered keeps increasing. (Leyla Kunimoto of Accredited Investor Insights.)

~ Some signs of pullback in token expenditures, from Frank Flight of Citadel.

~ You’ve heard about the K-shaped economy; “The Record Divide Between Corporate Profits and Worker Pay” by Greg Ip in the Wall Street Journal includes these graphs.

You’ll always find a fresh mix of investment ideas in the Fortnightly. The last issue was “The Big Rocket, Activists, and Valuation as Mindset.”

~ Oil looks to be a continuing factor of the inflation story around the world. (Rory Johnston of Commodity Context.)

~ The first quarter produced some eye-popping numbers, most notably in net income and capex. (From “roughly 3,600 filers,” via Calcbench.)

~ The semis are red hot, even more than during the dot-com bubble. (DataTrek.)

~ From “6 charts: SpaceX’s S-1 financials.” (PitchBook.)

~ An interesting chart from Matt Robinson at AI Street, on “the Pareto frontier between speed and intelligence.” (What happens if you extend this beyond minutes to days or weeks or years?)

~ The benchmark Aggregate bond index looks a lot different than it did twenty years ago. (Marquette Associates.)

~ Have funding strains gone away? (Bloomberg.)

~ A survey from CityWire, this is how fund selectors are using AI.

~ “NAV squeezing” (buying secondaries and marking them up immediately) fades away as an “alpha” source when a portfolio gets bigger. (Leyla Kunimoto, Accredited Investor Insights.)

~ While the lack of up-to-date pricing smooths PE returns, it doesn’t help much during times of stress. (Vanguard.)

~ “How Much of the Internet Is AI Slop?” (Stat Significant).

The most recent edition of the Fortnightly was “Who Owns What, Keeping the Faith, and Disruption Afoot.” Full of great investment readings.

~ “The World Is Burning Through Its Oil Safety Net.” (Wall Street Journal.)

~ Leverage in larger direct lending deals has increased, but it has fallen in the lower middle market. (S&P Global.)

~ The PE “distribution drought” continues; from MSCI, “The State of Private Markets 2026.”

~ Does more “research velocity” — “It can be thought of as ‘name turnover,’ unrelated to position sizes or trading volumes.” — predict outperformance? (Inalytics.)

~ Large-cap mutual funds aren’t keeping up this year, according to a Bloomberg article. (Note that in only one year since 2018 has outperformance been over 50%.)

~ The extraordinary rise in earnings at Nvidia — and its P/E ratio, which has retreated, via Josh Brown.

~ According to Acadian, fears of crowding in systematic strategies are misplaced (using the time before the 2007 “quant quake” as a benchmark for comparison).

~ The path of the Starwood Real Estate Income Trust looks likely to be repeated in other retail-oriented alternative vehicles. (Accredited Investor Insights: “They were buying apartments at the top of the cycle, just as supply surged and interest rates were about to spike.”)

~ This Bloomberg chart from a few weeks ago (“Gen Z Is Souring on AI,” using Gallup polling) presaged the booing of AI advocates giving college graduation speeches.

Check out the latest Fortnightly selection of curated reads from around the investment ecosystem.

~ The credit cycle. (Verdad, as found in “Reflexivity in Credit Markets,” Robin Greenwood, et al., Harvard Business School.)

~ Will the divergence continue? (John Authers, Bloomberg.)

~ Berkshire Hathaway keeps selling stocks . . .

. . . and the cash pile gets bigger and bigger (both images from “Greg Abel leaves unanswered questions about Berkshire’s war chest,” Financial Times).

~ The scale and mix of KKR, via Alt Goes Mainstream.

~ Arctos: “New Fund? Get Ready for a Three-Year Slog” (North American and European buyout funds).

~ Treasury exposures by hedge funds (Reuters, via Debt Serious).

~ Recent deterioration in the U.S. savings rate (Spencer Jakab, Bloomberg).

~ Can AI use conference call text to generate better returns? (From “Large Language Models for Asset Pricing: Learning from Earnings Calls, Yizhong Zhang and Guofu Zhou, via Quantitativo.)

~ “Thought leadership,” from Tom Fishburne, Marketoonist.

Interested in private equity? This is a must read.

Also on the main site, the most recent Fortnightly of investment ideas.

. . . with the number of deals heavily weighted toward venture. (Both charts via Bloomberg.)

~ The “velocity of returned capital” for buyout funds, by quartile. (From “Have You Seen The Dead Walking?” by Upwelling Capital Group.)

