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Robinhood, the Efficient Markets Hypothesis and the Gamification of Investing
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Socialism fails once again in distributing the Covid vaccine
Reuters headline: “New York and Florida tell hospitals to dispense vaccine faster or lose supply” Jan 4 2021
Which of the following would you expect to see during a pandemic?
A. Unused vaccine serum sitting idle; or
B. Shortage of vaccine supply
It would seem that the natural tendency would be toward B – that during a pandemic, there are many people at risk of infection and they would all be clamouring for the limited supply of the life saving protection that a vaccine offers, not just to themselves but to society in general. How bizarre it is to learn from the headline that hospitals in New York and Florida (and presumably many others!) are sitting on 5.5 million doses out of the 10 million allotted, simply because they could not find the motivation to stick as many needles in as many arms as possible ? What is going wrong?
Hospitals are being paid A LOT to treat patients in intensive care facilities while being paid next to NOTHING to give vaccinations. This conflict begs the question …’why are hospitals involved in the first place?’ Because the government said so, that’s why!
There is a very strong case that doctors in the private sector should be tapped to provide the vaccination service for a fee, or anyone else qualified to stick needles in arms, even if that service allows some ‘low risk’ individuals to jump the queue because they are rich. How much would you pay to receive a vaccination – $50, $100, $200 or more? Imagine how much vaccine would be dispensed if your local general practitioner set up a 24 hour vaccination tent on his front lawn charging $1oo a jab? The doctors would make out like bandits but the vaccine supply would be completely exhausted, most likely pre-sold before the likes of FedEx and UPS could deliver the valued cargo. Profit is a great motivator.
Governments offering ‘free vaccination’ subject to a rationing system based on ‘priority need’ is a noble objective, but also one that over thousands of years has proven ineffective. Socialist principles lead to resource misallocations – it seems that the socialist control of supply and distribution of the Covid vaccine is once again failing us all.
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Why do political opinion polls seem like rubbish? PLUS the First Degree US election Special PLUS the latest release from DJ Dr Fish
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Covid 19 notepad: Observations and opinions
1. Pandemic preparedness
It is curious how the general media seems to think that every nation should have sufficient medical resources available to deal with the strains of a pandemic. Investing in five times the average daily demand for medical resources in case a pandemic happens is both suboptimal and ludicrous.
The US spends 18% of GDP on health care. If a pandemic requires 5 times this amount of medical resources then the US would be spending 90% of GDP. Comfortably coping with the rare pandemic event means that the US would almost always have beautiful but empty hospitals , a lot of doctors and nurses standing around doing nothing and little money left for anything else.
Some countries can be criticized for not having a plan to deal with a pandemic but none can be criticized for not having idle resources.
2. Governments are not good at letting go
Lockdown is a hard decision to make but unlocking is even harder. China is tenuously relieving its restrictions in Wuhan with little fanfare while the rest of the world bunkers down. But what is the path back to normalcy? What milestones trigger relief? Very little guidance is coming from governments on these questions.
If you think policy errors have been made dealing with the rise of the pandemic, just wait for the policy errors that are about to happen as the virus abates. The UK’s 3-year procrastination over Brexit – how to leave the EU? – is the prototype for the pending policy procrastination over Covid 19 – how to restore civil liberties?
Governments are good at passing laws and regulating activities. They are the wrong people to put in charge of deregulation
3. Air travel will never be the same
It took a decade for the government to allow proper cutlery on aircraft again following 9/11’s policy requiring that airlines use plastic only knives and forks. What is air travel going to look like post-Covid 19?
The main issue for every country in the future will be ‘imported’ cases of the virus. This means detecting and excluding passengers arriving from another country carrying the virus. Controlling virus importation will probably require every passenger to present medical proof that they are Covid 19 – negative before checking in.
Once this policy is put in place, how long do you think it will take before the government will let you book an air ticket without a Covid19 negative test in hand at check in? So long as the Covid 19 virus remains in circulation the answer is ‘probably never’. So here’s a business opportunity – develop a simple yet accurate Covid 19 test and market it through vending machines in airports globally…
On thing is for certain, gone are the days of a quick trip to Bali for the weekend. The days of mass-airline transportation are similarly gone.
