Expand Energy

Because it was a rough neighborhood.

And so we were out there leasing for Chesapeake Energy.

And that was my...

I had 2,500 rooftops.

Next up, let's take a look at what you had picked back then.

This was Expand Energy.

So what's happening there? It is...

Right now trading at $99 US and total returns are down by about 14%.

Hello, Eric.

Thanks for taking my call.

Your discussion of Expand Energy and Taro actually answered a lot of my questions, but I'm just wondering if...

If you're looking at a long-term position in natural gas, so for a long-term investor, do you have a favorite name now with, say, exposure to the mountain email that ARC is off the boards? And would you advise somebody taking a position now if they have a five-year-plus horizon, or are you just avoiding the sector entirely?

And so when I- when he learned that I d- worked that way, he ended up...

I, I became the, one of the top leasing agents for Chesapeake Energy in the Barnett Shale.

[sniffs] And so I was averaging 46 leases a month and the average person was doing eight.

And so when a weird as big project come on, he asked me even though I wasn't, I...

I like that one.

The other thing, as you were saying around power, to me, I mentioned this earlier, if you look at the gas-oriented public companies, something like Expand Energy, trades at a P2E of 8.

It's got a 2.5% dividend yield.

The stock has gone up a little bit over the last five years, but by no means...

Correct.

So they had an ownership group led by Clay Bennett and a couple of other, like, Chesapeake Energy guys who are all Oklahoma based.

They bought the team, and everyone was like, "Are you guys just buying this team to relocate it to Oklahoma?" And they were like, "No." And Howard Schultz was like, "They told me they wouldn't." And then l- like a little-

Sure

And no one seems to care that they were wrong by magnitude of, you know, three hundred times.

Yep, you're totally right, and Chesapeake will always be the case that I'll, in my retirement, look back on and say, "How did that outcome become..." Well, I know why the outcome became what it became, but Chesapeake was such a travesty, and I look back on that and I say, the system that I had worked so well that when National Gypsum became the Nat Gyp, we all talked about it as those travesties don't happen anymore.

And now we talk about them and we can name lots of them.

Pro- the problem also is that companies now go dark, so the markets don't, don't assess them post-hoc and tell us who got wrong and who wasn't.

When you find out or you think that companies are committing some kind of shenanigans, they get upset.

When I was an analyst, I covered a company called Chesapeake Energy, which is no longer.

It might still exist, but they went through bankruptcy.

They had a lot of issues.