~ From “The Vanishing: How BDCs Disappear Bad Loans” by Rod Dubitsky.

~ Why are foreign central banks reducing their holdings of Treasuries at the New York Fed? (Financial Times.)

~ The US and the UK were quite similar in industry composition in 1900, but there are huge differences today. (UBS.)

~ Flows have gone away from traditional active — in two directions. (“US Asset Managers,” Greggory Warren, Morningstar.)

~ Not nearly as many “unicorns” are being minted these days, but the real eye-opener is the plunge in the average number of employees when they are so anointed. (Bloomberg.)

~ After four decades, the trend to lower rates was broken, causing dislocations in the housing market. (Apollo.)

~ A critical governance decision, from “Endowment Spend Policy: Why Methodology Matters,” by Anne Duggan of TIFF.

~ “For more than 1,200 years, Japanese noblemen, monks and bureaucrats have carefully recorded one of the most eagerly awaited days of the year . . .” (New York Times.)

The April 13 Fortnightly featured an example of a “self-driving portfolio,” the spreadsheet challenge for AI, the problem with brainstorming, pros and cons re: private credit, a certain risk mindset, and a bunch of other great reads.

~ Also, computer memory prices have skyrocketed (Paul Kedrosky).

~ A matrix for thinking about the credit culture of lenders, based upon the orientations of those doing the originating and those doing the underwriting. (Debt Serious.)

~ Prices relative to net asset value for limited partner secondary sales during 2025, via Jefferies.

~ Do you think annual reports should be long and detailed or short and sweet? (Wall Street Journal.)

~ Analysts are forecasting a rebound in margins from the 2025 decline (“Sell-side signals short-term pain, long-term gain,” S&P Global).

~ The S&P multiple has dropped as it did in response to Trump’s tariff announcement a year ago, but strong earnings have led to less of a price drop. (Daily Chartbook, based on a chart from Duality Research.)

~ For the third year running, asset owners have seen private equity lag public equity. Here are the numbers for some of the big Canadian plans (Bloomberg).

~ The hyperscalers have altered the investment grade universe (Torsten Slok, Apollo Global).

~ The prisoner’s dilemma for interval investors and their advisors. (Leyla Kunimoto of Accredited Investor Insights, via LinkedIn.)

~ “The United States is the only place we surveyed where more adults (ages 18 and older) describe the morality and ethics of others living in the country as bad (53%) than as good (47%).” - Pew Research.

The most recent Fortnightly of great reads on the main site featured sections on rewiring the ecosystem, eyes on private credit in insurance portfolios, Fundsmith (and other “structurally active” managers, overconfidence, the diligence environment, and many other interesting topics.

~ It’s worth noting that since the last time we worried about an important oil strait being closed (two years ago), that area, leading to the Red Sea, still hasn’t fully recovered in terms of oil throughput (Carlyle).

~ Predicting forward returns is notoriously hard in equities, but not so in investment grade fixed income. (From J.P. Morgan’s “Guide to the Markets;” hat tip, Stephen Clapham.)

~ Pod shops have been extending their redemption windows (Rupak Ghose).

~ GMO plots “a strong negative relationship between corporate investment and future equity returns.”

~ Strategy labels can obscure what’s really in a private credit fund (MSCI).

~ From Stepstone, “The case for emerging managers.”

~ The Top1000Funds CIO survey still shows more looking to add to alternatives than reduce them, but the current headwinds appear to be causing some rethinking.

~ Answers to the question, “How confident are you in your ability to identify top-performing GPs,” from a limited partner survey by Commonplace.

~ This is from ten days ago, shown here only as a reminder that weird, useless norms like “technical corrections” are sticky (Bloomberg).

~ Spending on the “offices” of machines has eclipsed that for people (Augur Infinity).

Recent postings on the main site include:

~ A look at the predictability of portfolio managers actions and what that means for the production of alpha.

~ The regular Fortnightly set of curated readings, including on endowment model principles, desirable characteristics for investment professionals, AI scenarios, and a baker’s dozen other topics of interest.

. . . while the conflict has renewed awareness of an explosive region (this is from a great series of Reuters graphics from the start of the war).

~ Will the strong outperformance of the U.S. market resume or continue to revert? (BCA Research.)

~ Secondaries have spiked higher during this decade. (“The rise of secondaries: market maturation, misalignment or both?” Anna Morrison, bfinance.)

~ With BlackRock “facing a rush to the exits” by investors in its HPS direct-lending fund, its stock took it on the chin, via Bloomberg.