4. Autarky
Movement restrictions on labour spill over into movement restrictions on capital and future trade transactions are similarly reduced. The world is taking a backward step towards Autarky, the extreme case where each economy is self-sufficient in producing what it needs and the gains from trade are left unexploited. Robinson Crusoe made do on his desert island but pined for civilisation and a friend or two.
Trade could be the biggest resource cost of the Covid-19 in the long run. The Wealth of Nations just got smaller…
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Panic v numerical discipline in predicting Covid19’s market impact
“Investment ideas can spread like epidemics.” Robert Shiller in his Nobel Lecture “Speculative Asset Markets” 2013
Bob Shiller’s Nobel winning contribution was the observation that asset markets generally are too volatile relative to theoretical methods for pricing securities. The panicked reaction to Coronavirus 2019 (Covid19) seems no exception.
I have regularly been asked what Covid19’s impact on markets should be? This is a difficult question since there are many factors determining equilibrium asset prices. The interesting aspect of the current crisis is that everyone agrees that it is a purely temporary economic shock. Therefore the transitional dynamics of the initial market decline and the recovery path for asset prices are of primary interest. At the risk of simplifying the problem and betraying the traditions of market efficiency, let me make an attempt at articulating the immediate impact and transitional market dynamics.
Theoretically, the stock market measures the value of the capital stock. Capital combines with labour to produce output, output is paid to shareholders as dividend income which is then consumed. Covid19 has negatively impacted this production process by (i) depleting the labour force (death, sickness), (ii) causing the capital stock to sit idle for a few months as factories quarantine. Eventually all will return to normal but there will be a short term impact on stock prices from these temporary effects. Without boring our dear readers with the derivation of the following equilibrium result (1), the market impact, P’-P, of this temporary shock is close to the following,
P’-P = ∑(g’-g)/(1+risk premium)^(t+i))
where g’-g is the critical quantity measuring how far below short term growth g’ declines relative to the long run average. Thus, if the effect of the Coronavirus is to reduce global growth initially by, say, 1% over 1 quarter and this persists for a few quarters then the impact on stock prices, P’-P, should reflect this.
The interesting question is quantifying these qualitative effects. This requires a calibration of the Covid19’s impact on the economy. The virus has touched about 1 in 100,000 people Globally, quarantined about 1 in 500 for 14 days and permanently reduced the labour supply by just 1 in 5,000,000. Taking these facts together, the impact of quarantine on both the labour supply and shutting down production suggests to a short term cost to growth of around 0.5% this quarter and this may persist but decay for several subsequent periods. [At least, this is Goldman Sachs’ expert view!] Therefore, I set the initial growth shock at -0.5% and assume that the shock persists with a half life of one year.
The results of the model are shown in the two diagrams above. In each case the horizontal axis measures time in years. The vertical axis for the left hand diagram measures the percentage deviation of economic growth and stock prices from their long run trend. The vertical axis for the right hand diagram measures the Expected Return for stocks relative to long run average. The left hand diagram confirms one’s intuition whereby the impact on stock prices is about six times greater than the impact on economic growth. However, the striking finding is that the magnitude of the decline is predicted to be only 3% whereas we all know that the stock markets reacted more violently than this over the last week. The diagram also predicts a once-off fall in prices followed by a gradual recovery.
Turning to the right hand diagram, the once off decline in stock prices has a temporarily positive impact on future expected returns. This occurs to induce investors to buy stocks and replenish the capital stock.
One can play with this model, specifying various magnitudes and lengths of time that output growth is affected, as well as introducing more reasonable elements of uncertainty with stochastic shocks (sometimes called Monte Carlo simulation), the result of which is a calibrated distribution of the range of outcomes for stock prices. Again, without boring the reader, I can confidently assert that after this statistical playtime is completed the prospect of predicting a 10% decline in stock prices as a consequence of the Covid19 is statistically zero. The conclusion is that standard models cannot predict the empirical realities for market outcomes.