~ The charts are on different scales, but the trend is unmistakable. (The top row is how this year’s numbers have changed over time; the bottom how next years’ have. From “Why Nvidia’s terrific quarter is getting a terrible reaction,” Luke Kawa, Sherwood.)

~ The leaders in payment for order flow; quarterly totals (Global Trading).

~ After three years of narrow breadth, more stocks in the S&P 500 have been outperforming the index (RBA) . . .

. . . but the top ten stocks are where the price action is (D. E. Shaw).

~ A look at the “Board of Peace” invitees — and acceptances — in terms of credit ratings, from Toby Nangle of FT Alphaville.

~ Extraordinary. Via Scott Galloway’s No Mercy / No Malice.

The last Fortnightly featured AI “thought exercises,” creatures of the investment system, the coming GP clawback, a moving investment letter, and a dozen other fascinating topics.

~ The stocks of the big alternatives managers have come under attack (“Partners Group to markets: pls chill OK,” Robin Wigglesworth, FT Alphaville) . . .

. . . even as they continue to push retail to invest in privates using bogus "risk” claims, here from Apollo by way of The Alternatives Universe.

~ Trepp: “Office CMBS Delinquency Hits an All-Time High: What the Data Is Really Saying.”

~ In “The AI Prisoner’s Dilemma: Why Mega Cap Tech Spending May Enrich Everyone but Their Own Shareholders,” Cornell Capital Group offers this matrix . . .

. . . fitting with this Bank of America chart from its Fund Manager Survey, which has been shared far and wide of late, including by Bloomberg.

~ Market implied discount rates by sector (as compared to WACCs, from “What the Market Knows That WACC Doesn’t” by Kevin Prall for Enterprising Investor).

~ Abrupt and large changes in credit ratings seem to be getting more common. Here is a Bloomberg spread chart of a Raízen (a Brazilian “sugar and ethanol giant”) bond after S&P lowered its rating seven notches.

~ Buyout versus public multiples; note the multiples on large deals at the bottom (from McKinsey by way of Accredited Investor Insights).

~ With Gallup ending its longstanding presidential approval posting, here’s a look at the historical ranges by president (via “The Forecast” from Bloomberg.)

The most recent Fortnightly of curated links featured readings about evergreen funds, private credit, AI, the changes at Princeton’s endowment, the nature of family office private investments, and an array of other interesting ideas.

~ Of late, private-heavy allocations at the big endowments have flipped from the top of the performance pile to the bottom. (“Yale’s Famed Investing Model Falters at a Fraught Time for Colleges,” Janet Lorin, Bloomberg.)

~ Corning spikes, just like during the last tech infrastructure bubble. (“Why a 175-Year-Old Glassmaker Is Suddenly an AI Superstar,” Christopher Mims, Wall Street Journal.)

~ Disruption by AI is a theme taking hold in the market, led by the carnage in software stocks but spreading elsewhere. (From the Bloomberg Markets Daily newsletter by Charles Riley.)

~ Will the U.S. regain economic momentum? Chart from BCA Research.

~ Concerned about China selling Treasuries? It’s been happening already — to Belgium? (“China Urges Banks to Curb Exposure to US Treasuries,” Bloomberg.)

~ During this expansion, the amount of company debt falling to a CCC rating from S&P vastly exceeds the amount recovering from one. (Via Odd Lots.)

~ The biggest liquid alts mutual funds in each category had sizable differences in 2025 performance (AQR).

~ From “All You Need to Know About Warsh,” from The Market Compass by Alfonso Peccatiello.

~ About that “innovation funnel,” from Tom Fishburne’s Marketoonist.

The most recent Fortnightly of links and commentary on the main site featured BDCs, creditor wars, hedge fund alpha, quant shops, zombie private equity, and much more.

~ Do we need to worry about the basis trade? On “The $1.5tn Treasury basis trade boom,” by Robin Wigglesworth for FT Alphaville.

~ Will inflation move back up to a second peak (mirroring the seventies), slide toward the Fed’s 2% target, or stay stuck here? (John Authers, Bloomberg.)

~ Today’s top ten in market cap doesn’t include any stocks from the 2005 group, and the percentage of the S&P represented is almost double what it was then (“Guide to the Markets,” J.P. Morgan).

~ The decomposition of the market return in each of the last five years, from The Daily Shot, via Augur Digest.

~ The capex boom at hyperscalers (Wei Li, BlackRock, via LinkedIn).

~ The AI cash burn in perspective. (“Who Captures the Value When AI Inference Becomes Cheap?” Les Barclays, This Is Not Investment Advice.)