So back to Professor Shiller. “Investment ideas can spread like epidemics” seems a good way to explain how the Covid19 epidemic has spread an investment idea that is sometimes labelled ‘panic’. A feature of the sell off over the past week has been the uniform disposal of equities without much regard for the sectors/countries most negatively affected by Covid19 let alone those pockets that may benefit. This is symptomatic of blanket de-risking of portfolios which means selling stocks to buy cash. Panic is more politely referred to as a Risk-Aversion shock which means that the prevailing rate of return on stocks becomes insufficient to satisfy investors, leading them to sell their stocks ever-more cheaply until the future expected rate of return looks sufficiently compensatory again. In the meantime, the index fund managers liquidate large blocks of securities to meet redemptions and this flows through into blanket selling.
That said, the theoretical models still have something to say about extremes and whether they can be justified. The calibrated model that we presented illuminates the ‘rational’ reaction given the model. At least this provides a cool head when panic sets in.
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(1). I calibrated a version of the Basic Neo-Classical model with Utility maximising representative agent, a Cobb-Douglas Production function and a well defined steady state. The near-steady state dynamics are calculated for a given shock process which causes economic quantities and asset prices to deviate from the steady state equilibrium, in response to which the system returns to its steady state gradually over time. Asset price responses are the forward looking summation of deviations of capital from its steady state position. The treatment of uncertainty in this analysis is fudged by appealing to notions of certainty equivalence. I apologise for this but, my friends, this is a blog not a dissertation.
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An activist in the VC woodpile signals MPT is on its way
Paul Singer, the billionaire activist investor, just announced that his Elliot Investment Fund has taken a 20% stake in Masayoshi Son’s Softbank Ventures. Activist investors make a living out of forcing efficiencies on inefficiently run companies. Softbank is a legend in VC-land, yet it trades at a 50% discount to NAV. Masayoshi Son is a superstar investor amongst VC’s yet, were he a mutual fund manager, he would be a laughing stock with a fund trading at such a discount.
What do we make of Singer’s initiative? The simple answer is that Singer is going to pressure Softbank to take steps to narrow the discount by adopting best practice investment principles. But Masayoshi Son is a superstar, the VC investor that every VC investor wants to be – in VC-land he is doing nothing wrong, this is how VC operates. Singer and Softbank are shaping for a Titanic clash of – well- Titans.
Modern Portfolio Theory has forced major changes on the investment portfolios of institutions and individuals. Index funds never existed 50 years ago but now they make up more than 50% of the market. In the 1950s, investors were all stock-pickers, stitching together portfolios of 50-odd stocks or buying 20 of the 30 constituents in the Dow Jones Industrial and Transportation Indices. JPMorgan’s ‘Nifty-Fifty’ was the staple investment for US Corporate Pension Funds back then and the investments were ‘actively’ managed. Indexing had not been thought of.
Modern Portfolio Theory made two important observations that has shaped portfolios ever since the field emerged in the 1960’s,
- Every security return can expressed as the sum of its market exposure (its beta) and a company component (its alpha). The beta : alpha mix for a listed security is about 30% : 70%
- Passively managed Index funds outperform the average active investment portfolio
These two simple observations are related. From 1., since every security contains a market exposure and a company specific return, a portfolio of securities builds up its exposure to the market and a collection of ‘alphas’. By 2, the only way to beat the index is for the collection of ‘alphas’ to sum to something that is greater than zero (after transaction costs and fees).
The result of this thinking turned portfolio management on its head. Previously, portfolio managers had constructed portfolios by starting with a collection of stocks that they liked and the return that they received was a mixture of market and alphas. Today, the modern approach is to start with the market return and then step out into individual securities that appear cheap (ie have a positive alpha). The difference is subtle but completely transformed the investment industry. The starting point for an investor is to buy the market where possible and to only concentrate in individual securities when you have a good reason to. For most investors, the likes of institutions and individuals, there is never a good reason to take bets on stocks – markets are informationally efficient and the likes of Paul Singer are all over those opportunities when they arise…
So what does all this mean for VC? Just as there are undiscovered tribes in the Brazilian Amazon and the Mountains of Papua that have yet to be touched by civilisation, VC is one of the last bastions of investment management that has yet to be touched by Modern Portfolio Theory. Having only recently been exposed to the practices of VC-land I am appalled at the near-absence of science with which investors and managers alike approach this market. The typical VC investment portfolio holds 20 or fewer companies, risk-control is driven by draconian rules of thumb (“…we only invest in series A or later …”) rather than portfolio diversification principles and qualitative instincts drive decisions rather than quantitative objectivity. This is all the more surprising when it is recognised that VC returns are almost 100% alpha driven as opposed to the 70% alpha exposure for listed equities. The volatility of the sector is gut-wrenching, highly skewed toward complete failure (95% of startups lose 100% of their capital) and informationally asymmetric.