~ Money flowing to passive, alternatives, and ETFs has changed the trajectory of traditional mutual funds. (“Mutual Fund Rollouts at Lowest Level Since Reagan Era,” Brian Ponte, Financial Advisor IQ.)

~ Has the fast rise of private credit hit a speed bump? (“Private credit investors pull $7bn from Wall Street’s biggest funds,” Eric Platt, Financial Times).

~ Rupak Ghose’s posting on “the reincarnation of SAC Capital” includes this look at returns from the major pod shops.

~ A paragraph that catches the eye — in “Innovation Biopics” from Cabinet of Wonders by Samuel Arbesman.

~ From “The golden age of vaccine development” in The Works in Progress Newsletter.

The most recent Fortnightly set of curated links and commentary included lead sections on private equity data, boutique manager failures, and mania and value in ESG, plus a number of other readings across the spectrum of asset classes and strategies.

~ Jim Paulsen on “New Era” stocks versus spending, via Odd Lots (Tracy Alloway and Joe Weisenthal).

~ Small employers have been retrenching. (“The Economic Divide Between Big and Small Companies Is Growing,” Harriet Torry and Justin Lahart, Wall Street Journal.)

~ Significant change in the relationship between bond yields in the biggest Asian economies. (“Japan’s Bond Widows Are Finally Having Their Day,” John Authers, Bloomberg.)

~ A golden year, one in a group of 2025 charts from the Financial Times.

~ Comparing the AI investment cycle to previous ones (are we still early in the cycle?) — from Vanguard, “AI exuberance: Economic upside, stock market downside.”

~ There’s a lot of overlap across business development company portfolios (overall and regarding non-accruals); chart from Raymond James via Larry Swedroe in “How Diverse Are BDC Portfolios?”

~ Corporate spreads are tight. (ICE BofA US Corporate Index Option-Adjusted Spread, FRED).

~ The geographic composition of the MSCI Frontier Markets Index has changed dramatically. (“Frontier Markets,” Braden Clark, et al., Meketa.)

~ Margins have increased a lot this decade (Carson Group; hat tip Abnormal Returns).

Bizarre. (Via “The Return of the Weirdo,” Ted Gioia, The Honest Broker.)

The latest posting on the main Investment Ecosystem site featured sections on the Tiger Global “spray and pray” approach, the history of information markets, and two very different sides of capitalism. Plus, private credit, alternative asset managers, mission investing, good finance books, nine more current topics, and a look back at the investor Philip Fisher.

~ “Global Bond Yields Hit 16-Year High on Fading Rate-Cut Bets,” Ruth Carson and Matthew Burgess, Bloomberg.

~ The Bluerock belly flop, via Robin Wigglesworth of FT Alphaville, “Private market marks, say hello to public markets.”

~“The Ones Writing It Off,” Eric Cinnamond, Palm Valley Capital Management. Earnings are getting more and more “adjusted.”

~ “First Brands Loan Hits 30 Cents as Fresh Rescue Seen as Critical,” Reshmi Basu, et al., Bloomberg. “Seeing the super-senior debt crater at a speed that bankruptcy experts say is virtually unprecedented.”

~ “Hedge funds double down using near-record leverage in quest to boost returns,” Anirban Sen and Nell Mackenzie, Reuters. Multi-manager funds have grown at a much faster pace than other hedge funds in the last few years.

~ Bank lending to non-bank financial institutions, from “Non-Banks Are Now a Big Banking Business,” Tracy Alloway and Joe Weisenthal, Bloomberg.

~ A decade of outflows from active equity mutual funds and more estimated for 2026 by Bank of America, via Mike Zaccardi.

~ “Whatever Happened to NFTs?” Barry Ritholtz, The Big Picture. Notice the billions of dollars brought in by these top sellers; prices on many of them are down more than 95%.

~ Posted by Leyla Kunimoto on LinkedIn.

~ From AQR’s “Active Extension: A Potential Solution for Improving Equity Returns.” An example of a chart that’s trying to do too much.

~ From “A Battle with My Blood,” Tatiana Schlossberg, New Yorker.

Over on the main Investment Ecosystem site, the latest Fortnightly issue of curated links includes items about trillion-dollar valuations, risk management 2.0, bubble talk, portfolios of active funds, and a dozen other topics of interest.

Since this is the first attempt at one of these, let us know if there are any problems for you in accessing or reading it. We’ll get the kinks worked out. (And feel free to send ideas too.)