That said, the VC sector as a whole has delivered some eye-popping returns with the Thomson-Reuters VC Index delivering 22% pa since 1996. Investors are increasingly attracted to these returns however the industry is so antiquated that the only way to get exposure is through old style stock picking which is expensive, unnecessarily risky and a shark tank for the uninitiated.
The Singer-Son clash may change the VC dynamic. Effectively arbitraging the 50% discount of Softbank to its Net Asset Value requires Softbank to (i) liquidate some of its investments and pay out the proceeds to shareholders, or (ii) open-end the fund thereby allowing for subscriptions and redemptions at NAV, or (iii) buying Softbank and hedging its components by shorting the underlying[1]. The Singer-Son clash, however, may get the VC market thinking about how to deliver VC returns in the Modern way. That is, finding a way to deliver diversified market index type returns to investors who want VC beta and then specialising in stock picking to generate alpha.
There are very few diversified VC funds offering beta exposure. We are proud to say that we are associated with the Hatcher+ fund (www.hatcher.com) that is designed to deliver beta for startup tech VC by investing in 1,300 startups over the next few years. Traditional VC investors see this as a ‘radical’ approach to their market and are either intrigued or skeptical. The truth is that the Modern Portfolio Theory train is heading toward VC-land so either you jump aboard or it will run you down.
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[1] Softbank’s two significant investments are its stakes in Yahoo and Sprint Telecommunications, each of which can be shorted.
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Memoirs of a SARSa
As the WuHanFlu pandemic rapidly takes grip, it is worth recounting the SARS crisis of 2002…
The first I heard about SARS was when a taxi driver picked me up with his car door windows completely open. I congratulated him on his appreciation of the climate and rejection of air conditioning which tends to be frigidly standard in Singapore taxis. Rather than embracing the tropical climate, he brusquely responded “the windows are open cos i don’t want to catch the Cantonese Flu”. I thought he was a weirdo but within a few hours the first hints of crisis were emerging.
At its deepest trough , Changi Airport in Singapore hosted only 10 flights in a single day. Usually they cater for 10 flights every 10 minutes. I recall being at the airport that evening when the entire Terminal 2 departure hall was in darkness with just one trolley-uncle sleeping in a chair. Normally there would have been 28 gates open serving thousands of travellers. I had managed to secure a seat on a flight to Australia to serve a ‘quarantine ‘ period and the only reason that the flight had arrived was to deliver its precious cargo of World Health Organisation professionals establishing a beach head in Singapore to direct the crisis.
As it dragged on the feeling for most residents in Asia generally and Singapore in particular, was will this ever end?
In hingsight, the SARS epidemic was bad but it wasn’t like the plague in the Middle Ages that wiped out 1 in 3 nor the flu epidemic of 1918 that killed 50million people. To their credit, the medical authorities and epidemiologists did a fantastic job containing and ultimately defeating SARS.
However, there was some stupidity from which lessons can be learned as we enter the current WuHanFlu pandemic. Not surprisingly, the banking sector exhibited much of this behaviour.
In banking, mandatory regulation and prudent risk management practices require Financial Institutions to maintain emergency contingency plans. These plans are quite detailed and once activated are rigidly enforced. My recollection is that Deutsche Bank was the first major financial institution to activate their contingency plan during SARS. Every other major bank responded within hours by activating their own plans as well. This was all well and good at the time but as the crisis rolled on, there was one detail that had not been planned…how and when should the contingency be DE-activated?
As the months dragged on, watching the game being played by the major banks in contingency mode was fascinating. Twice per day, the risk management heads for each institution had a conference call where each would state their position. If one bank decided to lift their emergency status while others remained in contingency mode then they would be an outlier, risking the industry for their own benefit, thereby attracting criticism. This reinforced the contingency position and the whole sector got stuck. No-one was bold enough to act unilaterally. Eventually, the government took the lead by stating Singapore would be SARS-free provided there was no new case reported for 14 consecutive days. Hopes were raised upon reaching 11 days one month only to be deflated when one poor guy turned up to hospital with SARS and the clock reset. Finally, the 14 days ticked over and the country was SARS-free and contingency plans were abandoned.
Another key player in the SARS crisis was the United States. They banned arrivals from Asia very early on and somehow remained SARS-free throughout the crisis. The USA’s insulation from the disease made them unreasonable to deal with since Asian countries were excluded from travel and trade to ‘protect’ the US economy. Notably, this time around, the WuHanFlu has showed up in the US very early on in this crisis so the US can hardly dictate terms to the rest of the world.
Finally, the most amusing experience I had was being denied entry to India on the basis that I had come from Singapore which was a SARS affected country. India is an amazing place but travellers seldom leave without being infected with some undocumented microbe, dysentery or typhus-related disease. To have India deny travellers entry on health grounds was truly ironic!
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ARAMCO’s direct listing arithmetic
ARAMCO, the Saudi Arabian oil company, issued stock at a USD1.7 trillion valuation last week and promptly traded up 18% to top USD2trillion. This was in line with the Saudi government’s initial valuation expectations.
This result was achieved essentially by direct listing. I say this since the cap raise was a miniscule 1.5% of market cap. ARAMCO had originally planned to raise closer to 10% of market cap through a network of international banks however the bankers almost unanimously rejected the valuation target that the Saudi’s had suggested. The banks had argued for more of a USD1.2trillion valuation when issuing new shares.
The IPO market is one of the last bastions of financial inefficiency and the Saudi’s determination to stick by their valuation deserves praise. It is well documented that the degree of underpricing in the IPO market is 30% on average, so that investment banks deliberately stuff their favoured clients with cheap stock, which their clients then stag for a quick profit. So when an investment bank quotes $1.2trillion for an IPO they really mean $1.6trillion after factoring in their stag premium.
It appears that this back of the envelope calculation drove the Saudis to dismiss their dealer panel and go it alone. The banking community publicly expressed their criticism of the Saudis based on valuation numbers generated by their captive analysts’ teams but, no doubt, the banks privately bad mouthed the Saudis as crazy and inept in order to keep their clients away from the deal. Depriving the ‘Saudi renegades’ of the international investment community would surely see the direct listing strategy flop, they surmised, thereby exposing ARAMCO as fools and more broadly serving a warning to any other issuer contemplating a direct listing themselves…
…but the fools turn out to be the investment banks themselves. The $1.6trillion inclusive of stag premium is pretty close to the $1.7trillion the stock priced at. This means that the Saudis kept the stag premium for themselves, all $36 billion of it. That is a lot of money…and a watershed victory for the direct listing camp that seems to be growing in importance and actual listing frequency. In 5 years time my prediction is that direct listing will be the normal approach for any company going public.
One final point on ARAMCO’s decision to go it alone. The investment banking community seemed to treat ARAMCO as purely a private corporation going public. In fact, ARAMCO is a sovereign asset ultimately owned by the Saudi people. ARAMCO therefore had a public duty to their citizens to maximise the value of the asset. Private shareholders make decisions to go public for many reasons and they internalise the costs versus the benefits as they are the asset owners. ARAMCO, on the other hand, are stewards of their nation’s natural resources and it is not for them to simply pay a 30% premium of their country’s wealth to a group of international bankers. This point is lost on every commentator that I have read. Full marks to the Saudis!
A comment on the UK election…
Well, we were correct in predicting a clear triumph for Boris Johnson but the Labour Party route turned out to be deeper than anticipated. The mischief vote in favour of the Tories sends a clear message to the UK Parliament that the electorate thinks it is an inept institution. Irrespective of whether they voted for or against Brexit, the UK electorate was aghast at how their representatives cannot follow a simple instruction.
The US Democrats should take note of this dissatisfaction and disenfranchised attitude toward elected representatives. Our long-range prediction is that Trump and the Republicans sweep the elections in 11 months time for this very reason.
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An FDV threeway: Swinging in Saudi Arabia…plus Our UK Election Special…plus the latest release from DJ Dr Fish
Swinging in Saudi Arabia
ARAMCO officially listed yesterday. The Saudi owned company is the world’s largest oil producer, world’s largest company … the world’s largest many things. It has played a political role, a diplomatic role and a world economic role for many years as the ‘Swing Producer’ in the oil markets. Swing producers have the capacity and substance to stabilise oil markets should there be short term fluctuations in supply. Swing producers can also act as policeman to a price-fixing cartel such as OPEC. Swing producers, it is fair to say, may not necessarily act to maximise profits, especially when it belongs to a Sovereign entity with many competing objectives…
…but now that ARAMCO is a listed entity does this change? The starting point for a public company is to maximise profit and it is not clear that ARAMCO’s activities to date have had that objective. Cartels, such as OPEC, aim to control the supply of a commodity in order to fix a price that will benefit all members in terms of higher revenue. That price is typically way higher than the marginal cost of producing the commodity so there are clear incentives for one or more members of the cartel to chisel away at their production quotas, selling more oil than they are permitted for profits at the expense of other members. Cartels are inherently unstable, therefore, and it is the role of the Swing Producer to bring discipline to its members. In this way, the Swinger is not acting to maximise their own profit per se, rather they are bearing the cost of policing other members sly activities.
Public companies are not meant to engage in price-fixing arrangements, collusive anti-competitive behaviour nor any supply manipulation. On the face of it, however, ARAMCO’s raison d’etre has been all these things. Owing to its ‘strategic global importance’ ARAMCO will get away with all these activities as the global regulators turn a blind-eye to it all. ARAMCO’s shareholders, however, may think differently. While the non-government shareholder register represents only 1.5% of the stock, they will want their rewards – as either higher dividends or higher stock prices. This may force ARAMCO to abandon their Swing activities and, quite possibly, become a source of instability themselves.
UK Election special: Money v Mischief in the UK Brexit Poll
Speaking of cartels, the UK is going to an election om December 12 to break the impasse caused by the UK parliament’s inability to follow a simple instruction. In 2016, the UK’s electorate decided to leave the European Union, a particularly vicious cartel that favoured members such as France, Italy and Germany over others such as the UK. Breaking the cartel seemed, on the face of it, the right thing to do. But the UK’s government has had difficulties letting go of the security blanket and their Whitehall bureaucrats got busy negotiating a ‘Claytons Brexit’ – an expression for the Brexit you have when you are not having a Brexit.
Frequent readers will be aware of my ‘Money v Mischief’ theory of voter behaviour. Basically, the ‘thoughtful swinging voter’ make their mind up only when they reach the polling booth and they do so based on (i) how much money they expect to make from each party and (ii) how much mischief they can cause within their own parliament. On this basis, the Labour Party in the UK might well surprise with their pork-barrelling of promises such as free fibre internet for everyone. The mischief vote goes squarely to Boris Johnson who, despite being a career politician, candidly expresses his impatience with the talk-but-no-action that is modern democracy. Sadly for the Liberal-Democrats, they offer neither money nor anything other than ‘good policy’ which, irrespective of its content, is pure boredom.
So on this basis, my prediction for the UK elections are
(i) The Liberal Democrats get decimated to the point of extinction
(ii) The Conservatives easily obtain a majority as the electorate send a message to the parliament to just get Brexit done
(iii) The Labour party pick up the Lib-Dems losses
…and finally, check out the Christmas Album from DJ Dr Fish
The latest release does NOT have any of the songs that your DONT want to hear at Christmas. Just 63 minutes of relaxing, progressive trance.
https://soundcloud.com/stephen-john-fisher/santas-little-fish-mix
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